Justice Served

True tales of injustice will provoke and inspire young readers

By Kathleen Baxter -- School Library Journal, 6/1/2004

"It's not fair!" Every listener in your booktalk audience has either uttered those words or heard them shouted from a sibling or schoolmate, for the sting of injustice comes to us early in life. Indeed, stories about people treated unfairly stir something deep in our psyche.

Chris Crowe's Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case (Penguin, 2003) tells the story of Till, who had just turned 14 in the summer of 1955. He was a popular African-American kid growing up in Chicago, where racial discrimination was not nearly as blatant as it was in the Deep South.

That summer, Emmett visited his relatives in Mississippi. His mother warned him that things were different in the South, but Emmett was an irrepressible spirit—a kid who liked to show off, loved jokes, and loved life. One night in a general store near the town of Money, Emmett whistled at a white woman—an unacceptable act by a black male in 1950s Mississippi. While Emmett thought nothing of the incident, his cousins knew better.

Soon after, two white men came in the middle of the night and took the teenager away. Emmett's mutilated body was found in the Tallahatchie River three days later.

Emmett's mother wanted to bring his body back home to Chicago. But when she saw what they had done to her son, Mamie Till wanted more, she wanted justice. So she insisted on an open-casket funeral. News of Emmett's gruesome death quickly spread, sparking outrage among people across the country, black and white. The senseless death of the Chicago teenager helped spur the Civil Rights movement, which suddenly swelled with supporters who sought just treatment for all of our nation's citizens.

Ask your booktalk listeners how they'd feel if they were given two days notice to leave their homes, their friends, and almost all their possessions behind. "That's not fair!" some will say. But that's exactly what happened to some American kids who lived on the West Coast. For Americans of Japanese descent, the world turned upsidedown when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The U.S. government, afraid their own citizens would suddenly turn into enemy spies, ordered the removal of all Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Kids had to leave their schools and their friends. Families were loaded onto trucks and transported to remote prison camps in the mountains and the desert.

Michael Cooper's Remembering Manzanar: Life in a Japanese Relocation Camp (Clarion, 2002) is the story of one of those camps. Youngsters in Manzanar still went to school, but they did not have furniture or textbooks. These American citizens were also deprived of their rights.

Despite hardships, people from around the world have always been drawn to America. Between 1880 and 1923, more than 23 million immigrants arrived; 19 million of those came through New York and many of them settled there. Needless to say, the city became very crowded. Ask your booktalk listeners to raise their hands if they would like to share their school desk with three other students. Would they like to use an outdoor toilet that had no toilet paper and was situated alongside their supply of drinking water? Immigrant children who lived on New York City's Lower East Side faced unspeakable conditions. The tenement buildings often lacked electricity, heat, and adequate toilet facilities, and they were filthy beyond imagination. No wonder everyone thronged the streets. Who would want to stay inside under those conditions?

Deborah Hopkinson reveals that world in Shutting Out the Sky: Life in the Tenements of New York 1880–1924 (Scholastic/Orchard, 2003). Tenement families, primarily immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, faced discrimination along with harsh living conditions. Hopkinson details the lives of five young immigrants, who were determined to make their futures in this strange, sometimes unfair, new land.

True stories of injustice are sure to hook your listeners and inspire them with examples of true perseverance and courage.