Busing & Flying
The celebration of Martin Luther King Day on January 17, as well as the tributes given recently at the funeral of Rosa Parks, signal how much we understand the history of the civil rights movement in terms of the contributions of heroic adults. Even so, a good deal of the burden for initiating social change actually fell upon the frail shoulders of children and the locus for transformation was their schoolrooms. In 1954, “Brown v. Board of Education” struck down the notion of “separate but equal” and ushered in school integration; in its wake came other efforts by grown-ups and hard-won successes at lunch counters and on city buses, in polling booths, housing and employment.
My daughter now teaches a first-grade class where children with every shade of skin color–from freckled white through brown to a plum-colored blackness–go about their business and play with each other without any awareness that it was once otherwise. Toni Morrison, the Pulitzer-winning author of Beloved, wants today’s children to know about the past sacrifices of other youngsters who brought about these conditions we now unthinkingly take for granted.
In Remember: The Journey to School Integration, Morrison collects more than 50 photographs from this era of school busing, and she provides as commentary her own imaginings about what people were thinking at the time their picture was taken. Here are U.S. marshals sent by President Eisenhower–white men in dark suits and thin ties, in an era when men wore hats–watching over a tiny African-American first-grader carrying a plaid portfolio at her new school. Here are two black youths inside the circle of a jeering mob, their heads hung down as if expecting a rain of blows at any minute. As Huckleberry Finn once said, “It’s enough to make a body ashamed.”
Children often had to pay for what, in more general terms, the Bible calls “the sins of the fathers.” Morrison dedicates her book to the four black children murdered by members of the older generation and the K.K.K. in the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church. On the other hand, the situation may often have been different among youngsters themselves; along with others, Morrison provides a photo of a smiling white boy (looking smart with his bowtie, his hair slicked with Brylcreem) talking so nonchalantly with a black classmate in their schoolroom that you wonder what all the fuss was about.
Addressing these same issues, but in the different and imaginative manner of literature, is another recently published book: Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly. In 1985, Hamilton collected twenty-four African-American folk tales dealing with airborne themes in a collection also called The People Could Fly. Now, three years after her death and as a tribute to Hamilton, Leo and Dianne Dillon have illustrated the title story from that collection. Previously, the Digllons addressed African themes in their prize-winning picture books Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears and Ashanti to Zulu; here they surpass even their prior pictorial excellence.
The story concerns some Africans who had a magical ability to fly but were, nonetheless, caught and sent to America as slaves. When Sarah is mercilessly whipped in the cotton fields, she appeals to grey-bearded Toby who conjures up the old magic and Sarah wings away with her baby, to the consternation of her slave masters. Soon others join in this angelic procession to freedom; and those unable to do so, pass along this story of hope to future generations. This tale, let me add, recalls my own favorite African-American children’s book, a prize-winning young adult novel that Hamilton wrote some thirty years before: M.C. Higgins, the Great, with its account both of a slave mother escaping to freedom and of her descendant, a contemporary boy whose own adolescent desire for freedom manifests itself in his wish to fly.
Though these seem different books–one nonfiction and the other fiction, one about busing and the other about flying–they both tell the same African-American story of intertwined pain and hope spoken of in the spiritual: “Go down Moses, way down in Egypt’s land; tell ol’ Pharaoh, let my people go.” As Morrison’s history of school integration and the civil rights movement suggests, in our own time, Moses was often a child. Moreover, in retelling this history and in passing down an old legend to future generations, an expectation is present in both these children’s books: that the young will remain our saviors and shoulder the burden of keeping these stories alive.
Remember: The Journey to School Integration
Ages: 4 - 8 yrs.
By: Toni Morrison
Houghton Mifflin, $18.00 (Hardcover)
The People Could Fly
Ages: 4 - 8 yrs.
By: Virginia Hamilton Illustrated By: Leo and Diane Dillon
Knopf, $16.95 (Hardcover)
Why Mosquitos Buzz in People’s Ears
Ages: 4 - 8 yrs.
By: Verna Aardema Illustrated By: Leo and Diane Dillon
Puffin, $6.95 (Paperback)
Ashanti to Zulu
Ages: 4 - 8 yrs.
By: Margaret Musgrove; illustrated by Diane Dillon
Dial: $19.99 (Hardback)
M.C. Higgins, the Great
Ages: 9 - 12 yrs.
By: Virginia Hamilton
Simon Pulse, $5.95 (Paperback)
About the Author
Jerry Griswold is the Director of San Diego State University's National Center for the Study of Children's Literature. His most recent book is The Meanings of "Beauty and the Beast" (Broadview Press).
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