It's the book club for kids.
The book club for kids.
It's the book club for kids.
It's the book club for kids podcast.
Hi, I'm Kitty Felde.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when African-Americans couldn't vote, couldn't even swim in the same swimming pool as white folks.
Who says it has to just be for white folks?
Don't everybody need a pool?
Ma'am say that's just the way it is and I want to know why.
That's our celebrity reader, KNX News anchor, Mark Austin Thomas, reading from Deborah Wiles' tale of freedom's summer called Revolution.
This is the second in a trilogy of books.
Wiles wrote about one of the most turbulent eras in American history.
I had loved living during the 60s, and there was so much I wanted to write about.
We'll also hear from our young readers at Hooray for Books in Alexandria, Virginia.
This was pretty much made for, like a parent or a teacher or an adult to give to a kid to help them learn about that time period.
This is the Book Club for Kids, the show where middle graders talk about books.
We'll tell you how you can be on the show a little later on, but first let's meet our panel of readers.
Hi, my name is Leah.
Hi, my name is Noor.
Hi, my name is Serena, and we're all sixth graders at George Washington Middle School.
The book is called Revolution.
There's actually a lot of different stories within the book, but it's mainly about Sunny.
This book takes place in Greenwood, Mississippi in 1964.
What's going on in 1964 in Mississippi?
The Civil Rights Movement with... segregation and how African-American people wanting to vote.
It's nicknamed Freedom Summer.
And some people from the north are coming in to helping blacks register to vote.
These people are called invaders and at first Sunny is scared by them because she wasn't sure what invaders meant.
We also have two different parts in this book.
We have Sunny and Raymond.
The thing is it's narrated by a bunch of different characters, so it does get hard to keep track of.
Also, I would like to add in that Sunny is white.
So I thought that was interesting that usually these kinds of books are told from the perspective of a black, but this one is about a white girl.
It is sort of interesting that a story about desegregation is told from a white person's point of view.
Did that bother you?
Did that seem odd?
Did it help you tell the story?
Did you wish it was being told from Raymond's point of view more?
I was kind of surprised at first that it was being told from a white person's point of view.
But I also liked how the author kind of intertwined Raymond's point of view as an African-American's point of view, like how each race reacts to each situation.
The stories weren't that different, because then afterwards they will be, so that Sonny and Raymond actually connect at the end.
So they are...
I can't think of the word, but like intertwine.
Because in the beginning, Sunny and her stepbrother, Jillet, were actually in a pool late night.
And then they saw Raymond.
At first, they didn't know his name.
And they call him just the colored boy.
And he was in the pool.
And at the time...
Blacks weren't allowed to be in the pool.
Let's hear a little bit from the book.
That scene where Raymond is discovered swimming in the whites-only public pool and then running away into the night.
Our celebrity reader is Mark Austin Thomas, a news anchor at KNX-CBS Newsradio in Los Angeles.
So I run.
I run like a fox away from a hound dog.
Sweet Lord, save me.
Get me out of here before they catch me.
Don't even stop to breathe.
I was hot, so hot, and now I'll be hotter than the other side of heaven, but I couldn't help it.
I just wanted to see it.
They closed our pool so long ago.
Drain the water, clean out.
And now none of us have a place to go swim except the muddy Yazoo or the snaky Tallahatchie.
And why not that sparkling clean water for me and that biggest Noah's Ark pool?
The pool for white folks.
Who says it has to just be for white folks?
Don't everybody need a pool?
Ma'am say that's just the way it is, and I want to know why.
Twill say we got to go north where the jobs are.
Jimmy say Ray here, he can play ball up north.
Run, Raymond, run.
No time to think.
Watch for cops.
Don't let them see a color boy running ever, especially not at night.
Don't let them catch you, Raymond.
Run.
Run past the cotton bowl where you can't eat the hamburgers because you're colored.
Trip across the railroad tracks and fall face first into the land where your people sleep together, eat together and sing hallelujah in a church together and keep to their own kind.
