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From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)

In her introduction, Toni Morrison speaks directly to young readers: “This book is about you. Even though the main event in the story took place many years ago, what happened before it and after it is now part of all our lives. Because remembering is the mind’s first step toward understanding, this book is designed to take you on a journey through a time in American life when there was as much hate as there was love; as much anger as there was hope; as many heroes as cowards.” Morrison’s brief text, often just a phrase or sentence per page, imagines the thoughts of the people shown in the carefully selected photographs. This powerful combination of words and images unfolds the story of school integration and the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education to a new generation of American children. The closing pages provide a chronology of key events in civil rights and school integration and notes describing events pictured in each of the book’s photographs. (Age 7 and older)

CCBC Choices 2005 © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2005. Used with permission.