The Teachers March!: How Selma’s Teachers Changed History
by Sandra Neil Wallace and Rich Wallace; illus. by Charly Palmer
Primary, Intermediate    Calkins/Boyds Mills & Kane    48 pp.    g
9/20    978-1-62979-452-5    $18.99
e-book ed.  978-1-63592-453-4    $11.99

The 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery is well known, especially with the death in 2020 of leader John Lewis, which brought renewed attention to the historic event. Less known is the teachers’ march, which happened six weeks before as part of the larger voting rights struggle in Selma. This book dramatizes how the teachers planned their protest, risking imprisonment and violence, leaving the classroom and taking to the streets, holding “their toothbrushes in the air, ready to go to jail for freedom.” The lively text incorporates lots of dialogue (sources indicated in the back matter), making for dramatic reading, and in particular weaving in the narrative of fifteen-year-old Joyce Parrish and her mother. But the illustrations are the star here, with Palmer’s beautifully lit acrylic-on-board paintings that are at times impressionistic or, as he writes in the illustrator’s note, “abstract and primal.” He effectively plays with perspective — an upward view of Brown Chapel, following the spires to the sky, and a double-page spread showing legs and feet with polished shoes marching down the street. The selected bibliography mainly includes adult books, but many excellent books for young people are available, including Partridge’s Marching for Freedom (rev. 11/09), Lewis’s March: Book Three (rev. 9/16), and Freedman’s Because They Marched (rev. 9/14). A strong addition to the literature on a pivotal event in civil rights history.

From the March/April 2021 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.