Picture Books Archives - Zinn Education Project

Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library

Deborah Menkart — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 18:39:19 +0000

“Where is our historian to give us our side? To teach our people our own history?” asks Afro-Puerto Rican Arturo Schomburg on the first page of this beautifully illustrated picture book,
Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library.

Schomburg’s 5th-grade teacher had told him “Africa’s sons and daughters had no history, no heroes worth noting.”

Schomburg dedicated his life to ensuring that future generations would learn of Africa and African Americans’ powerful heritage. He set out to write, research, and collect the stories that chronicled the Black history of the Diaspora. Filling every nook and cranny of his family home in Harlem, his collection was eventually donated to the now famous Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.

ISBN: 9780763680466 | Candlewick Press

The book is also available in Spanish, Schomburg: El Hombre Que Creó Una Biblioteca.

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Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down

Zinn Education Project — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:48:16 +0000

Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down, a Jane Addams Awards Honor Book, tells the story of the momentous Woolworths lunch counter sit-in, when four college students staged a peaceful protest that became one of the defining moments in the struggle for racial equality and the growing Civil Rights Movement.

On Feb. 1, 1960, four African American North Carolina A&T State University students, Ezell Blair Jr. (Jibreel Khazan), David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil, began a sit-in protest at a Woolworths “whites-only” lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., where they’d been refused service. Their protest, while not the first sit-in of the modern Civil Rights Movement, triggered a wave of direct action through sit-ins across the United States. Find more books and films for the classroom on the sit-in movement.

ISBN: 9780316070164 | Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Feb. 1, 1960, Greensboro, NC: The participants after leaving the Woolworth’s by a side exit. The four are (L-R): Richmond, McCain, Blair, and McNeil. (No photographers were allowed into Woolworth’s during this first protest.) Image: © Corbis.

Author and Illustrator

Andrea Davis Pinkney is the author of many acclaimed picture books and young adult novels, and she received a Coretta Scott King Book Award Author Honor for Let It Shine: Stories of Black Women Freedom Fighters. She is a children’s book editor at a major publishing company.

Brian Pinkney has illustrated numerous books for children, including two Caldecott Honor books, and he has written and illustrated several of his own books. Brian has received the Coretta Scott King Book Award for Illustration and three Coretta Scott King Book Award Honor medals. Andrea and Brian are a husband-and-wife team who have collaborated on a number of books for children, including the Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King Book Award Illustrator Honor book Duke Ellington: The Piano Prince and His Orchestra.

Book Trailer

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The Great Migration: Journey to the North

Zinn Education Project — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 19:27:20 +0000

Here is a picture book that introduces the historic story of the Great Migration to young readers. Eloise Greenfield, one of the most important children’s book writers of the last 40 years, wrote about her family migration from Parmele, North Carolina, to Washington, D.C., in Childtimes: A Three Generation Memoir for upper elementary school.

Now she has collaborated with Jan Spivey Gilchrist to describe the push factors and the journey north to an even younger audience. Gilchrist’s stunning collages make you want to stop and soak in each page. For everyone who was gripped by Isabel Wilkerson’s Warmth of Other Suns, you will be moved once again as you read Greenfield and Gilchrist’s story of the journey that transformed the lives of so many people and so many cities in this country.

ISBN: 9780061259210 | Amistad/HarperCollins

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Mississippi Morning

Zinn Education Project — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 18:18:31 +0000

Piece by piece, James William’s comfortable life in 1933 Mississippi begins to unravel. First, he learns that the burning of a black man’s house was not accidental. Then his fishing buddy LeRoy tells him about the hanging tree and the Klan.

A thought-provoking story of one white boy’s loss of naïvete in the face of harsh historical realities, Mississippi Morning will challenge young readers to question their own assumptions and confront personal decisions. [Publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9780802852113 | Eerdmans Books for Young Readers

Awards

Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People 2005
Storytelling World Award 2006

Review

“James, 12, lives in Mississippi in 1933. His father is influential in the community and owns a store in town. One day, a friend tells James that he overheard their dads discussing how a “colored preacher got what was coming to him.” James is also friends with LeRoy, an African-American boy, even though Pa feels that whites spending time with “colored folk” is not “natural.” When James suggests that they fish near a particular tree, LeRoy objects, explaining, “That’s where the Klan left a black man hangin’ for a whole day because he did something they didn’t like.” Then one morning, James’s faith and pride in his father are finally and painfully shattered when he sees him running home, carrying a rifle and wearing the white robes of the Klan. Cooper’s large, warm oil paintings create the perfect sense of time, place, and atmosphere. Special attention is paid to the facial expressions of the father and son whenever they appear together. The final illustration shows a tree with a frayed rope wound around its lower branches. A sad and poignant story about a period in American history, and on a more personal level, a son’s disillusionment.” —School Library Journal

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Child of the Civil Rights Movement

Zinn Education Project — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 16:53:55 +0000

Teaching historical events in an accurate and nuanced way can be challenging for early elementary teachers when mob violence and complex philosophical controversies are a central part of the story. Teaching the history of the modern Civil Rights Movement is particularly difficult because parts of the story have become absorbed as mythology into the mainstream culture.

Therefore, it is a joy to read Child of the Civil Rights Movement by Paula Young Shelton and Raul Colon. Who better to tell the story than a first-grade teacher whose parents were on the front lines of the Movement?

Shelton and Colon’s book is physically and lyrically beautiful. More importantly, it is written in a way that will resonate emotionally with young children without lying to or scaring them. While it highlights the superstars at the expense of the everyday people who fueled the Movement, the book also places children into the story and lends a humanity and community to the people in leadership without being saccharine.

This is a lovely and long-awaited book. [Review by Jenice L. View, George Mason University, Teaching for Change, senior professional development specialist].

Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Book of the Year.

ISBN: 9780385376068 | Schwartz and Wade/Random House

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Mumbet’s Declaration of Independence

Zinn Education Project — Sun, 23 Feb 2014 21:29:36 +0000

Mumbet’s Declaration of Independence gives young readers a slavery-to-freedom narrative that is clever, honest, and age appropriate. Gretchen Woelfle’s recounting of Elizabeth Freeman’s true story of resistance and liberation is smartly written and beautifully illustrated. Readers are introduced to Mumbet, a Black woman enslaved in Massachusetts at the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Mumbet, knowing that the promise of freedom and equality should belong to her as well, successfully brings a lawsuit against her owners to be free and chooses the name Elizabeth Freeman.

Children will root for this intelligent, brave heroine who confronted the terrible nature of slavery in the United States and set the precedent for Blacks to be free in Massachusetts. [Description from Rethinking Schools.]

ISBN: 9780761365891 | Carolrhoda Books

Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation

Zinn Education Project — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 17:38:14 +0000

Although written and illustrated for upper elementary school, even adults will learn a lot from Separate is Never Equal about the Mendez v. Westminster desegregation case in California that preceded Brown v. Board.

Author and illustrator Duncan Tonatiuh tells the story of how Mexican-born Gonzalo Mendez and Puerto Rican Felicitas Mendez challenged the separate and unequal school system in California. They moved to Westminster during WWII and their children were sent to a run-down school for Mexican American children. The book highlights the role of Mendez as an organizer — galvanizing other parents and legal support to pursue an equal education for all children. The illustrations are in Tonatiuh’s distinctive, folkloric style. [Description by Rethinking Schools.]

ISBN: 9781419710544 | Abram Books for Young Readers

Four other Orange County families joined the Mendez family in the class action lawsuit to fight against Mexican American school segregation. These include the families of Thomas Estrada and William Guzman of Santa Ana, Frank Palomino of Garden Grove, and Lorenzo Ramirez of Orange. Too often the other plaintiffs are left out of this history. It is important to recognize their struggles and commitments.

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The Price of Freedom: How One Town Stood Up to Slavery

Zinn Education Project — Tue, 21 Oct 2014 17:40:57 +0000

With powerful illustrations by Eric Velasquez and historically accurate narrative, The Price of Freedom tells the story of townspeople in mid-19th century Ohio who resisted the inhumane Fugitive Slave Law.

When “slave catchers” captured John Price in Oberlin and set out to return him to the enslavement he had escaped years earlier, a group of black and white abolitionists bravely sprang into action to defend their neighbor. They freed Price in what became known as the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue.

The Price of Freedom brings this important story in the history of the Underground Railroad and resistance to slavery to readers age 10 and older. [From Rethinking Schools]

When John Price took a chance at freedom by crossing the frozen Ohio river from Kentucky into Ohio one January night in 1856, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was fully enforced in every state of the union. But the townspeople of Oberlin, Ohio, believed there that all people deserved to be free, so Price started a new life in town—until a crew of slave-catchers arrived and apprehended him. When the residents of Oberlin heard of his capture, many of them banded together to demand his release in a dramatic showdown that risked their own freedom. [Publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9780802721662 | Walker Books

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Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer

Lauren Cooper — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 14:53:29 +0000

Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement is the story of Fannie Lou Hamer in poetic form. It is infused with Hamer’s own quotes and colloquial style that defined her skill as leader and speaker for the Civil Rights Movement. This book charts Fannie Lou Hamer’s life from her family beginnings as a sharecropper to her run for the Mississippi State Senate.

The story includes her work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Weatherford provides further notes on Hamer’s life, in addition to a timeline of the Civil Rights Movement from her birth in 1917 to her death in 1977.

Using earth toned hues, Ekua Holmes provides a visual feast that complements Carole Boston Weatherford’s prose. Although this is a picture book, educators should be informed that it delves into mature topics such as Hamer’s forced sterilization.

ISBN: 9780763665319 | Candlewick Press

Learn more about Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer from profiles at SNCC Digital Gateway and Mississippi History Now (MDAH) by Kay Mills.

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The Book Itch: Freedom, Truth, and Harlem’s Greatest Bookstore

Lauren Cooper — Thu, 05 May 2016 16:03:43 +0000

Lewis Michaux’s itch for books led him to found and run the National Memorial African Bookstore in Harlem for four decades beginning in the early 1930s. The store played a key role in African American history as a hub of knowledge, culture, and activism.

Michaux’s great-niece Vaunda Nelson introduces the bookstore to young readers through the eyes of the bookseller’s son, Lewis Michaux Jr.

Nelson also wrote a Coretta Scott King Award-winning book about the bookstore for middle to high school readers called No Crystal Stair.

Both books would be valuable additions to any classroom collection on U.S. history. [Description from Rethinking Schools.]

ISBN: 9780761339434 | Lerner Books

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