By: Carolyn Napolitano,
on 8/23/2016
Donald Trump’s mantra, to “make America great again,” plays on the word “again,” and is presumably meant to evoke among his supporters a return to an earlier, more bountiful, time. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it all depends on what the word “again” means. According
The post Jim Crow redux: Donald Trump and the racial fear factor appeared first on OUPblog.
By: JOANNA MARPLE,
on 2/19/2016
Another book for Black History Month. Title: the First Step, How One Girl Put Segregation on Trial Written by: Susan E. Goodman illustrated by: E. B. Lewis Published by: Bloomsbury, 2015 Genre: historical fiction, 40 pages Themes: segregation, discrimination in education, Boston, Sarah C Roberts, African Americans Ages: 7-11 Opening: Sarah Roberts was four … Continue reading
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By: JOANNA MARPLE,
on 10/5/2015
Title: New Shoes Written by: Susan Lynn Meyer Illustrated by: Eric Velasquez Published by: Holiday House, 2015 Themes/Topics: Shoes, Segregation, Discrimination, African American Interest, Human & Civil Rights, Fairness, Justice & Equality, Determination, Genre: Historical fiction Suitable for ages: 5-8 Opening: My cousin Charlotte … Continue reading
Add a CommentSet in the 1950s during the infamous days of Jim Crow, New Shoes is a story of an African American girl who comes up with a brilliant idea to remedy the far-too-often degrading experience of buying shoes, especially for back-to-school.
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By: Shelf-employed,
on 3/25/2015
I would never think of "North Carolina fiction" as a genre in children's literature, but I seem to have read quite a bit of it lately. I picked up Three Times Lucky because my daughter is attending college in North Carolina. I loved it!! Later, I had the good fortune of reviewing The Ghosts of Tupelo Landing (also by Sheila Turnage) for AudioFile Magazine. I can't say enough how quirky and wonderful and timeless these books are!
Another North Carolina book caught my eye last year (I love the cover art!) but I just got around to reading it.
The Sittin' Up by Sheila P. Moses (Putnam, 2014).
The premise for The Sittin' Up is an interesting one. The year is 1940, and former slave, Mr. Bro. Wiley has died. Stanbury "Bean" Jones is 12 years old, finally old enough to attend his first "sittin' up," an area tradition with similarities to an "Irish wake" or Judaism's "sitting shiva." There is not a lot of action in The Sittin' Up - something I've seen it knocked for in other reviews. I, however, loved the opportunity to take my time and get to know the rich personalities of the Low Meadows community, where they treat death with sorrow, remembrance, practicality, and humor.
Mr. Bro. Wiley lived with Bean and his parents, Stanbury and Magnolia Jones, and was revered by the everyone in the closely-knit African American community. Bean's father, a stutterer, is generally accepted as a leader of the community and is a foreman on the tobacco farm where many of the Low Country men work for the white, wealthy, Mr. Thomas. Bean's mother is Magnolia, a kind, commonsense woman with a baby on the way.
Other characters include Miss Florenza (the bootlegging sinner who dares wear red to a sittin' up) and Miss Lottie Pearl (Pole's busybody mother and Magnolia's best friend),
"Yes, Lord. Please help us," Miss Florenza said. Miss Lottie Pearl rolled her eyes at Miss Florenza. Poor Miss Florenza can't even talk to Jesus without Miss Lottie Pearl putting her two cents in.
"I thought we were in a Depression," Pole whispered to me.There's also Uncle Goat the liar,
"We are." I whispered back.
"Look like to me Reverend Hornbuckle should have been thinking about how the folk at Sandy Branch Baptist Church are gonna eat come winter instead of buying a new car," Pole said. Wasn't sure if the preacher heard my sassy friend, but she didn't seem to care. She got a whole of Miss Lottie Pearl in her as sho' as Mr. Bro. Wiley was dead in the house.
Ma swears Uncle Goat is the biggest liar in Northampton County. Papa said that ain't so. He said Uncle Goat is the biggest liar in the state of North Carolina. That's how he got the nickname Goat. Ma says he eats the truth up faster than a goat eats grass.
