Bowers, Rick. Spies of Mississippi. Washington D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2010.
Annotation:
Newly elected Governor J.P. Coleman declares that he has but one goal, to preserve segregation in the State of Mississippi in order to maintain peace and quiet. His first act as governor was to establish The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission that had the power to force witnesses to testify in court, maintain secret files on private citizens, and to arrest those who openly opposed segregation. The year is 1956 in Jackson Mississippi, and there is one word to describe a politician like Governor J.P. Coleman, moderate.
Rejection:
Let’s examine why Spies of Mississippi probably could have been nominated for the mock Printz Award for Excellence. First off, Spies of Mississippi provides the young reader with a wealth of knowledge regarding one of the most turbulent eras in American history, the civil rights movement. They are shown a world where racial hatred hid behind the misguided belief that the only way to achieve racial harmony was by creating two Americas, one black and one white. The reader also has the opportunity to meet lesser known heroes of the civil rights movement who gave everything they had in order to achieve the dream of racial integration; some even gave their lives before seeing the fruits of their labor. Young adults will also be able to see firsthand that their generation can be a catalyst for change, even against such a relentless system that had not been challenged for a hundred years.
Unfortunately, there are also several reasons that prevent Spies of Mississippi from being nominated. The most glaring reason is the literary quality of the book. While many nonfiction novels have a chronological flow to them, Spies of Mississippi tends to jump around from timeline to timeline after about the fifth chapter. The result is a confusing order of events in which people who are discussed early in the book, are brought back after the reader was led to believe that there was closure to their story. And while many of the people in the book were young college students who participated in the Freedom Ride (a coordinated attempt to overflow Mississippi jails with people who refused to abide by state laws that segregated blacks from whites in public venues), there is really no young people singled out that a teen reader can relate to in the story. Most of the organizers who are fighting the segregationists are at least twice the age of the young adult reader, and many of them already have spouses and children of their own.
And while the photos used in Spies of Mississippi add an effective element to the book, there are not nearly enough photos to truly grasp the magnitude of what was being accomplished in Jackson Mississippi in the late 1950’s. However, there is one picture in which Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett is waving in front of a crowd of 46,000 Ole Miss Football fans who are cheering him on and waving confederate flags. One cannot help but see a close similarity between this extremely powerful picture and one of the many historic photos of Adolph Hitler speaking to the German people who are cheering and waving Nazi flags. Gerald Blessy who was present at the game even recalled, “I looked back at the crowd and saw anger in the faces of the people right next to me and it sort of flashed through my mind that those rebel flags looked like swastikas. These were just ordinary school kids who were being whipped into a fever pitch of emotion by their own leaders. It was just like the Nazis had done.” Spies of Mississippi could have really benefited from more photos like this in order to truly pull together the attitude and emotion of this dark and historic time in American history.
Genre Category: Historical Nonfiction
No comments:
Post a Comment