Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange: A Financial History of Victorian Science. Marc Flandreau. University of Chicago Press. 2016.

The focus of Marc Flandreau’s Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange: A Financial History of Victorian Science is to unearth and explore the links between the development of early circles of anthropologists and the use of science in British imperial formal and informal policy.

Flandreau situates the reader in the British context of the Victorian notion of ‘puffing’ – financial bubbles and inflated notions of reputation that were full of hot air. Science was the most cherished commodity for those who pursued imperial projects, and explorers in London ensured the two went hand-in-hand. As some members found themselves handcuffed by the respectability of the established Ethnological Society, they decided to found a new, bolder group named the Anthropological Society, led by the particularly radical self-proclaimed ‘Cannibals’. Intent on eschewing funding and associations with the Establishment, the Anthropological Society ruthlessly pursued projects internationally. For example, they provided the evidence for prospective investors of the Ecuador Land Company to sell acres it had acquired from Ecuador as indemnity for its defaulted debts. Members such as Bedford Pim were also central in shaping the vocabulary of British scientific racism that validated investment in colonial works through texts such as The Negro and Jamaica. Their ways of tying together the stock market and anthropological science allowed for the bankrupting of foreign countries and shaped British policy in Abyssinia throughout the 1850s. In the 1870s, they were discredited by fellow scientists and their influence has since been misunderstood and broadly neglected.

Of particular interest in the book is the one chapter explicitly dedicated to exploring the ties between the stock market and anthropologists. Here, Flandreau delivers examples of how the works of anthropologists who engaged in bondholding assisted British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s imperial discourse and his policies towards Abyssinia, and how the British promotion of railway projects in South America and anthropology used the same rhetoric. Finally, Flandreau asks us to see how the professionalisation of the anthropologists did not mean that the criminality disappeared. Knowledge still provides a source of power and can often cloak racist prejudice. We are told this is a novel way of looking at issues of colonisation, dispossession and white-collar crime today.

Image Credit: Javali Mine, Chontales, Nicaragua, 1869. Image extract from page 12, Dottings on the Roadside in Panama, Nicaragua and Mosquito… by Berthold Seemann and Bedford Pim. British Library HMNTS 010480.ee.37 (British Library, Wikipedia Public Domain).

Flandreau’s research carries important lessons. However, his entertaining style often hinders the potential for deeper analyses. He informs the reader in the preface that there is no method to his approach and presents this as indicating a kind of purity to the research. He confesses his ignorance about anthropology, to writing it in an unintentional way in one sitting ‘(but then was asked to revise it)’. Bearing in mind just how much of the book’s effort is about deconstructing models of knowledge, it might come as a surprise when Flandreau states: ‘I confess to not having the kind of reliable knowledge about the pedigree of Victorians that only, I am sure, an Oxford or Cambridge education can provide.’ If we believe Flandreau’s illogical appeal to something like a false consciousness, we might ask why we should read on. If we challenge it – and we should – we might also question why Flandreau makes this comment in the first place. His statement is followed by other puzzling ones, with the most worrying being his acknowledgement that ‘anthropology is a metaphor […] to express ideas that have long been with me’. One can congratulate Flandreau on having found an apt metaphor for his ruminations. One may also wonder why the reader should care.

If anthropology rests ambivalently as a metaphor, we also find throughout the book that Flandreau conflates ideas with people. Anthropology as a field is constantly attacked for failing to acknowledge that its roots grew in the dark soil of British imperial racism and contributed to its discourse. This is an important recognition of the role that anthropologists played in the construction of the scientific language of racism. And yet a modern burgeoning scholarship has already begun to explore the links between culture, power and racism in nineteenth-century Britain. Engagement with Bernard Porter’s The Absent-Minded Imperialists (2006) or John Darwin’s The Empire Project (2009), among others, would have lent greater depth to Flandreau’s study. After all, the ties between racism, economics and culture constitute a topic in need of urgent evaluation and at the forefront of many studies. By writing as if he is the only historian to point this out, many of Flandreau’s insights are not related to these broader trends. This becomes particularly problematic as he moves towards examining British public life and explores the role of powerful figures such as Disraeli and the author of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson.

The supposed lack of methodology also leads to certain anachronisms and displays of historiographical lassitude. Flandreau’s use of the term ‘white-collar crime’ is one example, and does little to help us to dissect the racial charges behind many scams. The lack of appreciation for the historical precedents of explorers who traded information for wealth and influence and an interesting consideration of how these differed in their modes of analysis from the anthropologists would have been another valuable contextualisation within the scholarship.

