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Win a Skype visit with Carole Weatherford, acclaimed author of Birmingham, 1963

By on October 8, 2013   /   Giveaways, Nonfiction  

It was fifty years ago. Birmingham, Alabama was one of the most segregated cities in the United States. Civil rights demonstrators were met with police dogs and water cannons. The eyes of the world were on Birmingham, a flash point for the civil rights movement. On Sunday, September 15, 1963, members of the Ku Klux Klan planted nineteen sticks of dynamite under the back steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which served as a meeting place for civil rights organizers. The explosion claimed the lives of four little girls. Their murders shocked the nation and turned the tide in the struggle for equality.

birmingham

Carole Weatherford’s acclaimed poetry collection, published in 2008, has been reissued to mark this important anniversary. Recipient of the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Jefferson Cup Award, and a Jane Addams Children’s Book Award Honor winner, the book is a timely, moving memorial written in exquisite, understated free verse.

Carole joins us today for an interview.

Could you discuss your research/creative process?

After writing “Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-ins”, I wanted to tackle another watershed event in the Civil Rights Movement. I chose the church bombing because, at the time, there was not children’s book devoted to the subject. The death of the four girls turned the tide of public opinion against white supremacists and the systemic racism that they avowed.

I began research using primary sources in the Birmingham Public Library collection. I read newspaper accounts of the event, viewed news photos, and read responses by President John F. Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. I also referred to secondary sources. An article that interviewed the girls’ families helped me to humanize and personalize the victims.

Why did you use poetry to tell the story?

Most of my books are poetry or are a hybrid genre blending poetry, biography, fiction or nonfiction. For example, I, Matthew Henson, Jesse Owens: Fastest Man Alive, and Before John Was a Jazz Giant: A Song of John Coltrane are poetic biographies. Becoming Billie Holiday is a fictional verse memoir. The Sound that Jazz Makes and a Negro League Scrapbook are poetic informational books. Birmingham, 1963 is an elegy. But it is also a narrative poem, a historical fiction. Poetry allows me to conjure images and distill emotions that make the story powerful.

Why did you choose historical fiction and create an anonymous narrator?

The historical events are true, but the first-person narrator is fictional. I use historical fiction to give young readers a character with whom to identify. In so doing, young readers grapple with social justice issues. I did not want names of fictional characters to stick in readers’ minds or to take the focus off the real victims. Also, the narrator’s anonymity draws readers even closer to the action. In this scene, she struggles to get out of the church after the blast.

Smoke clogged my throat, stung my eyes.

As I crawled past crumbled plaster, broken glass,

Shredded Bibles and wrecked chairs—

Yelling Mama! Daddy!—scared church folk

Ran every which way to get out.  

Why  set the tragedy on the narrator’s birthday?

In the eyes of children, turning ten is a big deal, a childhood milestone bordering on a rite of passage. The bombing actually occurred on the church’s Youth Day. To compound the irony and up the emotional ante, I made the bombing coincide with the narrator’s tenth birthday. The main character is looking forward to singing a solo during worship service and to celebrating her birthday. Instead, she survives a church bombing and mourns four older girls. That setting dramatically juxtaposes birthday candles and the bundle of dynamite which sparked the explosion.  The milestone resonates like a mantra, beginning as The year I turned ten and building to The day I turned ten.

Is the bombing still relevant today?

Nowadays, racism is usually more subtle and less definitive. Even hate crimes are more difficult to pinpoint and to prove. Many argue that racism motivated neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, who murdered teenager Trayvon Martin. In a more clear-cut case of hate violence, in 1998, James Byrd, an African-American man, was dragged three miles to his death by three white men (two white supremacists) in a pickup truck. . And in 2006, nooses were hung in a tree on a high school campus in Jena, Mississippi, after a black student tried to sit with white students at lunch. As long as racism persists and this nation exists, stories from the African-American freedom struggle will remain relevant.

Carole as a child

Carole as a child

Do you recall the bombing?

My earliest recollections of televised news—besides the space race—were in 1963. I can remember watching the March on Washington and hearing the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  I also recall President Kennedy’s assassination and funeral.

But I do not recall the church bombing. I was just seven years old at the time. If I had known about the tragedy, it would have frightened me. I suspect now that my parents kept the news from me. That was how black parents shielded their children from the sting of segregation. So, I tried now to imagine how I would have mourned then. The child in me connected with anonymous narrator.

Did you see yourself in the four girls? How much of you is in the anonymous narrator?

In 1963 I was seven years old and had already written my first poem. I grew up in Baltimore and did not experience the degree of discrimination that they did in Birmingham. But In many ways, I was those girls.

Like Addie Mae Collins, I drew portraits, played hopscotch and wore my hair press and curled.

Like Cynthia Wesley, I was a mere wisp of a girl who sometimes wore dresses that my mother sewed. I sang soul music and sipped sodas with friends.

Like Denise McNair, I liked dolls, made mud pies and had a childhood crush. I was a Brownie, had tea parties and hosted a neighborhood carnival for muscular dystrophy. People probably thought I’d be a real go-getter.

Like Carole Robertson, I loved books, earned straight A’s and took music and dance lessons. I joined the Girl Scouts and was a member of Jack and Jill of America. I too hoped to make my mark. We are both Caroles  with an “e.”

In researching the book, did you discover anything that surprised you?

Yes. The stained glass window of Jesus almost survived the blast intact.

10:22 a.m. The clock stopped, and Jesus’ face

Was blown out of the only stained glass window

Left standing—the one where He stands at the door.

It is ironic that Jesus was left faceless—as if He couldn’t bear to witness the violence. Here’s a photo.

Did you learn anything about that tragic day that gets forgotten?

Yes. Two African-American boys died in the violent aftermath of the church bombing. Sixteen-year-old James Robinson  was short in the back by police after a rock-throwing incident with a gang of white teens. Thirteen-year-old Virgil Ware was shot by a white boy riding a moped draped with a Confederate flag.

How are you marking the 50th anniversary of the church bombing?

This fall, I am offering free Skype visits to schools that read Birmingham, 1963.

Carole provided the following links to classroom resources:

Free Film Kits (from Teaching Tolerance Magazine)– Mighty Times: The Children’s Marchand America’s Civil Rights Movement: A Time for Justice

Birmingham Public Library Digital Collections — Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Collection

Birmingham Civil Rights Institute — http://bcri.org/index.html

The King Center — http://www.thekingcenter.org/

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow (PBS) – For Teachers

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/education.html

Eyes on the Prize (PBS) – For Teachers  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/tguide/index.html

Teachers Guide Primary Source Set – Jim Crow in America

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysourcesets/civil-rights/pdf/teacher_guide.pdf

Songs of the Civil Rights Movement (NPR) — http://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/99315652/songs-of-the-civil-rights-movement

Photographs of Signs Enforcing Discrimination (Library of Congress) —http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/085_disc.html

Thank you, Carole.

To be eligible to win a Skype visit with Carole Weatherford for your classroom, please leave a comment below. The winner and Carole will coordinate dates and times.

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The Children’s Hour: Poetry Study with Middle Grade Readers

By on October 7, 2013   /   Book Lists, For Librarians, For Parents, For Teachers  

Longfellow_children's_hourIt started this summer, when we visited Boston. We had just been to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s house in Cambridge. We were relaxing on the Harvard University lawn, and, inspired by the uber-intellectual environment, I asked my then eight year old to read me one of Longfellow’s poems from the slim volume we had just bought. I half- way thought she would refuse. But she good-humoredly began to read The Children’s Hour, delighting in Longfellow’s description of his own daughters:

From my study I see in the lamplight,
      Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
      And Edith with golden hair.


A whisper, and then a silence:
      Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
      To take me by surprise.

 And for the last number of months, my now nine and eleven year old have indeed taken me by surprise with their enthusiasm for our daily poetry study. On the way to school, I ask them each to read me a poem of their choice from a collection of famous poems we keep in the car. What has surprised me is how much more their enthusiasm is for these poems than Shel Silverstein or the other ‘children’s poetry’ we have in the house. There is something about the ‘big topics’ addressed — love, death, yearning, freedom, God — that fascinates them. So too does the vulnerability of these long-ago adult poets appeal; although they don’t say it, I hear the amazement in their voices when they read the stanzas aloud. (And I imagine their inner dialogue: Adults feel scared or confused like we do? Adults that long ago were so inspired by love and beauty?) For instance, the courage and perseverance of the speaker in William Ernest Henley’s Invictus seems to speak to my son, who comes back to this poem again and again on our morning read-alouds,

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

It makes sense. After all, a primary developmental task of the middle grader is defining of the self in relation to the environment. And what older elementary schooler/middle schooler wouldn’t be inspired by the majestic inner strength of the lines

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

His love for this poem have allowed us to discuss Nelson Mandela, who — or so the movie says — recited this poem to himself during his many years of captivity in South Africa. We discuss how an idea, an image, can give someone strength to endure the apparently unendurable. We discuss the power, and comfort, of words.

