Download or read book A Wreath for Emmett Till written by Marilyn Nelson and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2009-01-12 with total page 49 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Coretta Scott King and Printz honor book now in paperback. A Wreath for Emmett Till is "A moving elegy," says The Bulletin. In 1955 people all over the United States knew that Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. The brutality of his murder, the open-casket funeral held by his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, and the acquittal of the men tried for the crime drew wide media attention. In a profound and chilling poem, award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson reminds us of the boy whose fate helped spark the civil rights movement.
Download or read book How I Discovered Poetry written by Marilyn Nelson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful and thought-provoking Civil Rights era memoir from one of America’s most celebrated poets. Looking back on her childhood in the 1950s, Newbery Honor winner and National Book Award finalist Marilyn Nelson tells the story of her development as an artist and young woman through fifty eye-opening poems. Readers are given an intimate portrait of her growing self-awareness and artistic inspiration along with a larger view of the world around her: racial tensions, the Cold War era, and the first stirrings of the feminist movement. A first-person account of African-American history, this is a book to study, discuss, and treasure.
Download or read book Getting Away with Murder written by Chris Crowe and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revised and updated with new information, this Jane Adams award winner is an in-depth examination of the Emmett Till murder case, a catalyst of the Civil Rights Movement. The kidnapping and violent murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 was and is a uniquely American tragedy. Till, a black teenager from Chicago, was visiting family in a small town in Mississippi, when he allegedly whistled at a white woman. Three days later, his brutally beaten body was found floating in the Tallahatchie River. In clear, vivid detail Chris Crowe investigates the before-and-aftermath of Till's murder, as well as the dramatic trial and speedy acquittal of his white murderers, situating both in the context of the nascent Civil Rights Movement. Newly reissued with a new chapter of additional material--including recently uncovered details about Till's accuser's testimony--this book grants eye-opening insight to the legacy of Emmett Till.
Download or read book Fortune s Bones written by Marilyn Nelson and published by Boyds Mills Press. This book was released on 2016-08-01 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Coretta Scott King Book Award For young readers comes a poetic commemoration of the life of an 18th-century slave, from a past poet laureate and three-time National Book Award finalist For over 200 years, the Mattatuck Museum in Connecticut has housed a mysterious skeleton. In 1996, community members decided to find out what they could about it. Historians discovered that the bones were those of an enslaved man named Fortune, who was owned by a local doctor. After Fortune’s death, the doctor rendered the bones. Further research revealed that Fortune had married, had fathered four children, and had been baptized later in life. His bones suggest that after a life of arduous labor, he died in 1798 at about the age of 60. The Manumission Requiem is Marilyn Nelson’s poetic commemoration of Fortune’s life. Detailed notes and archival photographs enhance the reader’s appreciation of the poem.
Download or read book American Ace written by Marilyn Nelson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This riveting novel in verse, perfect for fans of Jacqueline Woodson and Toni Morrison, explores American history and race through the eyes of a teenage boy embracing his newfound identity Connor’s grandmother leaves his dad a letter when she dies, and the letter’s confession shakes their tight-knit Italian-American family: The man who raised Dad is not his birth father. But the only clues to this birth father’s identity are a class ring and a pair of pilot’s wings. And so Connor takes it upon himself to investigate—a pursuit that becomes even more pressing when Dad is hospitalized after a stroke. What Connor discovers will lead him and his father to a new, richer understanding of race, identity, and each other.
Download or read book Magnificat written by Marilyn Nelson and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poems with a religious theme, the approach ranging from devotional to skeptical. In Sayings of the Desert Fathers, which is about a holy fool, she writes: "Big deal, / said Abba Jacob. / Miracles happen all the time. / We're here, / aren't we?"
Download or read book The Murder of Emmett Till written by Henrietta Toth and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In August 1955, Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old African American teenager on vacation. He had traveled to visit relatives in rural Mississippi. He would return home to Chicago to be buried. Emmett Till was murdered by two white men, making him a victim of racial violence that galvanized the unfolding civil rights movement. This account details the circumstances of his abduction, murder, and funeral, plus the subsequent trial. Readers will learn how his legacy still resonates today and how emerging information sheds a different light on what really happened to him.