Despite these easily avoidable flaws, Flandreau has unearthed plenty of valuable sources that will help further studies on the topic and provides thought-provoking interpretations. As with any work that succeeds in doing so, Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange merits a great deal of reflection. Flandreau’s analysis of the epistemic ties between colonialism and the stock market offers a valuable contribution to the growing and essential literature on capitalism and racism. However, Flandreau has missed the opportunity to link his work to broader interpretations about the stock market, the economics of the state and racism. This should encourage scholars to follow up his research with their own. Few other topics would appear as salient in the contemporary moment.

Cabinet’s Finest Hour: The Hidden Agenda of May 1940 By David Owen Haus Publishing/University of Chicago Press, $29.95, 276 pages

David Owen has had one of the most protean careers of any British politician. A medical doctor by training, specializing in neurology, he went on to become a member of the British Parliament, becoming foreign secretary in 1977 while still in his late 30s in Prime Minister James Callaghan’s government. After Margaret Thatcher’s victory, he was one of the “Gang of Four” MPs who left the leftward-lurching Labor Party to found the Social Democratic Party (SDP). And he still sits in the House of Lords as an “independent social democrat.”

Amid all this political work, Lord Owen has found time to write many books, and with this latest, he provides an in-depth look at the pivotal decisions taken by Britain’s War Cabinet in the month that saw Winston Churchill become prime minister. As someone who has himself sat in the inner circles of political power at No. 10 Downing Street, he brings a unique perspective to how such groups operate, something which resonates on every page here.

Mr. Owen’s experience has taught him the value of the original documents available to those actually making choices while deciding policy directions and has been able to draw upon papers “once only available to members of Churchill’s War Cabinet.” As he writes in the preface to “Cabinet’s Finest Hour”:

SPONSORED CONTENT

Marriott Brings Back NFL ExperiencesGlobal Traveler Magazine

NBA Player J.J. Redick Lands a Brooklyn Penthouse for $4.25 MillionMansion Global

The most addictive game of the year!Forge Of Empires
Recommended by

“I attach much importance to making available to the reader original documents from the time. I have tried to select sufficient quotes so that the narrative is not dependent on reading the documents in full.”

The author’s capacity for serving up such copious, judicious selections is just one of the qualities that make his tale so fascinating and absorbing.

Churchill has long been given credit for his staunch resolve to fighting on alone against Nazi Germany in the wake of its shocking Blitzkrieg and unexpected defeat of Britain’s main ally, France. But before John Lukacs published at the turn of this century his fresh look at the weeks following Churchill’s ascent to power, few were aware of how very nearly the great man was derailed from his task by the small, powerful, inner War Cabinet he had himself appointed. It is a measure of Mr. Owen’s scrupulousness as a historian as well as his graciousness and generosity that he acknowledges being “deeply indebted to John Lukacs’ ground-breaking book “Five Days in London, May 1940,” even if he does not agree with everything in it.

What Mr. Lukacs centrally shone a spotlight on was Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax’s dogged determination still to achieve a negotiated settlement with Hitler through his cohort Mussolini, who had not yet entered the war against Britain and France. Although there is the inevitable thought that Halifax, who had been passed over in favor of Churchill, was seeking to gain what many thought was his rightful position, it seems clear that he was sincere, if misguided, in his determination still to pursue peace at any price as he had done alongside Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938.

The Labor War Cabinet members, whose party had refused to serve under Halifax, unsurprisingly supported Churchill. So it came down to which side Chamberlain would support. Hitler’s takeover of what remained of Czechoslovakia only months after his promise to Chamberlain at Munich that their agreement was the end of his territorial ambitions in Europe had caused the scales to fall from the prime minister’s eyes. His attitude of “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” had only grown with Hitler’s multiple betrayals. And so, in the end, he sided with Churchill’s desire for vigorous warfare to be waged against all odds. No wonder that when people questioned Churchill’s handsome tribute to Chamberlain after his death only months later and he claimed it was easy, it was probably those days in May which made it so.

What is fascinating to see is the patience with which the normally impetuous Churchill allowed Halifax to pursue his arguments and even try some speculative attempts at negotiation. By giving him such full rein, the War Cabinet — and eventually even the foreign secretary himself — was able to see for themselves just how futile such a strategy was. Anyone who only associates Churchill with his undoubtedly great qualities of defiance and resolution will see a very different side in what Mr. Owen has provided readers.

