Getting to the Mountain: Martin Luther King, Jr., Peaceful Leader by Sarah Albee

Once Martin's father took him to buy new shoes. The white salesman told them to move to the back of the store.
They left.

Martin grew up in a pretty yellow house with plenty of books and music. He was firmly disciplined but encouraged to ask questions. His parents and the members of his father's church were supportive, and he became a bright student, entering Morehouse College at age fifteen.

Martin was a happy child. But as he grew older, he realized that black and white people were treated differently.

After briefly considering studying law, Martin finally chose to become a minister, finally graduating with a Ph.D. from Boston University, and soon became the minister at a large church in Montgomery, Alabama, where Rosa Park's bus boycott had just beginning. He was chosen by his fellow black ministers as leader of the movement, and the rest is history.

Sarah Albee's just published Martin Luther King Jr.: A Peaceful Leader (I Can Read Level 2) (Harper, 2018) traces King's biography and the development of his philosophy of nonviolent resistance through many of the watershed moments of his life, from the desegregation of city buses in Montgomery through the Brown vs. Board decision of the Supreme Court, the sit-ins, the Birmingham marches and bombing, the March on Washington, his winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and his assassination in Memphis.

Albee's account for newly independent readers is written to appeal to early primary students, mentioning little Martin's loss of his best friend, a white neighbor boy, when he had to attend a black school while his friend went to a white school. Without dwelling on the violence of the period, Albee shows that King's choices were not easy during his life, and that standing up for equal rights brought both honors and an early death.

Dr. King had known that he might not live to see liberty and justice for all.
But he believed there were things worth dying for.

Artist Chin Ko provides realistic illustrations that reinforce the text well, and the author includes a timeline and photos from family and public events that catch the flavor of the times of King's life. For Black History Month, young history buffs, or biography books reports, this informative easy biography is perfect for young readers who are just learning to add to their knowledge of how the world they live in came to be.

"My Friend Douglass": Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass: The Story Behind An American Friendship by Russell Freedman

Heads turned when Frederick Douglass walked into the White House on the morning of August 10, 1863. It was still early, but the waiting area was crowded with citizens of all kinds, seeking an audience with the president.

Douglass was the only black man among them. The others seemed surprised to see him and some were none too pleased.

Douglass handed his calling card to a clerk and looked around for an empty chair. None was available, so he found a place to sit on the stairway crowded with other men hoping for a moment with the nation's chief executive.

Douglass had no appointment. He hoped "to secure just and fair treatment" for the thousands of black troops now fighting for the North.

Douglass and Lincoln had never met, but they had much in common.

A fiery and feared Abolitionist and a careful centrist President caught between clashing philosophies in his own party, facing a contentious campaign for re-election to the presidency of an already divided nation, the two men seemed unlikely to have ever crossed paths. Lincoln had managed to gain the nomination of his party by representing a compromise position aimed at preserving the union while allowing slavery to continue only in the original slave states whch ratified the Constitution. Forced into the war unwillingly, Lincoln had good reason not to receive the elegant and prepossessing Frederick Douglass who dared enter through the main door and seat himself among white men, into his inner office, a place where no black man save servants had ever entered.

But Douglass came prepared to wait, and Lincoln had never lacked for courage in reaching for new opportunities to learn.

"Mr. Douglass, I am glad to see you."

Lincoln's courage and Douglass' audacity likely changed the course of the Civil War and American history itself. Out of that meeting was forged a friendship and a mutual respect and understanding that led to the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which enabled the reconciled states to go forward into the future not as "a house divided" but as one nation of citizens with common liberties.

Newbery Award winner Russell Freedman's premise in his Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass: The Story Behind an American Friendship (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2012) is that despite their obvious racial differences, they shared a strangely common background. Both were self-educated: Lincoln had less than a year's schooling; Douglas had only a few lessons in reading from a kind mistress; but each had read the same works, even studying some of the same books at the same time--notably The Columbian Orator, which helped make them the best-known orators of their time. Both were raised on back-breaking work and rough living conditions, both losing a parent, and both rising to positions of national leadership through qualities of character.

Freedman explores the very roots of those characteristics which drew the two men to form a brief but deep friendship at a time of nation breaking and nation building unlike any other in our history. With his graceful style and clear narrative, in parallel and alternating chapters, the author manages to tell both men's life stories interwoven with the history of racial politics and policy from the compromises of the Constitution through the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to the Thirteenth Amendment. Russell Freedman, author of the Newbery Award-winning Lincoln: A Photobiography, (Houghton Mifflin social studies) as well as Immigrant Kids, The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane, and Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (see my review here) and other noted bio-histories, knows how to craft a spirited narrative, filled with primary-source photos and drawings, letters, and anecdotes, which provides for easy and compelling nonfiction fare for middle readers, a book which is not only informative but inspirational in its portrayal of how the character of two disparate citizens changed the course of history through the confluence of their ideas. With backmatter that provides ample sources for research and on-line references to cited texts as well as a full textual index, this book is must-reading for our times.

Kirkus Reviews adds, "...all of this in a lucid and fascinating narrative that never sacrifices depth and intellectual rigor. A marvel of history writing that makes complicated history clear and interesting."