John Lewis: Getting to Know the Statesman Who Marched for Civil Rights by Jehan Jones Radgowski

In 1965 John Lewis organized a peaceful protest in Selma, Alabama,... to improve voter rights. The first protest took place on March 7. John planned to march from Selma to Montgomery (the state capital). As they crossed the bridge just outside Selma. Alabama state troopers demanded they turn around. Those who did not do so were beaten by police officers. John Lewis's skull was fractured.

Journalists called it "Bloody Sunday." News stations broadcast the images around the world. People were horrified to see violence used against peaceful protesters. Bloody Sunday was a turning point in the civil rights movement. President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965.

John was born in Troy, Alabama, where he attended a two-room school for black children when he wasn't need to help on his family's farm. As he grew up, Rosa Parks' arrest led the Montgomery bus boycott. Black students led the "sit-ins" which tried to integrate eating places. As a student participated in the "Freedom Riders," who attempted to integrate public accommodations such as buses and trains. One bus was hit and by a firebomb. "Burn them alive," the attackers yelled. But the Riders were sworn to non-violence and they persisted until segregation in public facilities was made illegal by Congress.

John was willing to risk everything for equality. But it was only the beginning of his battle.

There was much more to be done. John Lewis went to college and finally was elected a congressman from Georgia in 1986, where he has served since.

George Lewis has been there through it all, and he still serves in Congress, the last surviving member of the "Big Six," civil rights leaders who worked with Martin Luther King. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 and helped bring about the National Museum of African American History opened in 2016. Jehan Jones-Radgowski's John Lewis: Get to Know the Statesman Who Marched for Civil Rights (People You Should Know) (Capstone Books, 2019) is a brief biography of Lewis which also incorporates the significant moments in the civil rights movement. Brief and succinct, this 32-page non-fiction book covers a lot of ground in American history.  With ample historic illustrations, and names, dates and places, this entry in Capstone's People You Should Know series puts the biography of John Lewis in its historical setting, and includes a glossary, a short bibliography and list of internet sources, and an index to help young researchers in those Black History Month presentations and reports.

For One Bright Summer Day: One Fun Day with Lewis Carroll: A Celebration of Wordplay and a Girl Named Alice by Kathleen Krull

Lewis Carroll was an expert on fun. A day with Lewis was always fabulous and joyous--as he would say, frabjous.

Young Lewis could make anyone grin. His ten brothers and sisters adored him. He led adventures, galumphing across the leafy, tulgey woods of the English countryside. They found rabbit holes to peer down and caterpillars to befriend.

Lewis Carroll grew up in the Victorian period, a time of stodgy manners and stilted language. The fun-loving boy also became, of all things, a mathematician whose fame rested on his tome on geometry, that science of down-to-earth concreteness. But in many ways Carroll remained like that other landmark English character, Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up. Lewis refused to forfeit his boyish humor and playfulness in his personal life. And on one memorable day in literature, he went on a rowboat expedition with a friend and three little girls, one of them named Alice, and Lewis spun out a frabjous fantasy tale that the world has never forgotten.

Kathleen Krull's just published One Fun Day with Lewis Carroll: A Celebration of Wordplay and a Girl Named Alice (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). Carroll, whose actual and professional name was Charles Lutwidge Dodson, was a bit of a fish out of water in his own time, childless in a age of large families, a man who dealt in figures and forms whose joy was playing with words, telling fantastical tales that wove elements of of his time, from the Queen right down to the creatures of the fields and woods around him, into a piece of work that broke the mold of English children's literature, formerly mostly dedicated to teaching morals and precepts.

What Carroll gave literature in his Alice was a female protagonist who at once is a great adventuress, embracing both novelty and downright absurdity with a cool head, enabling the author to poke gentle but piercing satirical fun at the actual absurdities and peculiarities of his own social milieu and times. Charles Lutwidge Dodson was himself an edgy character, a bachelor who loved children, a long-nosed respectable professor whose delight was being a surrogate "uncle" to the children of his friends, a scientist who loved playful language, even freely coining words at will into terms that children and adults adored, words like slithy (slimy and lithe?) and uffish (huffy and rough?) and frumious (fuming and furious?) that at once make complete sense and nonsense in his storytelling. Indeed, many of Carroll's neologisms have become standards of the English language--words like wow, jabberwocky, un-birthday, snark, uglification, galumphing, and of course, chortle, which readers of Krull's new book are likely to do as they read this wondrous and utterly frabjous biography of that writer who got all of us ready to "believe six impossible things before breakfast."

