Making History Matter

How does Shane W. Evans make history matter to a picture book audience?

He does it by portraying a child just like them, born into a different time. And he shows children that the things that mattered then also matter now. Freedom. Family. Safety. Work that allows your parents to pay for your food and shelter. They mattered then; they matter now.

We March takes children back to a hot August morning in 1963 as a family rises and prepares for their day. It is a day that will change history. On August 28, 1963, 250,000 people gathered for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. 250,000 people. Before Facebook, Twitter or text messages, as Shane Evans pointed out in an interview. People met at their churches and boarded buses and stood together and marched together for “jobs and freedom.” And Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous speech, “I Have a Dream.”

A few weeks ago, Shane Evans won the 2012 Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award for his book Underground: Finding the Light to Freedom. The almost wordless story follows primarily one family on their journey through the Underground Railroad. If you look at the cover of his book Underground, it echoes the cover of We March in curious ways. The suns ray's make the covers look almost as if they are inversions of one another. I got a chance to ask Shane Evans about this in an interview, and he said he wanted to connect the two books visually. “I recognize that these two journeys, though hundreds of years apart, are still a continuum,” he said. “That pursuit of freedom goes on and on.”

The reasons for that August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom are still with us. Today in our own country the “99%” (or “Occupy”) protests echo these themes and, on a global scale, so do the protests that began during the Arab Spring of 2011. Martin Luther King’s model of peaceful protests have resonated around the world as the gold standard for the way to effect change.

What Makes a Hero?

Is it who someone is? Or what they do? The story of Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose, suggests that a hero is a combination of both.

Even at the age of 15, Claudette Colvin’s conviction that what was happening around her was inhumane led her to do something about it. She believed, as an African American teenager, that it was her constitutional right to remain seated on a segregated bus in 1955 Alabama (nine months before Rosa Parks took the same action), even if a white passenger was demanding her seat. Her act of courage began a chain of events that set off the Montgomery bus boycott.

Hoose begins the book with this quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Claudette Colvin had seen adults complain about the injustices of segregation at home, but say and do nothing about them in public. She had watched her schoolmate condemned to death for a crime he did not commit. She called it, “the turning point of my life.” She could not stand by and watch unjust laws terrorize her friends and community. Her brave act of defiance against the segregation laws of the deep South came with a cost. She was not fully supported at the time of her bravery, and she lived “in voluntary exile” much of her life, according to Phillip Hoose when I had a chance to interview him. But she had to live with her conscience.

Struggling with one’s conscience is often challenging, but it can be especially difficult for teens. As a teenager, you do not yet have the rights an adult has; the opinion of one’s peers seems crucially important. And often it seems as if nothing you could do would make a difference anyway. But Claudette Colvin’s example suggests that there’s a great deal we can do as individuals, no matter whether we are adults or teenagers.

This book sets the record straight. It completes the history of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. It lets young people know that the history books do not always tell the full story. But more importantly, it makes clear that history is made up of individuals and singular events, that sweeping social changes begin with one person taking a stand. And, as Claudette Colvin’s story proves, young people are often at the heart of these sweeping social changes. If she can do what’s right in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, her story seems to say, we can, too.