"I will never forget Mr. Bro. Wiley," I thought as we headed to town. Mule Bennett must have felt the same way. He was slowing down and barely lifted his head. Papa kept saying, "Get-get, get up, mule, get up." But Mule Bennett took his own sweet time.Mr. Bro. Wiley,the reader gets to know through the remembrances of the living.
Stella by Starlight, by esteemed storyteller Sharon M. Draper, is a poignant novel that beautifully captures the depth and complexities within individuals, a community, and society in 1932, an era when segregation and poverty is at the forefront.
Add a CommentRevolution, Deborah Wiles’ second novel in The Sixties Trilogy, sends readers on a journey to Greenwood, Mississippi in the summer of 1964, also known as “Freedom Summer."
Add a CommentIn Seven Stories Up, Laurel Snyder combines humor and friendship to spin a rich story of adventure, sprinkled with Snyder’s signature magic and mystery.
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By: Kirsty,
on 12/1/2011
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to move—and became the mother of the civil rights movement.
In 1955, strict segregation laws separated African Americans and whites in public settings across the South, including Parks’s home town, Montgomery, Alabama. That December evening, returning home from work, Parks sat with three other African Americans in a row just behind the fourteen whites in the front of the bus. Because the bus was full, a white man had to stand when he entered the bus. Under the South’s Jim Crow laws, whites sat and African Americans stood. The bus driver told Parks and the other three blacks to move to the back of the bus—the black section. The other three did, but Parks refused. The driver insisted, and she refused again. Faced with continued refusal, he used his powers under a city ordinance to arrest her. The driver summoned the police, and Parks spent the night in jail.
The arrest galvanized Montgomery’s African Americans. The local chapter of the NAACP had long resented the segregated buses and the drivers’ treatment of blacks; now they had a chance to act. The next day, a women’s council called for a boycott of the city bus system. African Americans by the thousands complied. By December 5, a new group—the Montgomery Improvement Association—was formed to coordinate the boycott. Inspired by young clergyman Martin Luther King, Jr., Montgomery’s African Americans kept up their boycott for more than a year, until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation on buses unconstitutional. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was one of the early triumphs of the civil rights movement. Parks later admitted her surprise: “I had no idea when I refused to give up my seat on that Montgomery bus that my small action would help put an end to the segregation laws in the South.”
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By: Shadra Strickland,
on 3/14/2011
Look for my new title, WHITE WATER this August in stores and online. Books are currently available for preordering. WHITE WATER is written by Michael S. Bandy and Eric Stein and is published by Candlewick Press. You can find out more about the authors here. I’m pleased to see that this title will be distributed by Random House and Walker Books in Australia and New Zealand. It is one of my dreams to see New Zealand. Feel free to contact me for school visits New Zealand and Australia!
“White Water is a wonderful way to give children an American history lesson proving that racism is a waste of time.”
–Bill Cosby“
…Michael’s discoveries remind us that we are interconnected and help us to believe in the possibilities for a better future. I can’t wait to share White Water with the children in my life…and come to think of it, I’ll be sharing it with the adults too.”
–Melissa Harris-Perry
Princeton Professor
MSNBC Contributor and Columnist for The Nation
By: Jessamyn West,
on 1/30/2011
Sometimes it’s a good thign to remember that libraries have big imacts on people who do big things. The ripple effect is hard to quantify, but it’s a good thing to remember. From my inbox
By: Lauren,
on 1/10/2011
In difficult times people need a vision of a better future to give them hope. The U.S. is experiencing difficult times. The majority of people are poorer and many are out of work, the political system is frozen and corrupted by lobbyists and institutions that have gone awry, and there are constant changes in the world that create uncertainty. We are also at war, and face the danger of attack. While pluralism – the openness and public space to express varied ideas, and for all groups in society to have access to the public domain – is important for a free society, the cacophony of shrill voices creates confusion and makes it difficult for constructive visions and policies to emerge.
