The Youngest Marcher

Audrey Faye Hendricks was nine years old when she decided to go to jail. She had heard grown-ups talk about wiping out Birmingham's segregation laws and she stepped right up — she didn't know that Martin Luther King spent time in solitary confinement, she knew him as her parents' friend Mike who came for dinner and ate her momma's Hot Rolls Baptized in Butter. In May 1963 she became the youngest known child to be arrested in the Children's March, spending a week in juvenile detention alongside thousands of other students who filled Birmingham's jails until the city had no choice but to listen. Levinson, who wrote the longer nonfiction account We've Got a Job for older readers, tailors this picture book to the scale of a nine-year-old's life — the loneliness of the jail cell, the oily grits, the angry white interrogators — without simplifying the courage required or the stakes involved. Vanessa Brantley-Newton's bright collages hold both the danger and the defiance simultaneously. The most important message for the youngest readers in the America bundle: that the people who changed this country included a nine-year-old girl who decided that what was happening was wrong and that she would do something about it. Carter G. Woodson Award. NAACP Image Award finalist.