As the writer inside slowly grows, she listens to family stories and fills her days and evenings as a Jehovah’s Witness, activities that continue after a move to Brooklyn to reunite with her mother. Moving south to live with her maternal grandmother, she is in a world of sweet peas and collards, getting her hair straightened and avoiding segregated stores with her grandmother. Writing in free verse, Woodson starts with her 1963 birth in Ohio during the civil rights movement, when America is “a country caught / / between Black and White.” But while evoking names such as Malcolm, Martin, James, Rosa and Ruby, her story is also one of family: her father’s people in Ohio and her mother’s people in South Carolina. 8-12)Ī multiaward–winning author recalls her childhood and the joy of becoming a writer. Krull and Morales introduce a long-neglected figure from recent history to a new audience in an informative, eye-catching manner. The overall look of the work is reminiscent of a Diego Rivera mural. Morales uses bright acrylic colors that flow across the pages, mirroring the constant movement in Chavez’s life. She presents additional events in his life and the circumstances of his death in an author’s note. She portrays Chavez as a quiet, patient, strong-willed man who believed implicitly in his “causa” and worked tirelessly for his people. Krull does not offer a birth-to-death biography, instead focusing on the influences of his early years, the organization of the National Farm Workers Association, and the first contract with the grape growers.

He fought ceaselessly for the rights of migrant farm workers to have a decent living conditions and a living wage. Cesar Chavez, like his heroes Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, believed in non-violent change.

Harvesting hope by kathleen krull