Miles to Go for Freedom: Segregation & Civil Rights in the Jim Crow Years (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Miles to Go for Freedom: Segregation & Civil Rights in the Jim Crow Years Elizabeth Bush Osborne, Linda Barrett . Miles to Go for Freedom: Segregation & Civil Rights in the Jim Crow Years. Abrams, 2012. 118p. illus. with photographs ISBN 978-1-4197-0020-0 $27.95 R Gr. 5-8. Tight, consistent focus, pristine organization, and eminently browsable illustrations make this middle-school offering a strong recommendation. As a follow-up companion to Osborne's title on Reconstruction, Traveling the Freedom Road, Miles to Go concentrates on the period between the Plessy v. Ferguson decision establishing the legality of separate but equal accommodations, through the 1954 Brown v. Board decision, which found separate accommodations to be inherently unequal. After introductory discussion of the rapid upward rise of many freedmen after the Civil War, which Osborne cites as an important cause of white backlash against African Americans as Reconstruction drew to an end, she looks at the Jim Crow laws and customs that became imbedded in the South, in the North, and within federal programs and agencies. The litany of extreme segregation measures will no doubt be astonishing to many readers: separate paycheck windows in South Carolina, separate phone booths in Oklahoma, separate sections in a pet cemetery in Washington, DC. Osborne also attends to the measures of resistance and adaptation that helped African Americans retain their dignity as they struggled for their civil rights: from the black universities, mutual-aid societies, and Green Book travel guides, to the Harlem Renaissance and black nationalist movements. Complete with a timeline, bibliography with children's books noted, thorough source notes, and an index, this will be a fine resource for children beginning research on this era. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois