Singing for Dr. King by Angela Shelf Medearis, illustrated by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu.
Produced for Scholastic by Color-Bridge Books, Brooklyn, NY, 2004.
Picture book non-fiction, 32 pages (including back matter).
Lexile: 660L (for some reason, the illustrator is listed as the author)
AR Level: 3.8 (worth 0.5 points)
NOTE: Part of the Just For You series, level 3. This book is non-fiction.
This book is about Sheyann Webb and her friend Rachel West, two third graders who marched in Selma with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These nine year olds also sang for Dr. King and attended civil rights meetings, defying and later inspiring their parents and teachers by doing so.
This book instantly stood out from the pile of books because anything about Dr. King is hugely popular in my house. Then when I opened the book and read the first page, I knew it was non-fiction partly by the way in which the characters were introduced. Here is the opening:
“In 1965, Sheyann Webb was in the third grade in Selma, Alabama. She was smaller than most third graders, including her best friend, Rachel West. // Rachel was nine. She lived with her family in the apartment next door to Sheyann’s.” p. 5
Fiction books for young children simply don’t open that way, giving the full names, ages, and year on the opening page. It happened that I had just been reading A Child Shall Lead Them, so I quickly recognized the names and scenarios from that book. However, a reader who was not already familiar with these events could easily have mistaken this book for fiction that was written oddly.
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