Written by
Andrea Davis Pinkney
Illustrated by
Brian Pinckney
Today we are going to read a book called Sit-in. It tells a true story from the Civil Rights Movement, which happened in this country starting in the 1950s – about 70 years ago.
Before we read, let’s think. What do the words Civil, Rights , and Movement, mean? Civil here means a person who belongs to a place – it’s like the word citizen, if you know that word. Rights means that you are free to do certain things. So, Civil Rights means The things a person who belongs to a place can do freely. A movement is when a very large group of people work together to make something happen.
Why was there a Civil Rights Movement? We had Civil Rights Movement because we had had slavery. Right here on this land where we live, even before we were a country called the the United States of America, people who had been stolen from their homes in Africa were forced to work for people who bought and sold them, as if they weren’t people, but things. Slavery lasted for over 250 years.
But even when slavery ended, racism didn’t – it just changed. The white people who had power made new laws and forced Black people to live by those laws. These laws made it very, very, hard for Black people to have control over their own lives – to live where they wanted, to love who they wanted, to vote for the people they wanted, to learn what they wanted, to work how they wanted.
People always resisted these unjust laws even though it was dangerous to do so. People kept working and helping each other and organizing protests and all of it came together – so many people were working toward a shared goal – that you could call it a movement.
The person you hear the most about when we think of the Civil Rights Movement is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But movements are not about just one person. Movements are many thousands of people working together by doing what they can to make change in the world.
This book is about four young people who did what they could to make our country a better place.
