These 15 poems by Children's Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis cover a broad range of people and events that have contributed to the furthering of Civil Rights around the world.
Some of the subjects will be familiar to young readers, such as Mahatma Gandhi ("The Voice of the Voiceless"), who has some of the book's most moving lines: "For we are not the ones to say/ What will erode and what endure,/ Where the iron, where the clay,/ Who the foul and who the pure." R. Gregory Christie's soulful portrait shows Gandhi in the foreground with a crowd gathered behind him, a fitting representation of Lewis's focus on the championing of the lowest in India's caste system. The poet also celebrates lesser-known heroes, such as Sylvia Mendez, whose case, a precursor to Brown v. Board of Education, brought suit against Westminster, Calif., for restricting Sylvia and her brothers to a "Mexican school." Science, sports and economics as engines for social change also come to the fore in poems such as "Banker to the Poor," a tribute to Muhammad Yunus's development of microcredit.
Young people may need an adult's guidance to understand how baseball player Josh Gibson and the gruesome death of Emmett Till fit into the larger picture of the Civil Rights struggle. It takes some sleuthing to find out which of the five artists created which portrait. But this introduction to the many individuals who contributed to social change may well lead readers to further exploration. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness