Review: Coretta Scott

There is so much about this book to like. With poetry by Ntozake Shange and illustrated by Kadir Nelson, this mini biography of Coretta Scott King is direct, simple, and inspirational.

Kadir Nelson's paintings are absolutely luminous. Full of light and emotion, the faces in particular tell a deep and moving story of the life journey of these characters. I was fortunate enough to hear Kadir speak about his work several years ago at a conference and learned that for much of his work, he paints life-size portraits. The figures in his books are always so impactful that there must be some magic in this method because his paintings are always so evocative.

Ntozake Shange's poetry does not disappoint. Deceptively, simple, there are layers of meaning in her carefully crafted words. The book's organization is in short vignettes that capture the various stages of Coretta's life. You can feel the pain and the hope of Coretta and her siblings as they walk the five miles to school each day with the dust of the white children's bus in their faces. Each verse is wonderful in its own way. This is one of my favorites:

over years
learning and freedom
took hold of Coretta's soul
til she knew in her being
that the Good Lord intended freedom
for the Negro.

At the end of the book there is a factual biography of Coretta's life that honors Coretta for the work that she did with her husband, Martin Luther King, and on her own after his death.

This book is a wonderful introduction to one of the great American stories of the 20th century.

Review: Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-ins

I've lived in Greensboro, North Carolina for almost 30 years and believe it to be one of the finest and prettiest places I have ever been in the U.S. Greensboro still has many of the charms of a gracious southern city and it much honors its past on a regular basis.

The city's bicentennial celebration has just begun and there are countless meaningful and fun activities planned for the upcoming year. The Battle of Guilford Courthouse was a famous revolutionary battle that is celebrated through re-enactments on a routine basis. Religious tolerance dates to large settlements of Quakers and Moravians in the 1700s and the founding of the only Quaker college in the southeast when Guilford College was founded in 1837.

But for all its religious tolerance, Greensboro was always a social product of its time and segregation was the law of the land for generations until 1960 when the actions of four brave African-American college students from NC Agricultural and Technical College sat down at the Woolworth's counter in downtown Greensboro and created an act of civil disobedience that literally changed the course of history. How that action changed the city of Greensboro and also set off a chain of similar actions that resulted in the repeal of the Jim Crow laws throughout the south is one of our city's finest moments.

In Freedom on the Menu, Carole Boston Weatherford tells this story from the perspective of a young girl and her family who were allowed to shop at Woolworth's but never allowed service at the lunch counter. Jerome Laggarigue's dark, impressionistic paintings are both emotionally evocative and suggest the time capsule nature of those historic days.

The author has posted a lesson plan on her website for grades 3-5 that will help educators and students explore the history of the Jim Crow laws and the social calls to action of leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King that emboldened those four young men to sit at the lunch counter and ask for a seat at the table of social justice.

Not only is this an important chapter of Greensboro, North Carolina, but it is an important chapter in the history of our country. Although it has taken another 48 years for the United States to evolve to a place where an African-American has a real shot at being elected President, it is a long awaited and important indication that our citizens truly believe in our U.S. Declaration of Indpendence from the British written in 1776 which states: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...