I Am the River: Sarah E. Ray and the Bob-Lo Boat

Gr 1-3–Multiple narrators (including some natural features) highlight a protest against racial discrimination that not only preceded the better known ones of Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks by a decade but went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court well before Brown v. Board of Education. It began when Sarah E. Ray tried to join her otherwise all-white class of Detroit vocational school graduates in 1945 aboard an excursion boat headed for an amusement park on Bob-Lo Island—once, ironically, a station on the Underground Railroad—and was firmly escorted back to the dock. A picture of dark-skinned defiance in Marshall’s illustrations, Ray marched off to call the NAACP, marched on to multiple judicial wins with a legal team headed by rising star Thurgood Marshall, and here at last marches past the amusement park she ever after refused to visit. In a final view she stands forthrightly against a flowing background, in token of her status as an undersung hero of the Civil Rights Movement. She went on to become a lifelong activist determined, as a closing rhetorical flourish (that sounds better than it means) puts it, “to listen to and speak for the voices sometimes seen, but not always heard.”