"Still, I Rise: The Fierce 44: Black Americans Who Shook Up the World

Back in the distant days of children's libraries, the biography section was usually modest, but there was one section where the worn and popular dusty-orange volumes of the Childhood of Famous Americans series were shelved, that is, when they weren't checked out to eager readers. The biographies of George Washington, Daniel Boone, Florence Nightingale and Louisa May Alcott were especially popular, and many young readers tried to read all the books in the series--if they could catch them on the shelf.

Fast forward many decades and the juvenile biography section in libraries boast biographies of many more noteworthy people from the past and the present, such as in the just published collective biography of forty-four African Americans--from George Washington Carver, the botanist, to Barack Obama, President, from Harriet Tubman, the Moses of her people on the Underground Railroad to Katherine Johnson, space scientist who computed the course of Apollo 11, from Frederick Douglass to Maya Angelou, from Sojourner Truth to Shirley Chisholm, from Duke Ellington to Jay Z, and from Jackie Robinson to Simon Biles--featured in short, pithy essays on their lives and accomplishments, with full-page portraits by Robert Ball, all of African Americans who contributed to our national life in their own ways.

As Dr. Henry Louis Gates says in his Foreword to The Fierce 44: Black Americans Who Shook Up the World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), " ...the pages... in this gorgeously rendered volume, fill that need... with mesmerizing and elevating artwork, while the snapshot biographies of the undefeated inside offer exemplary truths and models that will be a source of enlightenment and courage go every reader." A first choice for libraries, and a good source for middle-graders when those Black History Month assignments come their way.