Freedom Riders: John Lewis and Jim Zwerg on the Front Lines of the Civil Rights Movement - Hardcover

Bausum, Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0792241738 ISBN 13: 9780792241737

Publisher: National Geographic Kids, 2005

Synopsis

Freedom Riders compares and contrasts the childhoods of John Lewis and James Zwerg in a way that helps young readers understand the segregated experience of our nation's past. It shows how a common interest in justice created the convergent path that enabled these young men to meet as Freedom Riders on a bus journey south.

No other book on the Freedom Riders has used such a personal perspective. These two young men, empowered by their successes in the Nashville student movement, were among those who volunteered to continue the Freedom Rides after violence in Anniston, Alabama, left the original bus in flames with the riders injured and in retreat. Lewis and Zwerg joined the cause knowing their own fate could be equally harsh, if not worse. The journey they shared as freedom riders through the Deep South changed not only their own lives but our nation's history.

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About this title

About the Author

Ann Bausum writes about US history for young people. Her books consistently earn prominent national recognition. Denied, Detained, Deported was named the 2010 Carter G. Woodson Book Award winner at the secondary school level from the National Council for the Social Studies. Muckrakers earned the Golden Kite Award as best nonfiction book of the year from the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. Freedom Riders gained the Robert F. Sibert Honor designation from the American Library Association, and With Courage and Cloth received the Jane Addams Children's Book Award as the year's best book on social justice issues for older readers.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Gr. 6-9. In another excellent work of nonfiction, the author of the acclaimed With Courage and Cloth (2004), covers a civil rights topic less frequently addressed than Brown v. Board of Education or the 1963 March on Washington. Eschewing a general overview of the 1961 Freedom Rides for specific, personal histories of real participants in the dangerous bus integration protests, Bausum focuses on two college students from strikingly different backgrounds: Jim Zwerg, a white Wisconsin native who became involved during an exchange visit to Nashville, and John Lewis, a black seminarian and student leader of the nonviolence movement. Zwerg became an inadvertent figurehead when he was branded "nigger-lover" and singled out for a particularly harsh beating, while Lewis parlayed leadership skills cultivated during the rides into political success as a Georgia congressman. Incisively illustrated with archival photos (one of which shows Zwerg and Lewis side-by-side in a jail cell, "bloodied together as brothers in a common cause"), this moving biographical diptych prompts careful thinking about race (Zwerg himself believed he received disproportionate fame because he was white), and delivers a galvanizing call to action, encapsulated in Lewis' stirring foreword: "You can change the world." Zwerg likewise contributes a foreword; exhaustive, useful end matter concludes, including resource listings, a bibliography, and citations for quotes. Jennifer Mattson
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About this edition

• Publisher: National Geographic Kids
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0792241738
• ISBN 13: 9780792241737
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 80