For my more whimsical daughter, William Wordsworth’s Daffodils seems to hold particular resonance. So much so that she’s been heard now reciting the lines to herself all around the house:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;

Like Invictus, the ultimate message of the poem is about building – and relying upon – one’s inner resources. A message utterly appropriate to a young person who is relatively powerless in this world so defined by adults:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils. 

What I’ve grown to realize is that like Wordsworth’s speaker, who stores the memory of the dancing flowers in his inner eye, these poems have the potential to be sources of inner strength for middle grade readers. There is no need to solely limit our young people to literature or poetry ‘meant’ for them. Rather, short exposure to small jewels of literary power (and most poems are by definition relatively short!) allow them to store these riches in their inner coffers for later spending. The great poets, like modern day rock or pop lyricists, appeal directly to the romantic spirits of young people.

Some of the words may be unfamiliar, some of the usages arcane, but without the cynicism that comes with teenage and adult years, middle grade readers have souls made for poetry. Like Emily Dickinson’s speaker in Chartless, they need no charts to navigate these poetic waters:

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet now I know how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be. 

So too do middle grade readers know great poetry in their bones. They may not have heard it before, but need no maps, just an enthusiastic parent, and permission to dive in.

And so, along with evening read-alouds, poetry study has become a part of our family culture. Sometimes it’s as simple as two short poems read aloud in the car on the way to school. Sometimes, when we’re pressed for time at night, I will read one or two poems in lieu of a bedtime story (or have the children chose and read a poem). If nothing else, hearing these great works recited in my children’s voices fills me with joy, and reminds me how important poetry is for spirits both young and old.

Are their particular poems you share, or plan to share, with the middle grade readers in your life?

(image of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s daughters courtesy wikipedia)

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A Tribute to Libraries

By on October 4, 2013   /   For Librarians, For Parents  

September was Library Card sign-up month — a reminder to parents and children that a library card is the most important school supply of all. So I’m a little late to the game to write a mini tribute to libraries. Kind of like an overdue book. But I’ll write it anyway.

Confession: I love libraries. Always have. My earliest memory of being inside a library is sitting on a carpeted floor, listening to a librarian read from a picture book. Story time. The sound of her voice filling the room with the melody of words. Anticipating what could happen with each turn of the page. In grade school, I remember walking to the car with my mom, clutching a library book to my chest, awaiting the moment when we’d get home and I could run to my room, curl up in my favorite chair and crack open the spine, diving into the story and not coming up for air until dinnertime.

There were countless trips to the neighborhood bookmobile, too, which parked just a few blocks from my house every other Thursday afternoon. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world to have a bus bring me books! As a teenager, I rode my bike to and from the library, my metal basket filled with books.

FBA Library 1970s

 

 

Typical 1970s library

 

When I became a parent, I took my three kids to story time at the library, met there with our parent-child book clubs, attended many events, not to mention borrowed hundreds of books over the years. The addition of the self-checkout was reason enough to go! My kids loved checking out books themselves (how cool is that beeping scanner!) and I loved avoiding a long line.

Our library recently underwent a major renovation, and while one thing has remained constant — shelf after shelf of books — much about the library is reinvented to meet the demands of today’s patrons. There’s a coffee shop, a multimedia area, open space, brightly-colored comfortable seating, and a friendly, cozy atmosphere.

vapl 2013

 

 

Vernon Area Public Library, Lincolnshire, Illinois

 

From the very first library, excavated in Syria (dating back to 1200 BCE), to today’s multimedia centers, with programs, meeting space, and technology at our fingertips, libraries have continued to evolve over time. And people use them more than ever. With the recent economic downturn, libraries experienced an increase in traffic and usage.

I once worried that because we live in a world relying more and more on technology, libraries might (gulp) go the way of the typewriter and rotary phone. Thankfully that has not happened. So take a ride over to your local library and get your child a card. Or if he or she already has one, use it! Honestly, it really will be the best school supply ever received. For free.

Michele Weber Hurwitz is the author of Calli Be Gold (Wendy Lamb Books 2011) and The Summer I Saved the World…in 65 Days (Wendy Lamb Books, coming April 2014). Visit her at micheleweberhurwitz.com.

 

 

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