Recommending Some Books To Celebrate Dr. King's Birthday

Story Painter: The Life of Jacob Lawrence (Hardcover)
by John Duggleby

This book was one I was able to get in years prior to NCLB take-over motifs,
as an elementary teacher in CA in an Under-Performing school now it seems ages ago but it was just 5 years. I selected it when my Principal, Helen Cosgrove who came in using rich literature and connecting school to key literature, gave us the money and sent us shopping for books for our room. So I bought this and Lawrence's Harriet Tubman story and his Aesop's Fables which I'm putting below(the most beautiful version ever rendered of Aesop) along with Ringgold and a slew of Langston Hughes. And this was just a wonderful biography to get. I really recommend it to third grade and above.

It tells of the life of an inspirational artist. Everytime I share this with children or use it, as I will this spring in After School arts programming, I recall just how much of a genius he was. Childen respond and love the art of his times, love Stuart Davis work and the life that one sees within the pictorial space -the images scream American life through the 20th century and elevate us into a compositional place of such beauty and truth, it doesn't get much better than this. Fortunately for children learning a new artist this book is filled with good images and a very readable yet rich life story. No pulling punches but no twisty-turny story. It reads well orally. I had the good fortune of seeing Lawrence work on exhibit years ago, seeing things contained here. I still regret being so poor in those years I did not buy the catalog...it was that or dinner and I made a poor choice.

As I work with children I have to share something. Friday five of my powerhouses were in my room early, girls I taught now in the 4th grade, some of the most powerful young ladies ever, they come into my 1st grade program every AM to help. One was bemoaning no words in her class this year on Dr. King. "Not a peep", prior to the holiday she says, while looking through this very book from my African American Wonderful You Experience Box, and then she added, "And you know what, I'm African American and I resent not learning about my people." And then she turned to me and said, "When I had you last year I was a somebody."

All I can say is this book belongs in the hands of chldren. They are somebody and they need to learn about their artistic traditions...and they certainly need to find that art is made by those with something to say to them. This book is truly a great one.

Harriet and the Promised Land (Paperback)
by Jacob Lawrence

My daughter Sylvia once noted to me this was her favorite book when we refound it unboxing my things from storage. I worked for two years up in the San Diego Mountains on a reservation servicing school three years ago and we were coming back to Hueneme with books to re-orient and organize. She did a report on Tubman and indeed that day I listened to her tell the story of this remarkable figure. Hathaway several times had an assembly for the children with an actress portraying Tubman and I believe this was how my daughter connected to choose her for further study. Lawrence a premier artist shows in these pages why his composition, color, ability to convey the power of her story is best left to his genius. Wow. Every child should experience this work.

Aesop's Fables (Hardcover)
by Jacob Lawrence

Not only the fables but the best black and white illustrations by Jacob Lawrence. Every spring I stage my puppets Aesop Theater and use this text to teach the fable an assign a group to re-write and make Fandango-esque puppets to act it out. It's fun and we talk of moral and lesson. Sufi tales are a good next step when your class connects.

The Dream Keeper and Other Poems (Paperback)
by Langston Hughes

I think this collection is among those I consider a child's "right" , it is a beautiful collection to share with an awareness of the importance of celebrating Hughes and his voice for America.

The First Book of Jazz (Dark Tower Series) (Paperback)
by Langston Hughes, Cliff Roberts (Illustrator)

When I introduce Jazz, and of course I do this throughout my year this is a book I return to. Hughes chronicaled Jazz, loved and supported it, so it's a place to take students.


Now for ADULT READERS I'd like to recommend this book:
I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (American Century Series) (Paperback)
by Langston Hughes
I hate to do it a disservice and I'm inadequate to the task, and yet the book is among my most favorite ever read. I'm surprised that it isn't known by many more , this volume for me one of the most amazing secrets ever kept. It is an autobiographical journey, a tale from Hughes life; it serves to create inner spaces, viseral visual ones, to consider Hughes and to look upon his perspectives. All I can conclude is something I find tonight as I type, it's daunting to write to the book and do it any real justice. It is worth purchasing for anyone, especially for someone who loves to read of the times of our lives in the 20th century..

Hughes opens the book, which covers time from 1931 to 1938 as a piece to carry on from The Big Sea his first autobiographical work. As I read them out of order I cannot say I am sorry this was my first. It stays solidly in my head. He tells of traveling in a car on a reading tour in the South and the west. On opening the tale of wandering we are where he was reading his work in small often rural settings and revealing black community and his meager circumstances as he was essentially becoming the writer. He becomes involved in a film project and goes to the Soviet Union which is such an amazing thing to read....it is a project that doesn't work out and he stays and continues traveling. Just to know more about this time in history from his perspective in areas we could not know enough about is worth the book....and it is these observations and how he finally returns to the US, I found the most compelling of the narrative. I felt I was wandering, wandering free of some of the limitations of American political shaping, looking at the Soviets as they took on the start of building their country, listening to Hughes describe the adventure, what he sees. Hughes is not given to excessive internal dialog, he is almost remarkably absent of this-which of course is a vehicle he creates-he relates what he sees and it has a kind of universal journey construction...almost ...so perfectly of those times, so completely crafted that I lose my "self" in the pages...I am a train, or a days delicious seafood with boiled bananas and Spanish rice learning to rumba. I am ill equipped to summarize but Hughes is a genius, creating a kind of tableau that for me stands as visually there as the great human artists of these times, this he does so easily. And I feel this trip across Russia as an experience. I think what moves me is that Hughes recounts human interaction, the simplicity, the everyday as it might be felt by myself or was felt by himself. I've spent most all of my life living in teaching in ordinary everyday, poorer worlds by choice learning of the dignity and indignity, suffering, laughing, discovering others, in the valid and real lives of ordinary people. It makes me anecdotal and determined to honor lives. And I note in the book foreword him stating, "I've now cut out all the impersonal stuff down to a running narrative with me in the middle of every page...the kind of intense condensation that, of course, keeps an autobiography from being entirely true, in that nobody's life is pure essence without pulp, waste matter , and rind-which art, of course, throws in the trash can." Ah always genius.

