Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down

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Recipient of Peach’s Picks Award

Top Ten Favorite Books

Summer 2011

Author: Andrea Davis Pinkney

Illustrator: Brian Pinkney

Peach’s Picks Rating:

Year of publication: 2010

City of publication: New York

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

ISBN: 9780316070164

Author website: No author website, but a website offering information about the author is available at http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/contributor.jsp?id=2861

Illustrator website: http://www.brianpinkney.net/

Media used for illustrations: Arches 300lb rough paper with watercolors and India ink

Annotation: Four young African-American men staged a sit-in at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina. Their action reverberated across America, part of the civil unrest leading to the implementation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 

Personal reaction to the book: This is a compelling, lyrical book written in free verse that celebrates the 50^th anniversary of the sit-in staged at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina by four young African-American men who attended North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. The text plays on the food and recipe metaphors emphasizing the lunch counter setting. The full-color impressionist paintings are not heavy-handed, but manage to capture the tension of the times. With the exception of pages 25-26, all the illustrations are two-page spreads with a center of focus effectively created in each picture. The book designer has chosen to emphasize important phrases in bold letters and colors. This leads to some confusion. The bold phrases in quotation marks are quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr., but other phrases in bold seem to be phrases considered important by the book’s designer. The biographical references and simplified Civil Rights timeline included at the end are a valuable addition. Students may need background information to understand the idea of a Woolworth store with a lunch counter. The text and the illustrations complement one another creating a first class book that can be used with younger students as well as older students. Both the text and illustrations offer many points for discussion, e.g. page 10 “So the customers left, including the four friends who went home to dinner, where they were served first.” Pair with Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-ins by Carole Boston Weatherford, (2005) Dial Books for Young Readers.

General curricular connections:

• Civil Rights movement
• United State history
• Race relations

Specific example of curricular connection matched to State Standards:
Subject: History
Grade level: 11

Standards:

California State Standards

History – Social Studies Content Standards for Public Schools: Kindergarten through Grade 12

Grade 11 United States History and Geography: Continuity and Change in the Twentieth Century

11.10 Students analyze the development of federal civil rights and voting rights.

Recommended grade levels:

School Library Journal recommends the book for use with grades 3-6

Booklist recommends the book for use with grades 3-4

Peach’s Picks recommends the book for use with grades 3 and up

Awards/Recognitions:

Booklist starred review

Library Media Connection starred review

School Library Journal starred review

Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, Honors for Books for Younger Children, 2011

Note: This entry applies to the assignment criteria to review books published during  2010-2011. This book is included in Assignment 2.

Repetition: The names of the four young men, David, Joseph, Franklin, and Ezell, are repeated throughout the text.

Repetition: The phrase “A doughnut and coffee with cream on the side.” is repeated throughout the text.

Simile: Page 4; “…they were treated like the hole in a doughnut…”

Metaphor: Page 6; “Integration was finder than homemade cake.”

Metaphor: Page 6; “Integration was a recipe that would take time.”

Symbolism: Pages 17 and 18; the Woolworth’s lunch counter grows infinitely longer as more and more people join sit-ins

Book cover picture retrieved from http://www.brianpinkney.net/main.html