Krull's retelling of the Carroll's life's work is heightened by the work of artist Julia Sarda, whose pages are filled with reeling and writhing images from Carroll's stories, things tulgey and beamish that gyre and gimble across the page, sometimes bordered by more staid images of the period, sometimes spreading over several pages of curiouser and curiouser creatures and frabjous events in ways that delight the eye. As Carroll would be wont to say, the text and illustrations are all much of a muchness for a delightful literary biography for middle readers.

First Steps! March: Book One by John Lewis

By noon, thousands of people had gathered at Tennessee State University to march on City Hall.

Martin Luther King came and said, "I came to Nashville not to bring inspiration but to gain inspiration from the great movement that has taken place in this community.

No lie can live forever. Let us not despair.

Walk together, children."

It makes sense that the progress of  American civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s came to be called "The Movement," because sitting down, and standing up for equal rights, walking, and marching en masse all played a pivotal role. As one elderly  Montgomery bus-boycotting grandmother, trudging to work, said, "I'm not walking for myself. I'm walking for my children and my grandchildren."

John Lewis and Andrew Aydin's 2014 Coretta Scott King Award-winning March:  Book 1 (Top Shelf Productions, 2013) begins with a dream sequence as a crowd begins its ill-fated march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, a dark dream from which Congressman John Lewis awakens early on January 20, 2009, Inauguration Day.

As Lewis enters his office at the Capitol that morning, a mother and a couple of children happen by, and he invites them in. As he explains the photos and framed documents on his wall, Lewis tell the boys about his sharecropping childhood, his beloved flock of chickens, his struggles to stay in school even when his father ordered him to stay home to work on the farm, and how his early experiences brought him to be on Edmund Pettus Bridge that day, to be beaten senseless, but to survive to help lead the Civil Rights Movement forward.

But his role didn't begin at the March from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.  It really began when he and others schooled in the ways of non-violent resistance began sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee. Students from nearby Tennessee State University organized sit-ins at lunch counters downtown. At first they politely left when service was refused, but as the movement grew, white students joined them. Still refused, they tried a new tactic. They simply sat and did not leave. The lunch counters were closed, and the lights were turned off, and still they remained. Arrested, they refused bail and filled the local jail.

Frustrated, the police considered leaving the demonstrators to the groups of armed whites, people who boasted they would beat the students until they gave up. Finally a leader's home was bombed. A call went out and the students were able to bring forth thousands of black and white supporters who filled the streets of downtown Nashville, all marching to City Hall to call out the Mayor. The Mayor agreed that their cause was just, and soon Nashville quietly integrated its public places. It was only one step on the road to full civil rights, but those relentlessly marching feet finally changed the country.

Written in the format of a graphic novel, this graphic memoir traces one major episode of the Civil Rights Movement witnessed by John Lewis as he lived it. Drawn in black and white with great impact by Nate Powell, the neo-comic-book format offers a new way for middle readers to experience these signal events through the eyes of someone still living, someone who was there to take every step, from Nashville, to Selma, to the March on Washington, and through a long career in Congress. Along with other first-person accounts, this book offers young people a unique chance to understand that critical period in American history. Kirkus Reviews calls this one "... a powerful tale of courage and principle igniting sweeping social change, told by a strong-minded, uniquely qualified eyewitness."

To round out a unit for Black History Month, include this new one with Russell Freedman's Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Andrea Davis Pinkney's account of the Greensboro sit-ins, Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down (Jane Addams Honor Book (Awards)), Shelley Tougas' Little Rock Girl 1957: How a Photograph Changed the Fight for Integration (Captured History), Kathleen Krull's What Was the March on Washington? and Cristine King Farris' March On!: The Day My Brother Martin Changed the World.