Except when they cross the tracks to clean the white folks' houses.
Tend to white folks' children, or pick the white folks' cotton, or say yes or no sir, or shine your shoe sir, or go to jail at the courthouse for no good reason.
Run past Fairchild's Grocery where Pap traded greens and sweet tater to Mr Jamie for bail money for Silas.
Run like a fox into the deep, dark night of your people.
Ma'am say, it's just like this, Ray.
Huh, not for me.
Not gonna be just like this for me.
Run.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, I thought that this was incredibly interesting because in school they talked about the law, about the laws, like the law that began segregation, the law that ended segregation, But Sunny didn't know anything about the laws at all.
She was just witnessing them in action.
So I thought that was interesting about how she didn't know why things were happening.
She just knew that they were happening.
Is this a good technique to use to try to tell that larger story, putting fictional characters in the middle of a historic situation?
Does that work for you as readers?
This isn't the kind of book that is all about the characters.
This was pretty much made For, like a parent or a teacher or an adult to give to a kid to help them learn about that time period.
Well, does that make it less fun of a book to read then?
Yes.
No offense to the author, but it's like a history book with extra pizzazz with fictional characters.
I like the part that it's a fictional story, but it's also in an actual time period.
That could easily be happening in a town in Mississippi.
Like if you're an adult and you already know this stuff from school, it kind of won't be interesting.
But the fact that she put in a lot of fictional things but based on a true event made it more interesting.
So for people who actually already know about all this can make sense, can see it more interesting in a fictional part, but still be in non-fiction.
Does this book remind you of another book you've read, kind of which one turning 15 on the road to freedom?
Um, it's about the youngest person who walked on the like the selma march.
It definitely reminds me of that book because it's around the same time period.
This is actually a really unique book to me.
I can't think of anything like it.
I mean, I can think of books for that time period, but this sort of way of describing that time period is unique.
It is actually a pretty unique book, so if you're looking at an interesting book to read, just read it.
It's actually really cool.
Sounds like a good time to meet our author, Deborah Wiles, who's written a lot of books.
Revolution is the second in a trilogy of novels set in the 1960s.
So where did the idea for this trilogy, and did you know it was a trilogy when you started?
Yes.
I had the idea to write about the 60s for young people, for all people really, all ages.
But I had...
Loved living during the 60s, and there was so much I wanted to write about for young people.
And I had written this Aurora County trilogy with Ruby Lavender and Each Little Bird That Sings and All Stars.
And that takes place ostensibly in the 60s, but they're timeless.
There's no actual real time period.
So I thought, well, I'm going to write about this particular time period.
And I was highly influenced by John Dos Passos' trilogy USA, which was the very same sort of elements that had fiction, nonfiction in the form of newsreels and short biographies.
And I wanted to do something like that because all the years I've been teaching in schools which I do with my books it's really hard, I notice, for kids to see themselves as part of a story.
How could I give them the outside history of what's going on in the world, along with an inside story of fiction?
So that's how that started.
Well, how do you build a story then around historic events?
I mean, truly, you have to do the two track.
You have to do all your research.
Oh, yeah, you live through it.
But and then where does the fictional part come in?
Well, it's easier now.
It's still very complex, but back then we didn't have any idea how to do that.
And I was just sort of cut loose with, okay, go do it.
So what I did was I started keeping voluminous files of research.
So I would research, research, research, 1962, say, for the Cuban Missile Crisis for Countdown.
And I had tons of research.
And I knew I wanted to write a family story.
So I started this family story and made up these characters living during this time.
And my dad was the chief of safety at Andrews Air Force Base in 62 for the 89th.
And so the dad just naturally became that.
And then the girl became me.
And then her brother became wanting to be an astronaut, my brother.
And so these little things just helped me to ground myself, and the community I lived in, Camp Springs Maryland, became the place half a mile from Andrews Air Force Base.
And then I just pulled in all my friends and I said okay, all these old friends of mine I haven't seen in 40 years are now going to be populating this novel.
