Civil Rights (Individual Rights and Civic Responsibility.)

Explores the history of civil rights and the Bill of Rights set up to protect the basic freedoms of Americans, focusing on groups that fought for their freedoms, including African Americans, women, prisoners, and gays and lesbians.

Grade 4-6-These titles provide quick overviews of the issues. The eight chapters in Isler's book include a discussion of sedition, protest, obscenity, symbolic speech, and hate speech. Specific court cases and biographical information about people like Thomas Jefferson, Eugene V. Debs, and Louis Farrakhan are highlighted in blue and integrated into the text. Seidman covers civil rights in seven chapters and includes discussion of African Americans, women, Native Americans, immigrants, prisoners, and gays and lesbians. Though the books are identical in format, Seidman focuses on events and movements, such as the "Anti-Gay Government" of the 1950s and the "American Indian Movement" of the 1960s, and provides little information about specific people. These easy-to-read books do relate the issues to society today, but students will need to do further research to gain a full understanding of the topics.
Pat Scales, South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities, Greenville
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