"The Children Coming On Behind Us": Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott by Russell Freedman

It has been 52 years today since the Montgomery bus boycott began on a chilly December dawn as, one by one, city buses rolled by usually crowded stops, now empty of their African American riders.

In many ways that time seems so long ago, an ancient time to the grandchildren of those who lived through it, actually or vicariously through the television news and newspaper reports that flooded the nation's consciousness. The Birmingham city bus that I rode back and forth to school that very day had those notorious movable WHITE/COLORED signs on the seat backs, and I clearly recall bus drivers getting out of their seats to move those signs to open up seats for us students as we climbed aboard to ride home. We energetic schoolkids thoughtlessly piled into those seats while African American adults, young or old, who had already finished their workday, moved to stand at the back of the bus. The injustice of that scene stings after all these years, and it is for this reason that Russell Freedman's award-winning Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Holiday House, 2006) is recommended reading for all young Americans. "The children coming on behind us ought to know the truth about this," said E. D. Nixon, a local leader. "The truth will set you free."

Freedman tells the story of the Montgomery bus boycott with due attention to the raw heroism of those participants who risked their well-being, their jobs, and their very lives to end a degrading and unfair practice that came to be the very symbol of Jim Crow segregation. Heroes they were, from the earlier arrested African American women, Professor Jo Ann Robinson and teenagers Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, who preceded Rosa Parks in their protests, to the leaders, Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, and white Lutheran minister Robert Graetz, whose homes were bombed, and the many ordinary citizens who were insulted, arrested, and beaten just for taking part in the boycott or riding the buses in its aftermath.

Freedman also tells another story, the story of the leadership which made the boycott a success. The same Jo Ann Robinson, who had earlier been ordered off an almost empty bus for sitting in the fifth row, risked her professorship at Alabama State College to run the college mimeograph machine all night to produce the flyers which spread the word of the boycott through Montgomery. She and the members of their Women's Political Council spent the weekend before December 5 delivering the leaflets and urging ministers and community leaders to support their efforts.

Through the leadership of the WPC and ministers King, Abernethy, Seay, Graetz, and so many others, the boycott was almost immediately universal. They and the hastily organized Montgomery Improvement Association first persuaded Black cab owners to ferry riders to work at ten cents a ride. When the city forced them to charge full fares, the leaders organized extensive carpools, with volunteered cars, a contingent of volunteer drivers, and a dispatching system which was a wonder in a time without CB radios or cell phones. When the city shut the carpools down as an "unauthorized transit system, they eventually raised funds to purchase a fleet of station wagons to carry passengers where they had to go, all the while holding rallies and supporting the thousands of daily walkers who lasted out the 381-day boycott. While this local effort sustained the movement, having found in Rosa Parks the person of impeccable decency and determination, the legal leaders mounted a challenge to the city and state laws which finally ended when the Supreme Court overturned Alabama's Jim Crow public transportation laws.

Looking back through Russell Freedman's skillful retracing of events, we can see how close we came to a racial holocaust in those early days. It was surely "the best of times and the worst of times," a crucible of will which literally turned on the moment when, having rushed to his bombed home where his wife and baby were unharmed only by chance, King turned to the armed and angry crowd of African American supporters milling about on his lawn and urged them to go home peacefully. "We must meet hate with love," he said. King made many more choices in his later life, some better than others, but this one decision probably allowed all the achievements that came later. There were none of the predicted "Negro goon squads," no Black mobs lynching thousands of outnumbered whites. Eventually, the whole country responded to the plea for fairness and justice that began in Montgomery.

Newbery medalist Russell Freedman instills new life into the well-known story and brings forth many lesser known players in the history of the early Civil Rights movement, letting their voices tell their own story. Although some of the well-reproduced black-and-white photos are familiar, others, such as Rosa Parks' and Martin Luther King's mug shots from their arrests in the February roundup of boycott leaders, are new. Full chapter notes, an extensive bibliographic essay, and a full index make this admirable account a valuable holding for any library and an enlightenment to those "children coming on behind" this turning point in our history.

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.

"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."