On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education which declared segregated schools unconstitutional. Three years later, the schools of Little Rock, Arkansas, were still segregated. A plan for gradual integration generated an intensely hostile response from Little Rock’s staunch segregationists. Nevertheless, nine courageous African American students were selected to challenge the status quo and integrate the city’s Central High School.  Clinging stubbornly to Jim Crow tradition, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to block the entrance of the nine black students into the school, and, in response, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and charged the troops with protecting the lives of the nine and enforcing the Supreme Court’s ruling. Every school day that year, the Little Rock Nine braved angry mobs spewing hostilities, racial epithets, and threats to their lives simply for seeking the right to enter their school. This book, Warriors Don’t Cry: The Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High, tells the story of Melba Pattilllo Beals, one of those valiant nine students. When you read this compelling account, you wonder how any kid could have that much fortitude. This book is a great read for teachers, students, and history buffs. You can acquire Warriors Don’t Cry from amazon.

Sandra Adickes was an energetic and idealistic thirty-year-old New York City schoolteacher in 1964, the year she ventured south into Mississippi to teach in a Freedom School. The goal of the summer program was to empower the black community to register to vote and to help bridge some of the gap of educational neglect that had long been a tradition in that Jim Crow state. Both blacks and whites realized that only through education and participation in the democratic process could African Americans hope to improve their lot.

The enterprise was not without danger. On the first day of Freedom Summer, three workers involved in the program disappeared while investigating the firebombing of the church facility designated for their voter recruitment activities. Six weeks later, as Sandra Adickes conducted her classes in Hattiesburg, the badly beaten and bullet-ridden bodies of the three missing men were discovered buried in an earthen dam in nearby Neshoba County.

At summer’s end, Sandra’s fearless students decided to integrate the Hattiesburg Public Library in what became, in effect, a graduation trip with an emphasis on civic reform. Sandra was arrested in the effort. Read her riveting story, and what became of her courageous students, in her book Legacy of a Freedom School. You can also find a chapter about this remarkable teacher in Chalkboard Champions.