By Carole Boston Weatherford
A young girl watches her family and their neighbors sit down at a whites-only lunch counter and refuse to leave, in the real 1960 Greensboro sit-ins.
In Greensboro, North Carolina, a young Black girl loves going downtown to Woolworth's, but there are two things she can't do there: sit at the lunch counter, or drink from the water fountain marked 'White.' Then one day in 1960, four college students sit down at that counter and politely ask to be served, and they don't get up. Day after day more people join them, including the girl's own big sister and brother, until the whole town is watching. Told through the eyes of one child in one family, with Jerome Lagarrigue's soft, glowing paintings, it makes a famous protest feel close and personal.
It shows children that ordinary people, including teenagers and children, powered the movement, not just the famous names. Because it's told by a young girl in the middle of it, a class sees the sit-ins from inside a family, the worry, the pride, the waiting, rather than as a paragraph in a textbook. And it makes nonviolent protest vivid and understandable: the protesters just sit, calmly, and ask to be treated equally, which gives a class a clear picture of what that kind of courage actually looked like.