100 books like Freedom's Children

In my writing I love to relate the stories of important historical actors that are unknown. Especially young actors.

Phillip Hoose apparently shares those loves. He gives us the story of Claudette Colvin who, at fifteen, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus to a White person. This was nine months before Rosa Parks’ famous stand. Through Hoose’s beautifully-rendered narrative, we are on the bus with Colvin that day and we are later in the courtroom when she bravely tells her story. 

As I said previously, I love to use the actual words historical actors spoke in my books. Hoose seems to share that passion as well. The author carried out fourteen interviews with Ms. Colvin. Through her own voice, we come to know this amazing young woman.

I had the honor of meeting John Lewis and introducing him when he spoke at the college where I taught.

You can have no better guide to the civil rights movement than the saintly John Lewis. And Lewis’ insider’s look is conveyed as a graphic novel. The images enhance the drama introduced through narration and dialogue. (I was excited to see depictions of places I had visited from my travels in the South.)

March Three begins with the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, includes a discussion of the Mississippi movement, and concludes with a powerful telling of the event Lewis is best known for, the Selma voting rights campaign. You can broaden what you learn from March Three by also reading Books One and Two.

I believe that historical nonfiction is best told as a rich narrative with compelling characters and a page-turning plot structure. No one accomplishes that ideal better than Steve Sheinkin. 

Sheinkin’s power is on full display in this book about the Port Chicago 50, a group of Black sailors during World War II. Living in a world of rampant racism, the men are relegated to the dangerous task of loading ammunition onto ships. When the danger and racism become untenable, many refuse to work. Fifty of the men are charged with mutiny, convicted, and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor. 

I love to include the actual words of historical actors in my writing and so does Sheinkin. His book draws from oral histories of the sailors. What power their voices bring to the story!!!!

When I taught, I hoped to engage students by making historical figures as human as possible. At the time I wish I had known the writing of Jean Fritz who brings the people of history to life. Magnificently.  

Peppering her books with oddball information about her subjects, she allows them to become more human. And in Jean Fritz books, people talk and act. These features are present in Fritz’s wonderful biography of the women’s rights activist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

The reader comes to know Ms. Stanton intimately, her warm friendships with fellow activists, her tensions with her father, her overall independent spirit. And we get a wonderful history of the early American women’s movement. 

Jean Fritz delivers for younger readers and makes history engaging, human, and, yes, exciting.

Eig continues another theme that captivates me—that great heroes can be human, with personal failings alongside a compelling voice for social justice.

I love the nuanced, complex picture of King that Eig draws. He shows us the complicated picture of a man that called to our better nature while struggling with his own demons. This is a great portrait of a man and the times he lived in.

Was World War 2 simply a prelude to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s?

The eleven authors of the essays in this collection examine the wartime struggle for civil rights from various angles, and like many historical questions, the answers they provide are complicated. While wartime rhetoric, federal actions, and military service all helped advance the black freedom movement—which had been underway for decades—those same forces also motivated opponents of black equality to resist racial change. 

We live in a time when personal convenience seems to trump everything else. So how is it that virtually the entire Black community of Montgomery, Alabama, stayed off the city buses for over a year in the mid-1950s?

The first three chapters of this book answer that question in a completely new way that made the realities of the Jim Crow South and the dangers of the struggle for racial justice snap into focus for me. The boycott was tangentially about segregation on buses, but really, argues McGuire, it was a fight for bodily integrity, safety, and self-respect.

Because it deals with rape and sexual assault, this can be a hard book to read, but it literally gave me a different understanding of what “equality” means.

This is one of those books that reminds you of something that was hiding in plain sight, but that you somehow overlooked: Black students who desegregated schools in the South were disproportionately female. Take the Little Rock Nine, for example: six women, three men. Rachel Devlin takes us inside the lives of these brave Black girls, who incurred enormous risks to help America live out its founding creed: all men (and, now, women) are created equal. We are all in their debt, whether we realize it or not.

I LOVE books about women who won’t be told what to do.

In 1960s Mississippi, black women were "the help." Other jobs weren’t open to them. They cooked and cleaned for white people, and they raised their children, but they weren’t allowed to use the same bathroom. And they couldn’t be friends with the children they’d raised when they were adults. 

Enter white would-be journalist Miss Skeeter aka Eugenia Phelan, who wants change, not least so she can find Constantine, who raised her, then disappeared. Enter Aibileen and Minny, black "helps" also wanting change, especially for their children. They recruit other "helps" who find the courage to act when it is dangerous to do so.

Boundaries are crossed, and unlikely friendships are formed. Brill book!

My daughter and I read this book together which started a conversation about Rosa Parks, racism, and courage. We liked reading from a child’s perspective because it evoked deeper emotions and made it more relatable to my daughter. The ending beautifully articulated how our courage gives others hope that they can also be courageous.