Download or read book The Homeplace written by Marilyn Nelson and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1990-10-01 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 1991 National Book Award In The Homeplace, the stories of a family become the history of a people as Marilyn Nelson Waniek sketches the lives descended from her great-great-grandmother Diverne. The poet’s mother, Johnnie Mitchell Nelson, inspired this volume when she bequeathed to Waniek from her deathbed the tales that had shaped her life. The first section of the book presents those stories transformed into graceful, humorous, and deeply touching poems. In the book’s second section Waniek honors her late father, Melvin Nelson, and tells the story of his “family”: the fabled group of black World War II aviators known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Using the language and perspective of her father and his comrades, Waniek explores through a few of their individual stories the hardships and achievements of the thousand black flyers trained at Tuskegee Institute. Throughout The Homeplace, the reader is involved in a series of sharply portrayed lives. By telling a continuous story in a mix of free verse and traditional forms, Waniek gives her work pace and intensity. She handles the villanelle, the sonnet, and the popular ballad with equal skill and gusto. “I just knew we were going to live some history,” Johnnie Nelson said at the end of her life. Her daughter has produced an eloquent homage to that history, celebrating the survival of Afro-American pride.
Download or read book Emmett Till written by Katina Rankin and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-06-07 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Triumph Can Come From Tragedy: Teaching Children a Lesson in Social Justice" Emmett Till: "Sometimes Good Can Come Out of a Bad Situation" is an immersive, thought-provoking story about a family passing on the legacy of the civil rights movement by learning about a 14-year-old boy who was murdered for whistling at a woman. The author gently but boldly diverges a story from Mississippi's once racially, hatred-filled atmosphere to create her first in a series of children's civil rights books set in the Magnolia State. Long-time devotees of the author's playful children's book that dispels rumors and misnomers about Mississippi: "Up North, Down South: City Folk Meet Country Folk" and new fans of this rip-roaring brand of children's story: Emmett Till: "Sometimes Good Can Come Out of a Bad Situation" - real, raw, yet hopeful and encouraging - join together in praise as this proven writer breaks into a new space. Emmett Till: "Sometimes Good Can Come Out of a Bad Situation" opens in a home in rural Mississippi with Renee King, a curious, young 5th grade girl, with a book in her hand asking her mother, Tonya, "Mommy, what's wrong with his face?" Careful not to stir up racial tension, Tonya calls the entire family into the living room to have a teachable moment of morality, social equality and optimism. The idea for Emmett Till: "Sometimes Good Can Come Out of a Bad Situation" came as Rankin covered a number of civil rights stories and couldn't shake the historical relevance in today's political climate. The first line of the book: "Mommy, what's wrong his face?," sat in the back of Rankin's mind for nearly a year before a trip back home to Mississippi gave her the perfect setting for telling the story in an age-appropriate manner for middle school students. In the book, the back dirt roads and the loving atmosphere of her mother's home provides the backdrop for a disturbing tale of abduction and deception, but leaves you with a sense of hope and that one day justice would be attainable. Select Praise for Emmett Till: "Sometimes Good Can Come Out of a Bad Situation" "Using her journalistic brilliance, Katina Rankin has created a book that can be used in various ways: in curriculum, for parents, for conflict resolution or for any opportunity to create a dialogue. With the aid of this book, children can express their feelings about race relations in their communities; and they can identify and address their fears about the climate of racism in America today." -Airickca Gordon-Taylor, Till Family "Katina Rankin eloquently introduces a whole new generation to Emmett Till, and reminds us that in order to move forward we must be honest with our past. I highly recommend this book to anyone trying to help young people understand the roots of the Civil Rights Movement struggle." -Patrick Weems, Director of Till Interpretive Center
Download or read book Emmett Till in Different States written by Philip C. Kolin and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems in Emmett Till in Different States span more than 7 decades of events in Emmett Till's legacy from the 1940s to the present. In them Philip Kolin shows how Emmett Till's importance has expanded from being a Civil Rights martyr to becoming a choric, heroic commentator on the tragedies of Civil Rights injustices (e.g. Medgar Evers's murder, the Freedom Riders, the murders of Chicago's children, Trayvon Martin), and a voice of conscience for America to hear and heed. The title of this collection points to the multiple ways we can see Emmett Till through time and space (e.g. geographic, historical, psychological, and theological.) Kolin weaves other voices throughout the poems in this collection, most notably Mamie Till, Gospel great Mahalia Jackson who bought Till's gravestone, an old black woman (Aunt Aretha) who meets Till in the Delta, Till's fictionalized brothers (other black men who have been slain and their bodies left to rot), his fictionalized sister based upon the Shulamite woman in the Song of Songs, the Chicago River, and even Carolyn Bryant, the white woman whom Till was said to have offended. These voices-and Till's as well-emerge from a variety of traditions-Biblical, the blues, classical mythology, spirituals. According to Natasha Trethewey, the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States, "In the history of a nation still on the long journey toward full realization of its creed, there are stories that need to be told again and again. The murder of Emmett Till is one such story; it belongs to all of us and should be sung by many different voices. In Emmett Till in Different States, Philip Kolin adds his voice--a necessary retelling so that we might be transformed by the listening."--Philip C. Kolin "Emmett Till in Different States"