Mr. Owen states forthrightly that “I do not think this book would have been possible without this Cabinet experience. As the years pass I grow evermore convinced that collective decision-making is the hallmark of a true democracy … . Also that there is nothing old-fashioned about its mechanisms that are proven to work.” It is the prime achievement of this authoritative book that it shows how Churchill was able to harness the forces of collective decision-making in order to fight off a last fatal attempt at appeasement and give himself the mandate necessary for ultimately victorious prosecution of the war. This is an important, instructive and ever-timely testament to a master politician literally saving his nation — and mankind — from catastrophe.

The Sociology Of Plants ....Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles Part of Cambridge Cultural Social Studies by Chandra Mukerji, Cambridge University Press Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, With a Foreword by Philippe Bourgois Seth Holmes (Author), Philippe Bourgois (Foreword), University of California Press Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and other Forgotten Foods by Jennifer Jordan,University of Chicago Press, 2015 Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond by Jennifer Jordan,Stanford University Press, 2006, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World Paperback – May 28, 2002 by Michael Pollan,, Random House A Natural History of English Gardening 1650-1800 by Mark Laird, Yale University Press

The questions at the heart of my research are always similar — how do memory and meaning shape the material world? — but I ask these questions in starkly different kinds of settings, as well as both indoors and outside. When I first started my dissertation research on post-1989 urban change and collective memory in Berlin, I headed to the State Library in the former West Berlin, or Stabi West — the modernist library in the opening scene of Wim Wenders’s film, Wings of Desire. This was 1996, so the serious but helpful librarians pointed me to the long row of card catalogue drawers where I spent hours flipping through the soft paper cards in search of knowledge and ordering books from the closed subterranean stacks. In those thoughtful days at Stabi West, there were a few clunky (but back then cutting-edge) computers with the beginnings of computerised databases. Web 2.0 was still years away, and most of my research was analogue and on-site.

On days when I wasn’t in that library or hidden away in one of the many archives across the city, my outside research involved a pair of sturdy sandals or urban-appropriate boots, a notebook and a camera — first my father’s Canon AE-1, in my brief foray into the world of SLRs, and then a Canon Sureshot that I could quickly pull from the pocket of my jacket, get the shot and move on. I would shoot 400 or sometimes 200, mostly slide film and sometimes black-and-white. I would get it developed at the local drugstore, always careful in how many pictures I took as each click of the shutter had a clear financial cost. A decade later, one of those photographs became the cover of my first book, Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond.

I would walk for miles and miles in Berlin. The city smelled of diesel, cigarettes and coal smoke, some generated by my own coal stove. For all their toxicity, these smells still provoke a deep nostalgia to this day. I walked through derelict postindustrial landscapes, which today house gleaming condos, and down row after row of apartment buildings hastily built in the late-nineteenth-century boom, which had become layered with the violence of the twentieth century — bullet holes, neglect, air pollution. The quiet hours in the library paired with the dogged, pedestrian inquiry into the forgotten corners and secret memories of this complicated city. For me, a researcher posing specific questions about human action and the material world, the one didn’t make sense without the other. My ability to read the landscape grew with the hours spent learning the unique German vocabulary for talking about the built environment. But those books, and the mimeographed papers I pored through in the archives, made more sense the more time I spent learning, inch by inch, the topography of the city.

Today this pairing of indoors and outdoors continues in my research, but the locations and objects of inquiry have changed — to gardens and fields and forests, and to the digital world. After completing nearly a decade of work on Berlin and on the violence that once occupied its streets and buildings, I turned to the plant-human intersection and to landscapes of sustenance. My last book investigated heirloom tomatoes and antique apples (Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods), and I am now writing on the one hand about climate change and historical kitchen gardens, and on the other about the changing landscapes of beer brewing — forgotten hops fields, revitalised barley fields, abandoned malt houses and hop kilns and the like. My research continues to be profoundly material. Even in this digital age, I do much of my research with old-fashioned books and am still a committed user of libraries, taking advantage of the serendipity of open stacks and the tactile focus of paper books and interlibrary loans.

