Marching for Freedom: Walk Together Children and Don't You Grow Weary, by Elizabeth Partridge

Marching for Freedom: Walk Together Children and Don’t You Grow Weary, by Elizabeth Partridge, focuses on the role of young people in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches advocating for the right to vote for African-American citizens. It was a difficult time in Selma and throughout the South; Jim Crow laws stood in the way of many people’s civil rights. In 1963, ten-year-old Joanne Blackmon accompanied her grandmother, who intended to register to vote, to the county courthouse. They were denied admittance and subsequently arrested, the first of numerous times over the following two years. Protests crystallized in the spring of 1965. The constancy of the community in protesting, the brutal events at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the participation of Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and thousands of others led to President Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965. Documentary photos and electrifying essays bring mature readers directly into this time in history. Ages 10-15. 

Viking Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House, 2009.