YBM 2011 Reading List for SEYM Youth and adults
—Cece Yocum, Designated Youth Worker
[note: this is first since it refers to Georgia]
** before a title indicates particular interest and/or related to what we will be talking about
**“47” is the title of a book by Walter Mosley. He has said that “Many black people, young and old, are afraid to read about slavery. They're afraid because they don't want to identify with the main characters because it's just too heartbreaking to do. And so I wanted to write a book that, you know, it's going to be--all the terrible things about slavery are gonna be there but in the end you know that your main character is not only gonna survive but is going to thrive. “
The character is a young slave boy referred to by a number, as are all the slaves on his Georgia plantation. Mosley says the character's name reveals an important truth about slavery—he had a number because he was not a person. He didn't have any rights in the world. He didn't have any purchase in the world. All he was labor for his master. And I think it's a really important thing to be able to say that this guy will not be recognized as a person in the world where he lives.
**Oh, Freedom! Kids Talk About the Civil Rights Movement With the People Who Made it Happen By Casey King and Linda Barrett Osborne; foreword by Rosa Parks; portraits by Joe Brooks, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997 Interviews by young people with participants in the civil rights movement accompany essays that describe the history of efforts to make equality a reality for African Americans.
[maybe one of the three below.. same topic]
**Journey to Freedom: The African-American Great Migration, Maurice Isserman, Facts on File, 1997. This work, a volume of the “Library of African-American History” series for young people, discusses the journey of rural Black Southerners to the urban North and the status of race relations both before and after the migration.
**Bound for the Promised Land: The Great Black Migration by Michael L. Cooper, Lodestar Books, 1995. This treatment of the 20th-century internal black migration is targeted towards middle-to-junior high readers.
**The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America
Nicholas Lemann, Vintage Books, 1992. This work represents the fullest overview of the rural-to-urban migration of black Southerners and is appropriate for serious, more senior high school students.
**Oscar Winner: Mighty Times: The Children's March. The story of Birmingham’s youth who braved fire hoses and police dogs to work against segregation in 1963. See www.tolerance.org <http://www.tolerance.org/> (So. Poverty Law Ctr) for more and possibility of free copy for schools.
Dragon's Gate by Lawrence Yep. Gripping tale of a 14 year old boy from Guangdong who comes to the "Golden Mountain" to work on the railroad in the high Sierras. Effectively illustrates the racism of the time as well as the contributions of Chinese workers to building the transcontinental railroad.
Daniel Quinn's Ishmael is a teen "read": a conversation between a man and a gorilla that gets at the fundaments of the superiority complex of people in western (American?) culture. Then read his next: My Ishamel and others.
I Want to Be Free is a beautifully illustrated poem-like story based on Rudyard Kipling’s Kim but about the escape of a young slave, while another illustrated poem focuses on Martin Luther King’s wife, Coretta Scott. Most Loved in All the World tells the heart-breaking story of a mother who sends her daughter North, though she stays behind herself to help others escape.
**Beautifully illustrated for age 1l and up? come highly recommended. Let’s Talk About Race by Julius Lester with artist Karen Barbour encourages the readers to tell and hear stories about others instead of looking at their outer appearance. Lester is a long time civil rights activist and musician.
And also beautifully illustrated for 11 and up?: Muhammad, written and illustrated by Demi, author of other children’s books like Gandhi and Buddha, tells of the Prophet Muhammad’s life, emphasizing that the Prophet’s message was the same as given to the Old Testament prophets and Jesus. It is said to be the first biography of the Prophet for children in a Western language. Both books may be ordered from www.quakerbooks.org.
**Grandmama’s Pride <http://www.quakerbooks.org/get/0-8075-3028-x> is a children’s picture book by Quaker poet and author Becky Birtha. Every summer, Mama, Sister, and Sarah Marie take the bus down south to visit Grandmama. The three of them sit in the back of the bus, because, as Mama says, it is the best seat Throughout the summer, Aunt Maria teaches Sarah Marie how to read. Then Sarah Marie notices signs in town she hadn't been able to read before, like the one on the bathroom door that says, "White Women" and another that says "Colored Women." Sarah Marie faces a hard realization about the segregated South. But in the fall she reads about events happening in places like Clinton, Tennessee, and Montgomery, Alabama. And by the next summer, when they go back to visit Grandmama, they all sit in the front of the bus.
From PBS:
[Note —Forten taught at Penn Center in S.C.]
**Charlotte Forten’s Mission: A simple and true tale of a pioneer African-American educator, Charlotte Forten, daughter of the most prominent African American family in Philadelphia in the 1800s. Melba Moore <http://movies.nytimes.com/person/50350/Melba-Moore> plays Forten, a young northern black woman who heads to Port Royal, SC, to teach newly freed slaves. Although not a Quaker, she was sent by a Friends Freedmen’s organization in Philadelphia where her prominent family was well-known to Quakers, especially abolitionists. PBS production. Order from various sources.
