In the mid-1930s, Marian Anderson was a famed vocalist who had been applauded by European royalty and welcomed at the White House. But, because of her race, she was denied the right to sing at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. This is the story of her resulting involvement in the civil rights movement of the time.

"Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and...

Raised in rural Alabama, Rosa Parks had never known a time when racial segregation was not the law. Then, one day, Parks decided that she had endured enough. Her soft-spoken defiance on a city bus was the spark-and civil rights activism, led by the young Martin Luther King, Jr., was the fire. The Montgomery bus boycott thrust parks into the spotlight, but it is only one part of her story.