Book Description
for Free at Last! by Doreen Rappaport and Shane W. Evans
From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)
A companion book to Rappaport’s earlier No More! Stories and Songs of Slave Resistance chronicles black experience in the United States from Emancipation in 1863 to 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled that segregation was illegal. Rappaport’s narrative is engages both mind and heart, blending an accessible factual narrative with stirring stories chronicling the experience of individual African Americans. There is Jane Kemper, a former slave who searches for her four children, stolen by her former master, and Harriet Postle, who clutches her baby son whie refusing to reveal her husband’s whereabouts to the Klansmen who crash through her door. There are also brief stories about Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, Jackie Robinson and others. African American songs and poems (such as Countee Cullen’s “The Incident”) add even greater emotional impact, as do Shane W. Evans’s oil illustrations in this notable volume. (Ages 10–14)
CCBC Choices 2005 . © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2005. Used with permission.