By Monica Clark-Robinson
Birmingham, 1963: the grown-ups can't march without losing their jobs, so the children go instead, and a girl and her brother walk out of school and into jail.
A girl in Birmingham is tired of the signs telling her where she can't go. Dr. King asks for marchers, and her parents want to, badly, but if they march they lose the jobs that feed the family. So the girl volunteers, and her brother with her, and thousands of children do the same. They walk out of school singing. Police turn dogs and fire hoses on them. They're arrested and taken away in paddy wagons, so many of them the jails fill up, and the city has nowhere left to put them. That's what breaks segregation in Birmingham. Frank Morrison's oil paintings are the reason to own it, big and swooping, painted from low down so the children tower.
It hands the movement to people your child's own size. The Children's Crusade is the piece of this history that children rarely get told, and once they hear it, the whole era stops being about famous adults on a stage. It's told by a girl who is scared and goes anyway, which is a far more useful picture of courage than the fearless kind. Morrison's paintings carry weight the text doesn't have to spell out, and the back matter is generous enough to answer the questions the story starts.