Freedom's Children: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories

by Ellen Levine

Overview

In this inspiring collection of true stories, thirty African-Americans who were children or teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s talk about what it was like for them to fight segregation in the South-to sit in an all-white restaurant and demand to be served, to refuse to give up a seat at the front of the bus, to be among the first to integrate the public schools, and to face violence, arrest, and even death for the cause of freedom.

"Thrilling...Nothing short of wonderful."-The New York Times

Awards:

( A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year
( A Booklist Editors' Choice

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101076170
Publisher:	Penguin Young Readers Group
Publication date:	12/01/2000
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
Lexile:	760L (what's this?)
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	10 - 14 Years

About the Author

Ellen S. Levine is a web producer, writer, editor, and consultant in marketing and publicity.

Editorial Reviews

"We were all ordinary kids." For too long most accounts of the civil rights movement have focused on the leaders. In this fine collection of oral histories, 30 African Americans who were children and teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s talk about what it was like for them in Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas: sitting in; riding at the front of the bus; integrating schools; braving arrest and violence, even death. Levine provides a clear framework, organizing the personal accounts into chapters, first, on what segregation was like, and, then, on the stages of the struggle, from the Montgomery bus boycott and the Freedom Rides to Bloody Sunday and the Selma movement. In each chapter she introduces the individual stories with a general view of the political scene, and at the back of the book she provides a detailed chronology and who's who and a bibliography. But it's the dramatic immediacy of the first-person accounts that will hold kids fast: Claudette Colvin tells what it was like for her at 15 when she was the first--before even Rosa Parks--to refuse to give up her seat on the bus. Several people remember what it was like to sit in and demand to be served in an all-white restaurant ("You would have thought we had walked in nude, or had three eyes"). They remember the sense of solidarity with white Freedom Riders who risked their lives, and several recall personal meetings with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Above all, they communicate what it was like to find courage they didn't know they had and to transform themselves and the world around them.

Hazel Rochman