In times like these, subgroups of a society – racial, ethnic, religious or political – often turn against other groups. Members of one group, often the largest or dominant group, blame others for the difficulties of life. Often, their ideology is destructive. Instead of addressing the source of societal problems, such visions frequently focus on enhanced national power, racial superiority, or a utopian degree of social equality in the society or in the world. They identify enemies that supposedly stand in the way of the fulfillment of the vision. The group turns against and engages in increasingly harmful, and eventually violent, actions against this enemy.
In response to intensely difficult conditions, destructive ideologies and movements have shaped life in many nations. In Germany the ideology stressed racial superiority, expansion, and submission to a leader. Jews and gypsies were regarded as racially inferior, Slavs both inferior and in the way of expansion. In Cambodia the vision was of total social equality, with everyone judged incapable of contributing to or living in such a society, whether the former elite, educated people or minorities as enemies. In the former Yugoslavia, for the Serbs, it was renewed nationalism, with other groups, especially Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo as enemies. In Argentina, people stood against communism and in defense of faith and order. Everyone considered left-leaning – even people working to improve the lives of poor people – became enemies. In Rwanda “Hutu power” over the Tutsi minority, became the guiding ideology. While significant societal change is usually shaped by a number of influences, such ideologies had important roles in creating hostility and violence, ending in mass killing or genocide.
In the U.S. so far, in spite of our increasingly dysfunctional political life and shrill political rhetoric, there is no comparable destructive ideology. While we have many divisions, and ignore the harm to civilians outside the country in the wars we fight, the rights of different groups inside the country have increasingly come to be respected, especially in the last half century. However, many have turned against the current administration, and to some extent, against government in general. They affirm core American values of freedom and individuality, but in the service of tearing down, without a vision of what to create. This is one half of an ideology, the against part, without a clear aim, a for part.
Such rebellion seems to be supported, and perhaps instigated, by people in the background who finance it, and by politicized media. It thrives on people’s genuine and understandable distress, the result of the frustration of material needs, but even more, the frustration of a variety of psychological needs, uncertainty, and fear. Joining ideological groups and movements helps fulfill needs for security, community, and a feeling of effectiveness at a time when people feel powerless.
We need a constructive vision, words joined
By: Lauren,
on 12/1/2010
Today is the 55th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ infamous stand sit during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Her daring refusal to move to the back of the bus was not a decision made lightly because she was simply “too tired.” “The only tired I was,” Parks wrote in Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), “was tired of giving in.” The following short biography of Parks comes from Darlene Clark Hine, editor of Black Women in America.
Parks, Rosa (b. 4 February 1913 ; d. 24 October 2005 ), civil rights activist. From the moment her photograph was first published in newspapers across America, Parks, with her quiet dignity, has been a symbol for the civil rights movement in this country. Those who orchestrated the Montgomery bus boycott bypassed several other women to choose Parks as a representative of all the black women and men who were forced to live with Jim Crow laws and customs in the South, and she lived up to their expectations.
Early Life and Activism
Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, the daughter of James McCauley , a carpenter, and Leona Edwards , a teacher. Her father migrated north to find work when Rosa was two years old and did not often communicate with the family after that. Her mother moved Rosa and a younger brother to Pine Level, Alabama, to be nearer her own parents and siblings. In Pine Level, Parks worked as a field hand, in addition to taking care of her grandparents while her mother worked, often as a teacher. Parks’s mother homeschooled her until she was eleven, then sent her to live with her aunt in Montgomery so that she could go to school. While attending the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, she did household chores for her aunt and also went out to do domestic work outside the home. She attended the Booker T. Washington High School but left before graduation to take care of her mother. Her experience in all these situations left her angry about the injustices in the world, and, when she was nineteen, she met Raymond Parks , a barber who was involved in the civil rights movement. On 19 December 1932 they were married.
