From School Library Journal
YA-Letters, speeches, newspaper articles, and other primary sources are used to chronicle the civil rights movement in the U.S. from 1954-1965. In addition to the chronologically arranged text, more information is packaged concisely in the appendixes: pertinent documents, biographical sketches, acronyms for movement organizations, and maps of sites and events.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This work, as with others in the Eyewitness History series for young adults, aims to assist readers in the development of their historical imagination by providing direct quotations from selected documents of a period. Thus, one can read Rosa Parks' description of her weariness and resistance on that momentous bus ride or learn what it was like for Melba Patillo to be escorted into Central High School as one of nine black students accompanied by 22 soldiers. The excerpts are drawn from such primary sources as memoirs, diaries, letters, and news articles. An eloquent foreword by Julian Bond, a participant in the civil rights movement, reminds readers of the countless "ordinary women and men" who laid the groundwork for a national consensus for reform.
The chapters are arranged chronologically beginning with the origins of the movement after the Civil War. Each chapter opens with a brief summary of the period followed by a "Chronicle of Events." The bulk of each chapter consists of a large number of quotations from eyewitness accounts, accompanied by black-and-white photographs. Extensive appendixes contain documents, such as the Thirteenth Amendment and the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Rights; brief biographies of major persons referred to in the text; acronyms; maps of sites; and an extensive bibliography of the sources quoted.
There is sometimes oversimplification in the "Chronicle of Events" section in chapters. For example, it is misleading to give a single date and place for the founding of the Klan when this organization had three separate foundings.
This timely source complements The Encyclopedia of African-American Civil Rights: From Emancipation to the Present [RBB Ag 92] and The Negro Almanac: A Reference Work on the African American (5th ed., Gale, 1991), both of which are better organized for checking specific facts. A similar book in the words of activists themselves is Freedom's Children: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories by Ellen Levine (Putnam, 1993).
This very readable source deserves a place in every public and middle and high school library, though it may fit better in the circulating collection. The honest, angry, thoughtful, and sad words can be read by individuals of any age. The intention of the author to bring the reader into the historical moment is admirably realized.
