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Marching For Freedom: Walk Together Children and Don't You Grow Weary

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Elizabeth Partridge prefaces the first chapter of MARCHING FOR FREEDOM with a series of four photographs that chronicle the July 8, 1964 arrest of young Samuel Newall. The series begins with Samuel standing alone in front of the Dallas County Courthouse in Selma, Alabama. He is quietly holding up a handwritten poster board sign that reads: "One Man One Vote Freedom Register Now SNCC" The photographs record the approach of deputies and the arrest of the young black child for quietly holding up the voting rights poster. Samuel Newall appears in the photos to be around nine or ten years old.

"Across the United States, people were shocked that Dr. King encouraged children to join in the civil rights struggle. 'A hundred times I have been asked,' he said, 'why we have allowed children to march in demonstrations, to freeze and suffer in jails, to be exposed to bullets and dynamite. The answer is simple. Our children and our families are maimed a little every day of our lives. If we can end an incessant torture by an single climactic confrontation, the risks are acceptable.'"

While Samuel Newall was getting arrested in Selma in the summer of 1964 for quietly holding a voting rights protest sign aloft, I was a nine-year-old spending the summer flipping baseball cards, riding my banana bike, playing kickball in the street, swimming at the beach, listening to the Beatles, reading Beverly Cleary, Walter Brooks, and the Sunday funnies, and regularly experiencing feelings of confusion and discomfort over the films running on the nightly newscasts of violence being perpetrated against Civil Rights protesters in the South. I was an attentive student -- both at school and at catechism -- and what I was seeing on TV just did not make sense given what I was being taught. What was it that I was missing?

I stare at these photos of Samuel Newall, a black kid in Alabama dressed in an outfit so similar to those I wore as a child on Long Island, and I think about how easily, by virtue of birth, I could have been him.

"'Don't worry about your children,' Dr. King had reassured parents. 'Don't hold them back if they want to go to jail.' He was in awe of their willingness and bravery. 'They are doing a job for not only themselves but for all of America and for all of mankind. They are carving a tunnel of hope through the great mountain of despair.'"

Chronicling in word and in image the brutal and sometimes deadly events in early 1965 that led to the Selma march and to the subsequent passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Elizabeth Partridge focuses MARCHING FOR FREEDOM on the role of children participating in the Civil Rights movement. The author sought out members of my generation who were children at the center of the action during those tumultuous and tragic days when peacefully protesting Americans were arrested and sometimes murdered at the hands of racist mobs and Southern white cops. It is powerful to hear recollections of now-grownup-kids who actually can be seen in the forty-four year old photographs that Partridge has selected for the book -- photos that visually immerse readers in the spirit of the Civil Rights movement.

A fact that is emphasized again and again by these photos is that the local churches played a pivotal role in the movement. We repeatedly see the young people either singing or listening intently inside, or standing outside their churches. We read how the marchers would retreat, oftentimes bleeding, to the sanctuary of a church.

Count me as one of my generation who grew up to reject the dictates of the church in which I was raised just as surely as I rejected my father's politics. I was content to grow up and leave both of their houses. Contemplating the significant and positive role that these churches clearly played in the lives of these young people in the Civil Rights movement has me wondering about what my children's generation may have lost out on as a result of the widespread disaffection that has caused so many of my generation to reject traditional religious institutions and raise our children without benefit of the community engendered by those churches.

Another reoccurring focus of Partridge's work are the songs of the movement that were being sung inside and outside of those churches. The author asked of those she interviewed about the songs that gave meaning to their struggle, and space amidst the text is provided for samples of those songs.

"'It's the good times that make you cry,' Charles told me. 'Not the bad times. You've seen something be accomplished and it really is heart-rending.'"

The times have been really good lately. I've cried a lot over the past year as I did what I could to help Barack Obama -- who was a little boy of color living in Hawaii while the events in 1965 Alabama were transpiring -- change the course of American history. For the little boy still inside of me who could not wrap his mind around the variance between what was being taught in school about the freedoms supposedly enjoyed by Americans, in catechism about the teachings and example set by Jesus, and the state-sanctioned violence that was brought into our Long Island living room on the evening news, MARCHING FOR FREEDOM does a stellar job -- visually and textually -- of helping make sense of what was taking place in those troubled times.

Through it, young readers should come to recognize that the most important part of becoming an adult in America is having the right and obligation of making informed choices at the ballot box. In my lifetime, and for my peers, people died to secure that sacred right.

What makes Marching for Freedom different from many other Civil Rights books is that it shows the roles that children played in the Civil Rights Movement. It specifically focuses on Selma during the long months before the Voting Rights Act was signed into law. Partridge does a masterful job describing the horrific conditions and day-to-day indignities inflicted upon Blacks in the South in 1965. We soon learn the roles that children played in this struggle. The Freedom Fighters actively recruited teenagers (and children) to participate in the protest marches and challenge the unjust laws that were in place. For, unlike adults, who would lose wages (or their jobs) if they were thrown in jail, children would come out in groups and protest. As Martin Luther King said:

"A hundred times I have been asked why we have allowed children to march in demonstrations, to freeze and suffer in jails, to be exposed to bullets and dynamite. The answer is simple. Our children and our families are maimed a little every day of our lives. If we can end an incessant torture by a single climactic confrontation, the risks are acceptable." (p.19)

Marching for Freedom focuses on the three months leading up to the landmark march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. We are introduced to some of the children involved, and hear their stories. It was a brutal time, and Partridge uses archival photos to show us what happened. Alongside, King, John Lewis and Ralph Abernathy you see young children singing and marching and, yes, running away from tear gas. There are also many of the protest songs that were such an important part of the movement interspersed throughout the book.

It's hard to believe that all of this took place only 45 years ago. This is an important book for middle school readers to read. I think with its focus on children, other children will relate to it in a way that they may not with other books. In my opinion, fifth and sixth grade classrooms should make sure to have Marching for Freedom on their shelves.

From the first attempts of black citizens to register for the vote in Selma, Alabama, to the arrival of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the work of the Freedom Fighters and the violence of Bloody Sunday, the march to Montgomery gathered strength; resulting in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the right of black citizens to vote. Powerful black and white photographs paired with text will drive home the emotions and ordeals of this part of the Civil Rights Movement for children ages 9-12 and more.

I had to get this book for an English class. It was checked out at the library so I thought it'd be best to shell out the $17 on the kindle version for what I *thought* would be a worthwhile read. It's 80 pages long, has many pictures, and the content is about a 4th grade reading level. I'm hitting myself now for not just taking the bad grade and skipping this book.

If We Could Change the World: Young People and America's Long Struggle for Racial Equality

As a scholar, one of the things that excites me most about Elizabeth Partridge's compelling book, besides how it takes seriously the contributions of children and youth to the civil rights movement, is the way it introduces young people to important themes in civil rights scholarship. For instance, Partridge's book helps to unpack one of the "big events" that has dominated both academic treatments and popular memory of the civil rights movement. As historians such as Charles Payne have explained, the tendency to focus on well-publicized confrontations obscures the complexity of the movement and movement organizing. But at the same time it acknowledges the value of well-known events associated with Selma, Marching for Freedom outlines the even more crucial backstory of the Selma campaign, as well as what Bloody Sunday and the Montgomery March looked like for many of those who participated in them and made them happen. Anyone who reads this book will better appreciate the behind-the-scenes work that went into making "big events" and understand that the media barely scratched the surface in its reports on those events and the movement in general.

Scholars have also decried all the attention given to national leaders like Martin Luther King, and most juvenile books on the movement focus on just such leaders. Partridge suceeds in integrating leaders like King into her story without belittling their significance to the movement, but also without making them more important than they were, or losing her focus on young local blacks. So we see King forming strategy in response to the crowds of people, including most of all-black Hudson High School, who attended mass rallies at Brown Chapel, and meet Rev. James Reeb through Sheyann Webb; he had promised her mother to come by for a cup of coffee--shortly before his fatal beating. In Partridge's account, King's influence on the movement was often more a result of young blacks, like Lynda Blackmon, identifying with what the famous man said, and then taking the action necessary to turn King's words and the freedom struggle's rhetorical ideals into reality. Partridge also carefully delineates other adult influences on young people; SNCC activists, local adult leaders, grandparents, etc., sometimes inspired local youth participation in the movement, but more often, Marching for Freedom suggests, determined young people, willing to challenge their racial socialization, to confront their fears, to march and go to jail, brought their parents and teachers into the movement and effectively built grassroots support for the Selma campaign.

Young readers will walk away with a sense of other significant scholarly arguments about the movement. Partridge suggests the important influence of older generations and fluid regional boundaries through Joanne and Lynda's grandmother, who moves from the North to help out the family when their mother dies; makes subtle references to Douglas Blackmon's findings in Slavery By Another Name as she describes how young people understood what it meant to go to jail; Partridge illustrates the role that music played in the movement; indicates the importance of racial socialization to maintaining white supremacy and of resocialization to creating a more just socio-political order; and she explores debates about the use of nonviolence. There are limits to the scholarly ideas Partridge introduces. She does not reveal the infighting among and within civil rights groups, critique King, or detail Johnson's sometimes strained relationship to the movement. But then again, such matters are not central to the important grassroots story she sets out to tell.