Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"Someday, we'll get it together and we'll get it undone
Someday, when the world is much brighter
Someday, we'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun
Someday, when the world is much lighter." -- Stan Vincent

"One mid-April 1944 day he and a teacher, Mrs. Bradley, stood for most of the ninety-mile journey from Dublin, Georgia, to Atlanta because the bus driver had ordered them to surrender their seats to whites, then cursed at them for not moving quickly. M.L. had wanted to sit tight, but his teacher convinced him that nothing good would come of defying the segregation law behind the bus driver's demand. M.L. seethed all the way home, stripped of his joy. For in Dublin, he had done well in an oratorical contest with his speech,' The Negro and the Constitution,' a plea for racial justice."

Does the average school library really need another biography of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? Do you really need to read another one? If there is anyone beyond John, Paul, George, and Ben who I can count on finding on the library shelf of every single school in which I booktalk, it is MLK.

"That night, M.L. was at a mass meeting when told that his home had been bombed. Coretta and Yoki weren't physically hurt, but he didn't know that until he reached his house, where several hundred blacks had gathered in response to the bombing, more than a few of them armed with guns, knives, and broken bottles.
"M.L. did a masterful job of calming the crowd, but later that night, he was 'on the verge of corroding hate.' He dug deep for the strength to love. By then, he understood well what the love Jesus preached really meant. He knew that it was neither the kind of love that he felt for Yoki, his parents, or his friends, nor the kind of love he had for Coretta, but agape, (pronounced ah-gah-pay), a Greek word for a higher, harder love: a love that has nothing to do with liking a person, a love worthy of people who do you no good and even do you wrong. Agape says to see past a person's sins to the soul God loves."

This concept of agape, and his belief in it, would so well serve Reverend King, permitting him to repeatedly maintain his determination to focus on the cause, to be positive and nonviolent in the face of repeated physical attacks and jailings month after month. Agape is just one of so many important concepts explored by Tonya Bolden about which I have never seen mention in other MLK bios that I have read over the years.

"In talks with riot-ready youth in Chicago and elsewhere, M.L. had been brought up short by the question 'What about Vietnam?' Hadn't the U.S. government resorted to violence to express its will? young blacks asked. What's more, M.L. had been literally sickened by photographs of horrors wrought by America's napalm bombs that accompanied the article 'The Children of Vietnam,' in the January 1967 issue of Ramparts magazine. Added to these promptings was his conscience calling him to recognize that if he didn't boldly denounce the war, he was no better than whites who knew in their bones that racial injustice was reprobate but said and did nothing about it."

Bolden shows how the media of that era sought to keep Reverend King "in his place," editorializing that he was making a mistake to divert his attention from the cause -- Civil Rights -- with which he was identified. But to the me of forty years ago and to the me whom I am today, MLK's stance against The War is what separated him from mere politicians and mere activists and really made him a lasting inspiration in my own world, making him a wise and holy man in the very best sense of the word.

"Early morning, April four
A shot rings out in the Memphis sky.
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride." -- U2

Tonya Bolden, as one of us who grew up an impressionable child during the Civil Rights Movement, as one of us who seeks to come to an understanding of how Reverend King was and remains part of our lives, as one of us who seeks to comprehend how someone who makes such a difference in the world can be taken away in the blink of an eye, has done an exceptional job of writing about this holy man, this man of color and conscience whose life and good works are celebrated across our country with an annual commemoration. M.L.K.: JOURNEY OF A KING is a must-have and must-read biography for the twenty-first century.

Richie Partington, MLIS
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