I had a chance to hear author Marilyn Nelson a couple years ago @ Reading the World Conference @ USF. She has written several books including Carver: a life in poems and Fortune's Bones
A Wreath for Emmett Till
Starred Review. Grade 9 Up–This memorial to the lynched teen is in the Homeric tradition of poet-as-historian. It is a heroic crown of sonnets in Petrarchan rhyme scheme and, as such, is quite formal not only in form but in language. There are 15 poems in the cycle, the last line of one being the first line of the next, and each of the first lines makes up the entirety of the 15th. This chosen formality brings distance and reflection to readers, but also calls attention to the horrifically ugly events. The language is highly figurative in one sonnet, cruelly graphic in the next. The illustrations echo the representative nature of the poetry, using images from nature and taking advantage of the emotional quality of color. There is an introduction by the author, a page about Emmett Till, and literary and poetical footnotes to the sonnets. The artist also gives detailed reasoning behind his choices. This underpinning information makes this a full experience, eminently teachable from several aspects, including historical and literary.–Cris Riedel, Ellis B. Hyde Elementary School, Dansville, NY
3 comments:
Andrea McAvoy also has highly recommended this book! thanks!
After this morning's conversation @ Freedom School I read in NYT this great editorial by Bob Herbert "Tweet Less, Kiss More"!!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/opinion/17herbert.html?th&emc=th
News article:
Fear of `resegregation' fuels unrest in NC
By ALLEN G. BREED, AP National Writer Allen G. Breed, Ap National Writer Sun Jul 18, 12:15 pm ET
RALEIGH, N.C. – In the annals of desegregation, Raleigh is barely a footnote.
Integration came relatively peacefully to the North Carolina capital. There was no "stand in the schoolhouse door," no need of National Guard escorts or even a federal court order.
Nearly 50 years passed — mostly uneventfully, at least until a new school board majority was elected last year on a platform supporting community schools.
The result has been turmoil.
The superintendent resigned in protest. A coalition of residents and civil rights groups filed suit. Months of rallies, news conferences and candlelight vigils against the feared "resegregation" of the state's largest school district culminated in the recent arrests of four activists for refusing to vacate board members' chairs.
Locals are lecturing Northern transplants about the Jim Crow past; white school board members are quoting Brown v. Board of Education to the NAACP.
"We're not going to sit idly by while they turn the clock back on the blood, sweat and tears and wipe their feet on the sacrifices of so many that have enabled us to get to the place we are today," says the Rev. William J. Barber II, head of the state NAACP chapter and one of the four protesters arrested for trespassing at the June 15 board meeting.
But John Tedesco, part of a new board majority, says it's the NAACP and others who are "trying to play with the old '60s playbook for rules for radicals" to preserve a policy that is no longer needed, and wasn't working anyway.
"This isn't 1960," he says.
It's not. But in 1960, when desegregation first came to the Raleigh city schools, there was no pitched battle.
In September of that year, 7-year-old William Craig Campbell — whose janitor father was head of the local NAACP chapter — braved a gantlet of spit and epithets and walked into the Murphy Public School.
Read rest of article @ Yahoo News
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