I pair this indoor work with the work I do quite literally out in the field, with muddy feet, finding old apple trees or talking with gardeners in the shade of an arbor. While conducting this research I have been too hot, too cold, soaked to the bone, jetlagged, sunburned and mosquito-bitten. This research also requires an unfamiliar pace for my hectic self — being slow, standing still, watching, listening. It is a very physical, visceral form of research, and one that allows me to be present in landscapes that are often undergoing great transformations that are not always immediately apparent.

Royal Kitchen Garden, Hampton Court, London There are aspects of this research that are terrifying (thunderstorms, climate change), but there is also much joy and pleasure to be had. Because I focus on edible plants, there is almost always something good to eat or drink at hand. I have eaten plums pulled of a tree that is a research object, been nourished by the tea room at Hampton Court Palace with its Henry VIII-inspired menu and produce from the Georgian garden nearby and tasted tomatoes plucked from a garden in a vacant lot in Garfield Park in Chicago. This research engages all senses — it has smells (some good, some bad), tastes (almost always good). It also has the sounds I have learned to listen for of bird and insect life as well as the weather, those important forces that Mark Laird and others remind garden historians to attend to. This work is also utterly visual and tactile. I am certain that part of what has sent me in this direction is the deep draw of gazing out at a landscape that contains more shades of green than I will ever be able to name.

But the ability to read a landscape of plants is quite dependent on some kind of experience and expertise. This is most often the knowledge of plants acquired over a lifetime and handed down across generations in communities that rely, at least in part, on foods and medicines gathered from forests, meadows and seashores or grown in local gardens and fields. Most of the time I have a guide of some sort explaining the landscape to me — a seasoned gardener or young apprentice, a costumed interpreter or an eager volunteer. In many respects, landscapes do not speak for themselves. And, in contrast to how I feel in a library or a database, I am a novice in the landscapes I enter: an intruder, a visitor, uninitiated.

When I stand in a garden or a field or a forest, my interpretation of that landscape is profoundly limited. In other words, I see the forest and I see the trees, but without a conversation with the local expert or gardener, a look into the archive or a perusal of archaeological and meteorological reports, I have little ability to place this landscape into context. I have little way of knowing if it has changed, if I am glimpsing a snapshot of radical transformation or arboreal or horticultural continuity. A local forager, a historian, a botanist, a park ranger, a phenologist and a meteorologist might all have different takes on a given landscape. Or, surveyed, their takes on that landscape might line up in compelling or even startling ways.

So, for my purposes of seeking the links between human action, memories and meanings and the landscapes we inhabit, I triangulate. I sit quietly at home or in my office, reading a stack of library books or the dim glow of journal articles held in the vast expanse of my hard drive. Then I walk out into the world, either alone or in the company of a knowledgeable farmer or gardener, and seek to bring together what I see (and smell, hear, taste and touch) with what I have read, and with the instruction that my guide can give me in reading the ways of the landscape. Sometimes this is quite obvious, embarrassingly so, as when a young gardener at Old Sturbridge Village answered my question about their apple tree collections by pointing to a good-sized cider orchard that was sitting in plain sight and that I had just walked by — no excuse. Once this past summer, another costumed interpreter at a different historical garden, observing me from afar for a while, finally crossed the dusty road running through the centre of a reconstructed agricultural village. He had watched me taking an inordinate number of photographs — with my phone rather than the SureShot of my Berlin days — in the apothecary’s garden that he tended. My read of that garden changed utterly once he talked and walked me through it — my initial impressions were wrong, nearly the opposite of what I learned when he told me of its origins and intentions.
Image Credit: (Tracy Reid CC BY 2.0)

A sociology of plants is already underway, and is also very much demanding the presence of the researcher in the field and the archive. Two examples are Seth Holmes’s Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, where the materiality of the research requires Holmes to work alongside the broken bodies of the women and men he writes about, to cross the border with them, to see and experience all the painful physicality of migrant labour, the people who harvest the fruit in such high demand across the USA and around the world. A quite different example would be Chandra Mukerji’s Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles, where the researcher triangulated the physical experience of viewing the garden at ground level and from above with deep archival records that explain not only the meaning of this particular arrangement of box hedges, annual beds and opulent fountains, but also the military technologies and intentions at work.