So between that, and I gave myself a timeline.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was 14 days, so the story would last 14 days and the story would outline the Cuban Missile Crisis.
So on the very hardest night where Dean Rusk says, I didn't know if I'd wake up the next day.
I didn't know if I'd live to see another Saturday night.
That's what he said.
That's the night of the big crux of the story.
So it's like that.
And it began to feed itself back forth, back forth, back forth.
Stop, do some research.
Stop, do some writing.
It was kind of schizophrenic.
But we did it.
So take us to book two now.
So book two is Revolution.
It takes place in 1964, during Freedom Summer, which was the summer that 1000 volunteers came south from the north, the east, the west, to live in Mississippi in the black communities and to register black voters who could not vote in Mississippi or Alabama, Georgia or much of the South.
Trying to figure out how to tell that story was a real challenge.
What I did in trying to figure out how to tell that story of 64, which was the same year that the pool closed for me and that I wrote about in Freedom Summer I went there.
First of all, I went to Greenwood, Mississippi, which was the headquarters of SNCC in the Delta.
I grew up in the Piney Woods, so I didn't know the Delta, which is another country.
And they happened to have a pool that had been closed there and paved over and turned into the parking lot for the electric company.
And I could walk around the edges of that parking lot and see the edges coming up.
The blue tile was being worn through the concrete.
So I started with the pool.
And so I had Sunny and Gillette, her brother, walk.
Go swimming at night and get caught.
And so really it's an echo from my picture book, Freedom Summer.
And I also had a time frame again.
Once again, what happened when all those volunteers came south?
And so many white people in Mississippi did not want them there.
Some did.
Some were working with them behind the scenes.
How do you show some of the folks in the black community who were real activists and some who were really afraid and didn't want you to come bother them, and How do you show all those mindsets of Mississippi or of America at that point?
So that was my challenge.
So once again, I used my time frame.
Freedom Summer started June 22nd.
So the book starts then.
And it really ended at the Democratic National Convention in August.
So that's when the book ends.
And we always like to end by asking, what's your favorite book?
My favorite book of all time is Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty.
My favorite children's book of all time is Charlotte's Web.
It's like the perfectly written children's book.
I read it every year.
Favorite book?
My favorite book, it's called Ruby Redford by Lauren Child.
I really like the book because it has that kind of real life adventures with not like spy life adventures, and I really like those kind of books.
I also like that it's It's like a mystery adventure book, and I really like that kind of genre.
My favorite book would be Spirit Animals by Sean Williams.
Like one of the main characters, I actually have the same spirit animal as that.
It's actually a wolf.
There's actually four main characters who actually have legendary, and it's just caught my eye.
I do have to ask, how did you find your own spirit animal?
Websites.
Favorite book?
I read the Percy Jackson series.
I liked it because I just really like Greek mythology and because it went to famous landmarks.
Your turn, Mark Austin Thomas.
Favorite book?
Trying to pick a best book is kind of like trying to pick a best song.
But if I had to just pick one, let's say Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.
It's a really great story, very engaging, great characters.
I reread the book every few years and I still really enjoy it.
We'll have a list of everybody's favorite books at our website, bookclubforkids.org.
And if you'd like to be on the show, just have your teacher, parent or librarian.
Send us an email to kitty at bookclubforkidsorg and we will tell them how.
We're booking schools, libraries and book clubs for 2017 shows right now, so send that email to kitty at bookclubforkidsorg.
Book Club for Kids is funded in part by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, an agency supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and by listeners like you.
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Information and a donate link is at the website, bookclubforkids.org.
Thanks this week to Jonathan Jensen, who composed and performed our music, and to our readers Leah Noor and Serena.
And thanks to Erin and Alan at Hooray for Books bookstore in Alexandria, Virginia.
We have a free newsletter for teachers, parents and librarians full of free tips about how to turn kids into lifelong readers.
You can sign up at our website, bookclubforkids.org, or at our Book Club for Kids Facebook page.
I'm Kitty Felde.
Thanks again for listening.
