The Girl from the Tar Paper School by Teri Kanefield celebrates the efforts of Barbara Johns in helping to desegregating public schools. Before the Little Rock Nine, before Rosa Parks, before Martin Luther King, Jr. and his March on Washington, there was Barbara Rose Johns, a student at all-black R.R. Moton High School in Farmville, Prince Edward County, Virginia, used nonviolent civil disobedience to draw attention to her cause. In 1951, witnessing the unfair conditions in her racially segregated high school, Barbara Johns led a walkout--the first public protest of its kind demanding racial equality in the U.S.--jumpstarting the American civil rights movement. Ridiculed by the white superintendent and school board, local newspapers, and others, and even after a cross was burned on the school grounds, Barbara and her classmates held firm and did not give up. Her school's case went all the way to the Supreme Court and helped end segregation as part of Brown v. Board of Education.
Awards and Honors
Fiction
Awards and Honors
- 2015 Jane Addams Children's Book Award
Fiction
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- Warriors Don't Cry: A searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High School by Melba Beals (921/Beals)