I now spend a lot of time with plants, both under the open sky and with the digital and analogue research materials at my desk. This is not ornamental work. Do I even have to say it? Without plants, there are no people. Water is life, and so are plants. Look to your plants. The weeds in the cracks of t

he sidewalks, the great trees like time machines from past centuries and millennia, the meticulously monotonous cornfields, kelp washing up on shore. The apple orchard, carrot patch and the rice paddy. The rain forest, the chaparral, the high desert with its plant life meticulously adapted to arid conditions, the alpine meadow. Without them, there is no us, no life on planet earth. Many of my colleagues, with good reason, write about space, territory and violence of various sorts. Violence and loss are never far away, and the sociology of plants is as intricately connected to power as any other realm of sociological inquiry. But I keep reaching for space, territory and joy, a very intentional move. There is much death in the world, and I want to write about life. So much cruelty, but I want, sometimes, to write about kindness. This is part of why I set out into the kitchen in my last book, and now wander forth into gardens and forests. It is impossible to ignore that these green spaces are intrinsically connected to systems of struggle, exploitation and deep imbalances of power, but, as Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and others make so clear, they can also be places where people find peace and create life.

Civil Rights Heroes to Teach Your Kids About

Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t the only one. So tell your family about the dreams of these other, perhaps lesser-known, leaders.


Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t the only one. So tell your family about the dreams of these other, perhaps lesser-known, leaders.

It’s shocking how little the youth of today know about the civil-rights movement. A few years ago, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 2 percent of high school seniors knew what social issue was addressed in Brown v. Board of Education. The Teaching Tolerance Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center noted in 2014 that 12 states don’t require that schools teach anything about civil-rights history, and also found that most states’ content standards, to put it mildly, suck. Teaching Tolerance gave the majority of states a D or below on their curricula; 20 states got an F. (You can see Teaching Tolerance’s methodology here.)

Furthermore, the way the movement does get taught tends to pump up the roles of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks at the expense of almost everyone else. Parks didn’t spontaneously decide not to give up her seat on a bus because she was tired, and she didn’t act in a vacuum: She was working strategically with other social-justice leaders. As Teaching Tolerance puts it, “The reduction of the movement into simple fables obscures the broad social, institutional and personal sacrifices of the people who engaged in the struggle.” If we treat King and Parks as singular, we fail to teach kids that they, too—as individuals and as members of communities—have the power to effect change. And we should be wary of presenting kids with too-pat, too-happy conclusions, turning King into a toothless advocate of the colorblind society we’ve now achieved (or at least come close to achieving, on a legal level) and turning Parks into a woman who ended institutionalized racism (yay!) because, as historian Michael Kammen put it, “amnesia is more likely to be induced by the desire for reconciliation.” There’s a reason right-wing leaders invoke King’s words as often as lefties do: If you bat your eyelashes and speak loftily about judging someone by the content of their character, you can avoid wrestling with current issues of inequity and systemic prejudice.

So, as a small corrective, here’s a quick primer on seven African-American civil-rights leaders whose personal stories will entice kids, with a list of books you can give your kids to learn more about heroes other than King. It’s up to you to continue those stories by adding, “We still have work to do.” And then, of course, to engage your family in helping to do that work.

(And, hey, here’s a radical proposition: Let’s not overemphasize the role of Jews in the civil-rights movement. I think for some white Jews, the fact that we were active participants in the 1960s serves as justification and excuse for not being great allies today. It’s more important for us to listen to black people’s current stories, respect their experiences, and sit with their anger than it is for us to trumpet our own involvement in those stories. Therefore, this column will not mention Abraham Joshua Heschel. I know.)

1. Ida B. Wells (1862-1930) was born to slaves and became an educator, journalist, and co-founder of the NAACP. When she was a teenager, her parents died of yellow fever, and she fought to keep her younger siblings together and care for them. She became a teacher in a segregated school at 16, and spread the word about terrible conditions and inadequate resources for black students. In 1891, three of her friends in Memphis who’d opened a grocery store that took black customers away from the established white grocery were lynched. (Their shop had been attacked by white vandals, and they fought back and shot several … but they were murdered in jail before they had a trial.) That sparked her desire to research lynchings; she found that contrary to what white newspapers said, lynchings weren’t prompted by the rapes of white women. They were more commonly a response to public drunkenness, economic competition with whites, and displaying attitudes and behavior that whites perceived as uppity. Also, Wells found, lynchings were more common in years of financial hardship, when cotton was less profitable. White newspaper editors were furious at her for her reporting. One wrote, “The fact that a black scoundrel is allowed to live … is a volume of evidence as to the wonderful patience of Southern whites. But we have had enough of it.” In the face of such threats to her life, Wells said, “I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap.” A book about her to share with kids from 8 to 12: Ida B. Wells: Let the Truth Be Told by Walter Dean Myers (the winner of two Newbery Medals and five Coretta Scott King Awards), illustrated by Bonnie Christenson. The book uses lots of quotes from Wells herself, and the watercolor illustrations are powerful.

• Ida B. Wells: Let the Truth Be Told Paperback – January 27, 2015 by Walter Dean Myers  (Author), Bonnie Christensen  (Illustrator), Amistad

2. John Lewis (1940-) is a legend, the last living keynote speaker at the 1963 March on Washington. He grew up in rural Alabama, met Martin Luther King Jr., became involved in student activism, and was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington. In 1965, at 25, he was beaten into unconsciousness by white cops and state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the march from Selma to Montgomery. “I gave a little blood on that bridge,” he said. “I thought I saw death.” But as white Americans watched police gassing and smashing the skulls of nonviolent protestors, the arc of history began to bend toward justice. You can talk to kids about how Lewis is still fighting today—he represents Georgia in the House of Representatives, and last year he led a sit-in on the House floor after Sen. Chris Murphy spearheaded a 15-hour filibuster in favor of common-sense gun control. Currently Lewis is in the vanguard of the fight against the confirmation of Jeff Sessions—who has been charged with racism for much of his career—as attorney general. In a piece last year for MLK Day, I mentioned the first volume of March, the comic book trilogy Lewis co-authored (along with Andrew Aydin and Eisner Award-winning graphic novelist Nate Powell); now all three books are out, and they’re spectacular … as well as older-kid-friendly. (I’d say they’re good for kids 11 and up.) You can buy them individually or in a slipcased collection. The comics offer nuance, showing that not all the participants in history agreed with each other about strategy or the use of violence in response to violence. Nuance is good. Especially now.

• March (Trilogy Slipcase Set) Paperback – September 6, 2016 by John Lewis  (Author), Andrew Aydin  (Author), Nate Powell  (Artist),Top Shelf Productions

3. Claudette Colvin (1939-) was a 15-year-old girl in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white passenger … nine months before Rosa Parks did the same thing. But civil-rights leaders felt that Colvin, a kid who’d been in trouble in school and had been called “mouthy” and “emotional,” wasn’t a good face for the movement. Rosa Parks, a respectable older married lady, was better. Colvin wound up with a police record (after being physically yanked off the bus, manhandled, handcuffed, and jailed). To make matters worse, she soon got pregnant by an older man and was expelled from school. She never got the support she should have from grown civil-rights leaders. Still, she eventually testified in the case that ended segregated buses. Philip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice is a spectacularly reported book (Hoose pursued Colvin, who had an unlisted phone number and was living in obscurity, for four years before she agreed to tell her story) that won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2009 and a Newbery Honor in 2010. Teenagers—who often want to stand up to injustice but feel that adults don’t have their backs—will relate.  

• Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice Paperback – December 21, 2010 by Phillip Hoose (Author), Square Fish

4. Ruby Bridges (1954-) was the first black child to desegregate the New Orleans public schools. The very youngest children will understand how scary this must have been for a 6-year-old, and how brave she was. Her book, Through My Eyes will resonate with kids 7 and up, and beginning readers (5 and up) will appreciate The Story of Ruby Bridges by Robert Coles, with gentle watercolor illustrations by George Ford. Because white parents wouldn’t let their kids learn with Ruby, she had one-on-one lessons with a young teacher. Parents can talk about why most schools (including their own kids,’ probably) are still so segregated, and what Americans can do to change that.

• Through My Eyes Hardcover – September 1, 1999 by Ruby Bridges  (Author), Margo Lundell (Compiler, Editor), Scholastic Press,
• The Story Of Ruby Bridges: Special Anniversary Edition Paperback – September 1, 2010 by Robert Coles  (Author), George Ford (Illustrator), Scholastic Press