Download or read book Mama s Promises written by Marilyn Nelson and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1985-09-01 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Waniek is a poet of intelligence, passion, and gentleness with a fine sense of the comic and unfailing judgment about what constitutes a poetic line. She creates a rich mixture of impressions about the speaker of these poems as a woman who is at the same time in her mid-twenties and her mid-fifties, who is black and white and red, who is both trapped by and freed by motherhood.” —Miller Williams Marilyn Nelson Waniek writes with great wisdom and compassion. Grounded but never earthbound, her poems speak honestly and eloquently about giving birth, nurturing life, and facing death; they inhabit the present, fully aware of their responsibilities to the past and the future. Waniek leaves us with the affecting strength and assurance of lasting things, as in the poem “Mama’s Promise.” But the dangerous highway curves through blue evenings when I hold his yielding hand and snip his minuscule nails with my vicious-looking scissors. I carry him around like an egg in a spoon, and I remember a porcelain fawn, a best friend’s trust, my broken faith in myself. It’s not my grace that keeps me erect as the sidewalk clatters downhill under my rollerskate wheels. Then I think of Mama, her bountiful breasts. When I was a child, I really swear, Mama’s kisses could heal. I remember her promise, and whisper it over my sweet son’s sleep: When you float to the bottom, child, like a mote down a sunbeam, you’ll see me from a trillion miles away: my eyes looking upon you, my arms outstretched for you like night. From “Mama’s Promise” published in Mama’s Promises by Marilyn Nelson. Copyright © 1985 by Marilyn Nelson Waniek. All rights reserved.
Download or read book Faster Than Light written by Marilyn Nelson and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conjuring numerous voices and characters across oceans and centuries, Faster Than Light explores widely disparate experiences through the lens of traditional poetic forms. This volume contains a selection of Marilyn Nelson's new and uncollected poems as well as work from each of her lyric histories of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century African American individuals and communities. Poems include the stories of historical figures like Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy lynched in 1955, and the inhabitants of Seneca Village, an African American community razed in 1857 for the creation of Central Park. "Bivouac in a Storm" tells the story of a group of young soldiers, later known as the Tuskegee Airmen, as they trained near Biloxi, Mississippi, "marching in summer heat / thick as blackstrap molasses, under trees / haunted by whippings." Later pieces range from the poet's travels in Africa, Europe, and Polynesia, to poems written in collaboration with Father Jacques de Foiard Brown, a former Benedictine monk and the subject of Nelson's playful fictional fantasy sequence, "Adventure-Monk!" Both personal and historical, these poems remain grounded in everyday details but reach toward spiritual and moral truths.
Download or read book In the Sea There are Crocodiles written by Fabio Geda and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-08-09 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When ten-year-old Enaiatollah Akbari’s small village in Afghanistan falls prey to Taliban rule in early 2000, his mother shepherds the boy across the border into Pakistan but has to leave him there all alone to fend for himself. Thus begins Enaiat’s remarkable and often punishing five-year ordeal, which takes him through Iran, Turkey, and Greece before he seeks political asylum in Italy at the age of fifteen. Along the way, Enaiat endures the crippling physical and emotional agony of dangerous border crossings, trekking across bitterly cold mountain pathways for days on end or being stuffed into the false bottom of a truck. But not everyone is as resourceful, resilient, or lucky as Enaiat, and there are many heart-wrenching casualties along the way. Based on Enaiat’s close collaboration with Italian novelist Fabio Geda and expertly rendered in English by an award- winning translator, this novel reconstructs the young boy’s memories, perfectly preserving the childlike perspective and rhythms of an intimate oral history. Told with humor and humanity, In the Sea There Are Crocodiles brilliantly captures Enaiat’s moving and engaging voice and lends urgency to an epic story of hope and survival.
Download or read book Remember written by Toni Morrison and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2004 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize winner presents a treasure chest of archival photographs that depict the historical events surrounding school desegregation.
Download or read book The Freedom Business written by Marilyn Nelson and published by Boyds Mills Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of poems by Marilyn Nelson, accompanied by prose by African slave Venture Smith and watercolor painting by Deborah Dancy.
Download or read book If You Want to See a Whale written by Julie Fogliano and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advises the reader about what to do, and not do, in order to successfully spot a whale, such as wrapping up in a not-too-cozy blanket, ignoring the roses, and especially, being patient.
Download or read book Hip Hop Speaks to Children with CD written by Nikki Giovanni and published by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky. This book was released on 2008-10 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 50 poems and an accompanying CD introduce poetry with a beat.