Because I had read a great deal of these times interested in Lillian Hellman and many other figures, his recounting his story with Arthur Koestler was so interesting. Again threaded through this personal anecdote was so much good information and his perspective. He talks of Haiti and I've given these pages many times to friends connected to this country, of Cuba, China and Japan ending in Carmel in an area I lived with close life there for 9 years, which was remarkable for me as I first encountered the book reading it sitting in a bookshop in Carmel and wandering the streets reading and thinking and enjoying thoughts of his times there. These were times of Communism, Marxism, the Scottsboro Boys, and only a bit becomes part of the book though I was discerning much because I did know of the times from my interests, reading and from reading more to understand his times.

I have stated in writing I've done of my teaching life that Hughes lived writing of black America, of politics, of difficult constructs, from his background, then his education, from his broadening views, from traveling, meeting such a wide spectrum, he was writing of the lives of the poor, living the lives, but also a writer, thinker, a man apart. I sense his frustration as much as I can from my inadequacies in trying to speak to these issues of fairness, of poverty, of the travesty of greed, of human lives affected by prejudice and economic and political failure. I write anecdotally of teaching in South Central, in migrant areas trying to reach out and tell the stories of kids hoping those that read can draw conclusions and understand better their real realities. I sense Hughes left to his readers a responsibility to use his journey, his insights, to think about how to make America a fairer place. How to work to create a just world. And to understand how broad a world it is.

I read in the forward about the books reception as "shallow". And I wonder....as I too wander. There is an elegant powerful truth that Hughes carries, a silent power in a poets voice spoken in the face of revealing things no one can hear or will hear. There is a basic return to the voyage as meaning itself, a telling of a life, a looking at life as a movement forward. I just cannot find that shallow. I find Hughes as ever one of the touchstones of my life.

And Finally the best book ever written.....on LOVE, by a genius

Strength to Love (Paperback)
by Martin Luther, Jr. King

In 1983 I entered teaching in West Virginia and recieved this book as a present from one of my teachers. In two years I moved to South Central to teach at 93rd Street School then into the Salinas valley and now in Oxnard. It has proved itself to be of great use to a teacher. I say this by way of explaining that as an elementary teacher, one working with a variety of settings, children, cultures, families, many kinds of educational issues I've come to believe that the book King wrote, this book, is a true helpmate to anyone trying to deal with inequity and injustice.

Teaching is an act that requires a very deep understanding of who you are, your strengths, purpose, and this volume supports the evolution of your social conscious. For me the text allowed me to solidify who I am as a teacher and why I do what I do.

One example might be the difficult job it is to teach in schools under assault for doing poorly, seemingly being deconstructed by politics without enough valid insight into ways to guide real improvement and coming up against ignorance in many forms-including the disparity in economic means permitted in America. It's not easy to teach children with vast dental decay, families out of work and watch a nation laud this as positive "welfare reform" when stranding these children in worse fixes. Sometimes I find it infinitely difficult to love my neighbor,well, my voucher loving neighbor, or even find commonality with those in million dollar homes feeling botox might make them both more appealing and more interesting.

The child as a commodity construct which is now prevelent in educational dialog, among many other kinds of views, I find difficult to separate from the individuals telling me( in often rude and hurtful ways) that my efforts educationally are a failure and that schools don't work. In my world it's a constant Lou Dobbs immigration rant that somehow is hiding vaguely words that really seem to be saying something else. I tire of watching the reality of racism, classism acted out in the lives of children-and this is a fatigue that easily becomes anger-King speaks to this.... I find myself lacking the strength to love positions taken by those that really don't know what they are talking about, and don't care other than for personal advantaging anyway....

There is something truely fascinating about having a book that describes both your situation and your feelings as well as frames this into affective forward action-King can give you individual empowerment quite readily.And he can help you address your mindset. And that in this world of mine is a beautiful thing. I frame my work with principles that are able to outweigh the personal likes and dislikes levels...so I bring to school dealings my thoughts that I am there to help Anthony be the best Anthony he can be...not to condemn Anthony to my judgement about him.

Let us say then King's is an active lexicon and this volume is insightful for someone wishing to everyday face injustice and difficulty with positive reaction and action. For me as a person I find the book more helpful than any I ever had.

If anyone underestimates MLK's true intellectual ability, or simply wants to revisit the kind of person he was, a read of this book should serve to illustrate that America has had a prophet in my lifetime. Truely this should be required reading in high school and college programs for the young persons of our country to become acquainted with and use in working on social issues.