The Girl from the Tar Paper School: Barbara Rose Johns and the Advent of the Civil Rights Movement by Teri Kanefield

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        Before the Little Rock Nine, before Rosa Parks, before Martin Luther 

King Jr. and his March on Washington, there was Barbara Rose Johns, a 

teenager who used nonviolent civil disobedience to draw attention to her 

cause. In 1951, witnessing the unfair conditions in her racially segregated 

high school, Barbara Johns led a walkout—the first public protest of its kind 

demanding racial equality in the U.S.—jumpstarting the American civil 

rights movement. Ridiculed by the white superintendent and school board, 

local newspapers, and others, and even after a cross was burned on the 

school grounds, Barbara and her classmates held firm and did not give up. 

Her school’s case went all the way to the Supreme Court and helped end 

segregation as part of Brown v. Board of Education.

Barbara Johns grew up to become a librarian in the Philadelphia school 

system. The Girl from the Tar Paper School mixes biography with social 

history and is illustrated with family photos, images of the school and town, 

and archival documents from classmates and local and national news media. 

The book includes a civil rights timeline, bibliography, and index.

Barbara Johns, Civil Rights Activist: 1935 - 1991

"It was time that Negroes were treated equally with whites, 

time that they had a decent school, 

time for the students themselves to do something about it. 

There wasn’t any fear. 

I just thought --- this is your moment. Seize it!"

Portrait/Robert Shetterly/Americans Who Tell The Truth

The Right Word Roget and his Thesaurus by Jen Bryant Illustrated by Melissa Sweet

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Born in London in 1779, Roget was plagued by lifelong setbacks. His father died early; his mother was unstable. Frequent moves and pronounced shyness engendered solace in books. Partial to classifying his knowledge and experiences, Peter composed his first book of lists by age 8. Inspired by the taxonomy of Swedish physician and botanist Linnaeus, teenage Peter studied medicine in Scotland, eventually establishing a practice in London, and he worked on a book of word classifications, completing it in 1805 for his own reference. Roget lectured, invented (the slide rule and the pocket chess set) and, inspired by the publication of several contemporary, inferior books of lists, returned to his own. His Thesaurus, published in 1852 and nurtured by his descendants, has never gone out of print. Bryant’s prose is bright and well-tuned for young readers. She goes gently, omitting Roget’s darkest traumas, such as witnessing his uncle’s suicide. Sweet tops herself—again!—visually reflecting Roget’s wide range as a thinker and product of the Enlightenment. Injecting her watercolor palette with shots of teal, scarlet and fuchsia, Sweet embeds vintage bits (ledger paper, type drawers, botanical illustrations and more), creating a teeming, contemplative, playfully celebratory opus. Exemplary backmatter includes a chronology, author’s and illustrator’s notes, selected bibliography, suggested reading, quotation sources, and a photograph of one of Roget's manuscript pages.

In a word: marvelous! (Picture book/biography. 6-10)

Kirkus Starred Review

Harriet Tubman The Life of an African-American Abolitionist by Rob Shone and Anita Ganeri, Illustrated by Rob Shone

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          Born a slave in the United States, Harriet Tubman escaped from bondage to risk her life and newfound liberty in becoming a leading abolitionist in the years before the American Civil War. Tubman surreptitiously led hundreds of escaped Southern slaves to freedom in the North along the Underground Railroad, earning her the nickname "Moses". Through this exciting graphic nonfiction format, readers will learn of Tubman's courage, determination, and iron discipline in this terse retelling of her life story.

Molly Bannaky by Alice McGill, pictures by Chris K. Soentpiet

ON A COLD, GRAY MORNING in 1683, Molly Walsh sat on a stool, tugging at the udder of an obstinate cow. When she spilled the milk, she was brought before the court for stealing. Because she could read, however, Molly escaped the typical punishment of death on the gallows. At the age of seventeen, the English dairymaid was exiled from her country and sentenced to work as an indentured servant in an American colony. Molly worked for a farmer in Maryland for seven long years. Then she was given an ox hitched to a cart, a plow, two hoes, a bag of tobacco seeds, a bag of seed corn, clothing, a gun--and her freedom.

That a lone woman should stake land was unheard of. That she should marry an African slave was even more so. Yet Molly prospered, together with Bannaky turning a one-room cabin in the wilderness into a thriving one-hundred-acre farm. And one day she had the pleasure of writing her new grandson's name in her cherished Bible: Benjamin Banneker. She taught this young boy how to read and write; she told him about his grandfather, a prince from Africa, and about her days as a dairymaid across the ocean in England.

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Throughout his life Banneker was troubled that all blacks were not free. And so, in 1791, he wrote to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who had signed the Declaration of Independence. Banneker attacked the institution of slavery and dared to call Jefferson a hypocrite for owning slaves. Jefferson responded. This is the story of Benjamin Banneker--his science, his politics, his morals, and his extraordinary correspondence with Thomas Jefferson. Illustrated in full-page scratchboard and oil paintings by Caldecott Honor artist Brian Pinkney.

Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phil Hoose

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    Excerpt from the text:

One of them said to the driver in a very angry tone, "Who is it?" The motorman pointed at me. I heard him say, "That's nothing new . . . I've had trouble with that 'thing' before." He called me a "thing." They came to me and stood over me and one said, "Aren't you going to get up?" I said, "No, sir." He shouted "Get up" again. I started crying, but I felt even more defiant. I kept saying over and over, in my high-pitched voice, "It's my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. I paid my fare, it's my constitutional right!" I knew I was talking back to a white policeman, but I had had enough.

One cop grabbed one of my hands and his partner grabbed the other and they pulled me straight up out of my seat. My books went flying everywhere. I went limp as a baby—I was too smart to fight back. They started dragging me backwards off the bus. One of them kicked me. I might have scratched one of them because I had long nails, but I sure didn't fight back. I kept screaming over and over, "It's my constitutional right!" I wasn't shouting anything profane—I never swore, not then, not ever. I was shouting out my rights.

It just killed me to leave the bus. I hated to give that white woman my seat when so many black people were standing. I was crying hard. The cops put me in the back of a police car and shut the door. They stood outside and talked to each other for a minute, and then one came back and told me to stick my hands out the open window. He handcuffed me and then pulled the door open and jumped in the backseat with me. I put my knees together and crossed my hands over my lap and started praying.

All ride long they swore at me and ridiculed me. They took turns trying to guess my bra size. They called me "nigger bitch" and cracked jokes about parts of my body. I recited the Lord's Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm over and over in my head, trying to push back the fear. I assumed they were taking me to juvenile court because I was only fifteen. I was thinking, Now I'm gonna be picking cotton, since that's how they punished juveniles—they put you in a school out in the country where they made you do field work during the day...

A Hubbub of Life Stories from the 900s !

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