Courageous acts, long undersung but well worth remembering.
A Civil Rights activist who sat on a bus before Rosa Parks did and paid the price tells her story.
Colvin and Hoose collaborated on a YA memoir in 2009 (Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice), but this boiled-down version preserves both major events—as a 15-year-old Montgomery resident in 1955, she was arrested for refusing to give up a bus seat and later participated in an Alabama lawsuit that succeeded in making racially segregated buses illegal in the state—and her claim to have inspired, but subsequently been overshadowed by, Parks. Jackson portrays her as a neatly dressed, studious-looking teen who sits stubbornly with the spirits of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth behind her while the white bus driver delivers an angry lecture; she then goes on to kneel fearfully in an empty cell after being manhandled by white police officers. Finally, she poses in forthright dignity before a panel of white judges as she delivers her testimony. What emerges most strongly from her account is her forceful conviction, undimmed through all the years since, that injustice must be fought: “Because you can’t just ask for change,” she writes. “You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.’ Like I did.” As well as honoring her as one of the earliest and last-surviving Civil Rights pioneers, the book might well inspire readers to take up Hoose’s closing suggestion to ask, “Is there a little Claudette in me?”
Courageous acts, long undersung but well worth remembering. (note from Hoose) (Picture-book memoir. 6-8)Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780374389734
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses.
An NBA star pays tribute to the influence of his grandfather.
In the same vein as his Long Shot (2009), illustrated by Frank Morrison, this latest from Paul prioritizes values and character: “My granddad Papa Chilly had dreams that came true,” he writes, “so maybe if I listen and watch him, / mine will too.” So it is that the wide-eyed Black child in the simply drawn illustrations rises early to get to the playground hoops before anyone else, watches his elder working hard and respecting others, hears him cheering along with the rest of the family from the stands during games, and recalls in a prose afterword that his grandfather wasn’t one to lecture but taught by example. Paul mentions in both the text and the backmatter that Papa Chilly was the first African American to own a service station in North Carolina (his presumed dream) but not that he was killed in a robbery, which has the effect of keeping the overall tone positive and the instructional content one-dimensional. Figures in the pictures are mostly dark-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-250-81003-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A unique angle on a watershed moment in the civil rights era.
The New Orleans school child who famously broke the color line in 1960 while surrounded by federal marshals describes the early days of her experience from a 6-year-old’s perspective.
Bridges told her tale to younger children in 2009’s Ruby Bridges Goes to School, but here the sensibility is more personal, and the sometimes-shocking historical photos have been replaced by uplifting painted scenes. “I didn’t find out what being ‘the first’ really meant until the day I arrived at this new school,” she writes. Unfrightened by the crowd of “screaming white people” that greets her at the school’s door (she thinks it’s like Mardi Gras) but surprised to find herself the only child in her classroom, and even the entire building, she gradually realizes the significance of her act as (in Smith’s illustration) she compares a small personal photo to the all-White class photos posted on a bulletin board and sees the difference. As she reflects on her new understanding, symbolic scenes first depict other dark-skinned children marching into classes in her wake to friendly greetings from lighter-skinned classmates (“School is just school,” she sensibly concludes, “and kids are just kids”) and finally an image of the bright-eyed icon posed next to a soaring bridge of reconciliation. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A unique angle on a watershed moment in the civil rights era. (author and illustrator notes, glossary) (Autobiographical picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-75388-2
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
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