On Writing for Children & Other People by Julius Lester

As part of the SNCC, he went to the South to document the civil rights movement. He later went moved to New York where he performed as a folk singer and became involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, as the head of its photography department. Louis, Missouri in 1939, and grew up in Kansas City and Nashville during Jim Crow. Lester was born the son of a minister from St. He was part of the Black Power movement a celebrated author of over 40 books for children, teens, and adults he was also a Jewish religious lay leader for more than a decade. As this country is aflame again - this time in the middle of a pandemic - because of the violence done against Black bodies in America, both by the police and by racist individuals, we need to elevate Black voices more than ever.Ī professor at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst for more than 30 years, Julius Lester was an important Black Jew. But, taken together, they should give freedom a tangible new definition.Do you know about Julius Lester? Well, if you don’t, it’s time you do - and it’s time your children do, too. We see fog, ''lying over the ground like scraps of cotton,'' and a blacksmith's legs, stretched ''like snakes sunning on a rock down by the creek.'' There are simple statements that say a lot: ''If they see us cry, then we won't have anything left that's ours.'' Newbery Honor Book author and National Book Award finalist Julius Lester has worked hard to produce the clean writing and free-flowing dialogue that bring these historical characters to life. ''I ain't going to run away,'' she tells him because she knows now where the sun lives.įinally there's the story of William Craft and his half-caste wife, Ellen, who elude their masters by traveling from Georgia to Massachusetts as a young white master and his submissive ''boy.'' Equally powerful in its depiction of the antislavery struggle and young love this is the most moving of the three. Standing tall and proud to the very end, she warns the slave auctioneer who comes to take her that he won't need a rope to tie her. Then there's Maria, who marries a free black man and enjoys a few years living in the ''sun'' of freedom, only to be sold into slavery again to pay off his debts when he dies.

On Writing for Children & Other People by Julius Lester