By Cynthia Levinson
The true story of the thousands of Black children who marched out of school in Birmingham in 1963 and got themselves arrested to break segregation, told through four of them.
In May 1963, when the grown-ups' protests in Birmingham had stalled, the children stepped up. Thousands of Black students, some as young as nine, walked out of school and marched downtown knowing they would be arrested, and were, by the thousands, jailed for days. Cynthia Levinson follows four real young people who were there, including nine-year-old Audrey Hendricks, who told her mother, 'I want to go to jail,' and did. It's history that reads like something happening now, built from real interviews and photographs, about children who decided the movement was their job too.
It's the top of the unit because it hands older students real history at real weight, and puts children their own age at the center of it. After the picture books introduce the movement, this shows what standing up actually cost: thousands of young people arrested and jailed, met by police dogs and fire hoses. Because it follows four named, real teenagers and children through interviews, it reads like a story rather than a report, which is exactly what carries a fluent reader through 170 pages of true and difficult history.