Over the past few years there have been several young adult non fiction books on the civil rights movements.  So even though We've Got A Job received three starred reviews, I let the galley sit on my ereader longer then I care to admit to. When I finally  started reading it, I quickly realized it stood out.
Today I have a pleasure of presenting an interview with the author, Cynthia Levinson for the Summer Blog Blast Tour

Hi, Cynthia, and welcome. Can you please tell us a little about We've Got A Job? And where the title derives from?

We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children’s March tells the story of how 3,000 to 4,000 black school children protested and went to jail in order to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama, and save the Civil Rights Movement, which was in a decline. The book does so through the experiences and voices of four particular young people, each of whom represents a different aspect of the black community in Birmingham then.

The title comes from a song, written by a teenager named Carlton Reese. He practiced it on the upright piano in the living room of one of these four children, Audrey Faye Hendricks, and it became her favorite civil rights song. Audrey’s father and many of her aunts and uncles sang in the Birmingham Movement for Human Rights Choir, which recorded an album titled “We’ve Got a Job.”

What is your preferred writing process, assembling the information first,or research has you write?

Although I did a tremendous amount of research before starting to write the book and even more while writing it, there’s no way that I know of to do all the research in advance. The two are inextricably intertwined and continually inform each other. In addition, inevitably, an editor will ask a question that leads to more investigations.

My editor at Peachtree, Kathy Landwehr, for instance, asked me an apparently simple question: who was the mayor of Birmingham in 1963? That question led to my reading most of a 700-page book about municipal politics in Alabama and interviewing the book’s author. It also led to my restructuring an entire chapter and working into the narrative an essential “sub-plot.” The story behind who was the mayor of Birmingham— there were two, who were suing each other for control!—turned out to explain, in part, why Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

The four young people, We've Got  A Job is based around truly stood out. How did you find Audrey Hendricks, Wash Booker, Arnetta Streeter and James Stewart?

The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI) has been conducting video interviews with local civil rights activists (and a few anti-civil rights activists) since the early 1980s. I read through dozens of transcripts of these interviews and “found” Audrey, James, and Wash that way. Audrey was practically a given because she was so young—nine years old when she spent a week in jail. More importantly, she was (sadly, she died three years ago) a lovely woman, who cared deeply about sharing her stories.

The first time I met Wash, on the first o

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