Smoke Signals: A truly moving and informative video for all ages, the first Native American film. “Simply an all-out wonderful American film, sweet , fearlessly emotional.” Roger Ebert: “Listen to the two young men discuss the ins and outs of an Indian specialty known as ‘’frybread,’' and you will sense what they know about the world.” Rent it!
For young adults: Trouble Don't Last by Shelley Pearsall. Samuel, an eleven-year-old Kentucky slave, and Harrison, the elderly slave who helped raise him, attempt to escape to Canada via the Underground Railroad.
For young people: Mighty Times, The Legacy of Rosa Parks. Video and teaching kit available free from The Southern Poverty Law Center Order one to donate at www.teachingtolerance.org/rosa <http://www.teachingtolerance.org/rosa> . While you’re at it, order another award winner: “The Children’s March,” about the youth of Birmingham.
Coming of Age in Mississippi is Anna Moody’s autobiography about deciding not to live the same life as her sharecropping parents and all that she has to overcome to do that—getting to college and then returning to the South to join the sit-ins and voter registration drives. For younger Friends and adults, too.
Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail, by Gary D. Schmidt, Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (Clarion Books Young Adult Fiction 2004). This novel for teens fictionalizes a true series of events in Phippsburg and Malaga Island, Maine, where the two main characters resiliently attempt to block the expulsion by whites of African Americans and their allies.
Video: The Color of Friendship. Highly recommended inspiring video about a young South African who comes to stay with a U.S. Congressman—with a surprise that proves meaningful for each—the African is white and the Congressman, Ron Dellums, is African American. Lessons for people of all ages. Rent or buy from amazon.com @$3.00+/-.
Your Chiefs Are Peacemakers. An award-winning video examining the peacemaking tradition of chiefs of the Cheyenne tribe. Documents how the chiefs tried to protect their people as European settlers invaded their lands in the mid-1800s. Grade 6 to adults. Study guide included. Borrow free or purchase. www.mcc.org <http://www.mcc.org> /resources and publications (Mennonite Central Committee.)
Freedom Writers: A video to inspire us all, especially educators. Described accurately as “an amazing true story of strength, courage, and achievement in the face of adversity,” the video shows how a young idealistic teacher disproves administrators’ warnings that her multi-racial and ethnic classes of “at risk” teenagers were "unteachable.” A much-needed story that defies stereotypes of “inner city” kids. Video and ways to explore her learnings for yourself at www.freedomwritersfoundation.org.
Andrea Davis Pinkney and Stephen Alcorn, Let it shine: stories of black women freedom fighters.
** before a title indicates particular interest and/or related to what we will be talking about
**“47” is the title of a book by Walter Mosley. He has said that “Many black people, young and old, are afraid to read about slavery. They're afraid because they don't want to identify with the main characters because it's just too heartbreaking to do. And so I wanted to write a book that, you know, it's going to be--all the terrible things about slavery are gonna be there but in the end you know that your main character is not only gonna survive but is going to thrive. “
The character is a young slave boy referred to by a number, as are all the slaves on his Georgia plantation. Mosley says the character's name reveals an important truth about slavery—he had a number because he was not a person. He didn't have any rights in the world. He didn't have any purchase in the world. All he was labor for his master. And I think it's a really important thing to be able to say that this guy will not be recognized as a person in the world where he lives.
**Oh, Freedom! Kids Talk About the Civil Rights Movement With the People Who Made it Happen By Casey King and Linda Barrett Osborne; foreword by Rosa Parks; portraits by Joe Brooks, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997 Interviews by young people with participants in the civil rights movement accompany essays that describe the history of efforts to make equality a reality for African Americans.
[maybe one of the three below.. same topic]
**Journey to Freedom: The African-American Great Migration, Maurice Isserman, Facts on File, 1997. This work, a volume of the “Library of African-American History” series for young people, discusses the journey of rural Black Southerners to the urban North and the status of race relations both before and after the migration.
**Bound for the Promised Land: The Great Black Migration by Michael L. Cooper, Lodestar Books, 1995. This treatment of the 20th-century internal black migration is targeted towards middle-to-junior high readers.
**The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America
Nicholas Lemann, Vintage Books, 1992. This work represents the fullest overview of the rural-to-urban migration of black Southerners and is appropriate for serious, more senior high school students.
**Oscar Winner: Mighty Times: The Children's March. The story of Birmingham’s youth who braved fire hoses and police dogs to work against segregation in 1963. See www.tolerance.org <http://www.tolerance.org/> (So. Poverty Law Ctr) for more and possibility of free copy for schools.
Dragon's Gate by Lawrence Yep. Gripping tale of a 14 year old boy from Guangdong who comes to the "Golden Mountain" to work on the railroad in the high Sierras. Effectively illustrates the racism of the time as well as the contributions of Chinese workers to building the transcontinental railroad.
Daniel Quinn's Ishmael is a teen "read": a conversation between a man and a gorilla that gets at the fundaments of the superiority complex of people in western (American?) culture. Then read his next: My Ishamel and others.