The couple did not have children. With her husband’s encouragement, Parks completed her high school education, receiving a diploma in 1934 . From the beginning of their marriage, both were social activists. They worked to secure the release of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black youths accused of raping two white girls. Parks joined the Montgomery Voters League and worked to enfranchise African Americans in the community. During the 1940s she joined the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP and served as secretary of the branch from 1943 until 1956 . Edgar Daniel Nixon Jr. , organizer of the Black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union in Montgomery and head of the Progressive Democrats, was president of the local NAACP chapter.
Particularly good at working with young people, Parks helped train a group of NAACP youths to protest
By: Lauren,
on 9/20/2010
A new HBO series, Boardwalk Empire, premiered this weekend. Worlds away from what we see on Jersey Shore, it has reignited interest in New Jersey history and culture. Bryant Simon (author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America and Professor of History at Temple University) has been interviewed for the accompanying HBO documentary, and here we ask him some questions about the “dreamlike” place that is AC.
You’ve described yourself as a native of South New Jersey. What drew you to writing the history of Atlantic City?
When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in Vineland, Philly was not the place that drew us; it was more Atlantic City. That was where we went for splurge meals, special occasions, amusement parks, parades, and shopping. In fact, that’s where I got my bar mitzvah suit! Years later, my family moved just outside of Atlantic City and I watched, while riding my bike in the morning on the Boardwalk, as gambling woke the place up and irrevocably transformed it. I was transfixed by the city, by people’s nostalgia for it, by its nervous energy, and its aching sadness and painful poverty in the midst of plenty. Really, it had everything I wanted to write about it – it was like a Springsteen song, a place that could be mean and cruel, but a place of romance and possible redemption. How could I resist?
Compared to places like Las Vegas or Coney Island in its heyday, how did/does Atlantic City epitomize the urban playground?
All of these places share something in common – they are each the tale of two cities. They are places built in the interests of visitors, not necessarily residents; they sell (or sold) fantasies – fantasies that put tourists as the center of the narrative and allowed them to slip their daily skin and imagine themselves not as they were, but as they wanted to be. That is what people paid for when they went these places – they paid for fantasies.
As you researched the book, what memorable anecdotes did you come across that really captured the heart and history of Atlantic City?
One of the first things I learned about Atlantic City stayed with me throughout the project. I remember looking at a postcard from the 1920s or so. In it, the benches on the Boardwalk were pointed away from the beach. I asked if this was a mistake. “No” an expert on the city told me, “That’s how it was.” That was my first lesson that Atlantic City was essentially a stage and the visitors were both actors and audience.
You’ve been interviewed for a documentary that’s set to run in conjunction with the HBO series, Boardwalk Empire. What do you make of the series’ take on Atlantic City, and what to your mind does it say about public perception of the city?
If the show is a success, it will no doubt draw tourists to town, looking for the romantic, if still violent, past the program surely mythologizes. Yet the real Atlantic City Boardwalk of today has little relationship to the past except its common geography. Most of the dreamlike hotels – buildings that looked like French chateaux and Moorish palaces – have been torn down. The amusement piers are long gone or covered up and turned into air-conditioned malls. The crowds of people dressed in their Sunday – really their sleek and elegant Saturday night best – have been replaced by people in t-shirts and flip flops. Except for the ocean and
By: Annette,
on 6/16/2010
Link @ Amazon for the book:
http://www.amazon.com/Back-Bus-Aaron-Reynolds/dp/0399250913/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276699772&sr=1-1
Link @ the publishers:
http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780399250910,00.html?Back_of_the_Bus_Aaron_Reynolds
For ages 4-8, 32 pages, published by Philomel Books a division of Penguin Young Readers, published 2010
By: Jessamyn West,
on 1/18/2010
“In December of 1957 a comic book was published that really did threaten the future–at least the future of American segregationists. Carefully preserved in the special collections of several academic libraries, such as The Smithsonian Institution, Morehouse College, and Stanford University, The Montgomery Story, a 14-page comic book is, credited with being one of the most influential teaching tools ever produced for the Civil Rights Movement.“
Great review. I haven't read it, but "my" library has it, so now I recommend it to students. :)
Thank you so very much for this thoughtful review. I particularly like the label "first crushes"- something I hadn't thought of but fits perfectly. :)