5. Ella Baker (1903-1986) was like many women: an active player behind the scenes of history who never got the credit she deserved. She grew up in North Carolina and moved to New York City to work in social justice. She knew that economic parity was essential for equality, and once said, “People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job.” In the 1940s she worked for the NAACP, and in the 1950s she moved to Atlanta to help King establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She was most interested in working with young activists, and was one of the people who helped organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which helped create Freedom Summer. She said of herself: “You didn’t see me on television; you didn’t see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come.” That perspective was how she got the nickname “Fundi,” a Swahili word for someone who teaches a craft to the next generation. Alas, another reason she was perhaps less publicly lauded than she should have been was that the civil-rights movement was largely modeled on the black church, with its male leadership and female congregants. (In fact, no woman was a featured speaker at the March on Washington—Gloria Richardson, a Maryland activist, was told she’d get to give a two-minute speech but her chair was taken offstage and her microphone was whisked away when she got to the podium; even Rosa Parks and Lena Horne were escorted offstage before Martin Luther King Jr. spoke.) Today, New York City has a well-regarded, diverse, progressive public school named after her, but if there’s a great children’s book about her, I can’t find it! Someone write one!

• Freedom Cannot Rest: Ella Baker and the Civil Rights Movement (Portraits of Black Americans) Library Binding – September 12, 2005,Morgan Reynolds Publishing 
• Ella Baker: A Leader Behind the Scenes (The History of the Civil Rights Movement)Sep 1990 by Shyrlee Dallard,Paperback, Silver Burdett,
• Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Gender and American Culture) New edition Edition by Barbara Ransby  (Author),The University of North Carolina Press

6. Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) was born on a Mississippi plantation, the last of 20 children of a poor sharecropper. In 1961, when she was in the hospital to have a small tumor removed, she was sterilized without her knowledge or consent. Doctors could legally do that to poor black women then. (The procedure was colloquially known as a “Mississippi appendectomy.”) In 1962, after learning that she had the right to vote, she went to try to register, along with a small group of her neighbors. After being made to jump through hoops, they were turned away. On the way home, the group’s bus was pulled over by police for being “the wrong color.” The passengers were terrified…until Hamer began to sing. She sang hymns like “This Little Light of Mine,” and civil-rights songs, and she made her fellow activists feel better. But upon her return to the plantation where she lived and worked as a bookkeeper, she was fired and kicked out of her house. Still, she kept up her activism, despite being brutally beaten, assaulted, and threatened. In 1964, she spoke to the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention, asking, “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings?” Hamer’s story is showcased in the poetic, lyrical Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, a 2016 Caldecott Honor Book (the publisher recommends it for kids 9-12) by Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated with potent multimedia collages by Ekua Holmes. You might also sing “This Little Light of Mine” with kids, and talk about the song’s association with Hamer.

• Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer: The Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement (Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Honor (Awards)) Hardcover – August 4, 2015,by Carole Boston Weatherford  (Author), Ekua Holmes (Illustrator,Candlewick
• For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Women in American History)May 25, 2000 by Chana Kai Lee, University of Illinois Press,
• Fannie Lou Hamer: Fighting for the Right to Vote (African-American Biographies (Enslow)) Hardcover – October, 2002 by Laura Baskes Litwin ,Enslow Publisher

7. Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award an American citizen can attain, in 2013. Here’s what President Obama’s citation said: “Bayard Rustin was an unyielding activist for civil rights, dignity, and equality for all. An adviser to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he promoted nonviolent resistance, participated in one of the first Freedom Rides, organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and fought tirelessly for marginalized communities at home and abroad. As an openly gay African-American, Mr. Rustin stood at the intersection of several of the fights for equal rights.” During his lifetime, Rustin didn’t get the honor he was due, probably because he was gay. (He was also a former Communist, and in the late ’60s, he became more of a hawk, aligning with the American right’s perspective on Israel. Oh, and he was also a big supporter of imperiled and oppressed Soviet Jewry. Look, I found a Jewish connection in this story after all!) There’s a 2007 children’s book about him that I haven’t read: We Are One: The Story of Bayard Rustin by Larry Dane Brinmer, aimed at reader age 9-11. Booklist’s review noted that Rustin’s gay identity is relegated to a small mention in the afterword, so hey, someone else please tell Rustin’s story in all its complexity. Kids can handle it.

• Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard RustinMar 24, 2015,by Devon W. Carbado and Don Weise,Paperback, Cleis Press
• Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard RustinOct 1, 2004,by John D'Emilio,Paperback, University of Chicago Press,
• We Are One: The Story of Bayard Rustin Hardcover – October 1, 2007 by Larry Dane Brimner  Calkins Creek
• Bayard Rustin: Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movement Hardcover – February 2, 1997by Jim Haskins (Author),Disney-Hyperion