I Want to Be Free is a beautifully illustrated poem-like story based on Rudyard Kipling’s Kim but about the escape of a young slave, while another illustrated poem focuses on Martin Luther King’s wife, Coretta Scott. Most Loved in All the World tells the heart-breaking story of a mother who sends her daughter North, though she stays behind herself to help others escape.
**Beautifully illustrated for age 1l and up? come highly recommended. Let’s Talk About Race by Julius Lester with artist Karen Barbour encourages the readers to tell and hear stories about others instead of looking at their outer appearance. Lester is a long time civil rights activist and musician.
And also beautifully illustrated for 11 and up?: Muhammad, written and illustrated by Demi, author of other children’s books like Gandhi and Buddha, tells of the Prophet Muhammad’s life, emphasizing that the Prophet’s message was the same as given to the Old Testament prophets and Jesus. It is said to be the first biography of the Prophet for children in a Western language. Both books may be ordered from www.quakerbooks.org.
**Grandmama’s Pride <http://www.quakerbooks.org/get/0-8075-3028-x> is a children’s picture book by Quaker poet and author Becky Birtha. Every summer, Mama, Sister, and Sarah Marie take the bus down south to visit Grandmama. The three of them sit in the back of the bus, because, as Mama says, it is the best seat Throughout the summer, Aunt Maria teaches Sarah Marie how to read. Then Sarah Marie notices signs in town she hadn't been able to read before, like the one on the bathroom door that says, "White Women" and another that says "Colored Women." Sarah Marie faces a hard realization about the segregated South. But in the fall she reads about events happening in places like Clinton, Tennessee, and Montgomery, Alabama. And by the next summer, when they go back to visit Grandmama, they all sit in the front of the bus.
From PBS:
[Note —Forten taught at Penn Center in S.C.]
**Charlotte Forten’s Mission: A simple and true tale of a pioneer African-American educator, Charlotte Forten, daughter of the most prominent African American family in Philadelphia in the 1800s. Melba Moore <http://movies.nytimes.com/person/50350/Melba-Moore> plays Forten, a young northern black woman who heads to Port Royal, SC, to teach newly freed slaves. Although not a Quaker, she was sent by a Friends Freedmen’s organization in Philadelphia where her prominent family was well-known to Quakers, especially abolitionists. PBS production. Order from various sources.
Smoke Signals: A truly moving and informative video for all ages, the first Native American film. “Simply an all-out wonderful American film, sweet , fearlessly emotional.” Roger Ebert: “Listen to the two young men discuss the ins and outs of an Indian specialty known as ‘’frybread,’' and you will sense what they know about the world.” Rent it!
For young adults: Trouble Don't Last by Shelley Pearsall. Samuel, an eleven-year-old Kentucky slave, and Harrison, the elderly slave who helped raise him, attempt to escape to Canada via the Underground Railroad.
For young people: Mighty Times, The Legacy of Rosa Parks. Video and teaching kit available free from The Southern Poverty Law Center Order one to donate at www.teachingtolerance.org/rosa <http://www.teachingtolerance.org/rosa> . While you’re at it, order another award winner: “The Children’s March,” about the youth of Birmingham.
Coming of Age in Mississippi is Anna Moody’s autobiography about deciding not to live the same life as her sharecropping parents and all that she has to overcome to do that—getting to college and then returning to the South to join the sit-ins and voter registration drives. For younger Friends and adults, too.
Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail, by Gary D. Schmidt, Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (Clarion Books Young Adult Fiction 2004). This novel for teens fictionalizes a true series of events in Phippsburg and Malaga Island, Maine, where the two main characters resiliently attempt to block the expulsion by whites of African Americans and their allies.
Video: The Color of Friendship. Highly recommended inspiring video about a young South African who comes to stay with a U.S. Congressman—with a surprise that proves meaningful for each—the African is white and the Congressman, Ron Dellums, is African American. Lessons for people of all ages. Rent or buy from amazon.com @$3.00+/-.
Your Chiefs Are Peacemakers. An award-winning video examining the peacemaking tradition of chiefs of the Cheyenne tribe. Documents how the chiefs tried to protect their people as European settlers invaded their lands in the mid-1800s. Grade 6 to adults. Study guide included. Borrow free or purchase. www.mcc.org <http://www.mcc.org> /resources and publications (Mennonite Central Committee.)
Freedom Writers: A video to inspire us all, especially educators. Described accurately as “an amazing true story of strength, courage, and achievement in the face of adversity,” the video shows how a young idealistic teacher disproves administrators’ warnings that her multi-racial and ethnic classes of “at risk” teenagers were "unteachable.” A much-needed story that defies stereotypes of “inner city” kids. Video and ways to explore her learnings for yourself at www.freedomwritersfoundation.org.
Andrea Davis Pinkney and Stephen Alcorn, Let it shine: stories of black women freedom fighters.
Updated: 1/25/11
