A companion book to Rappaport’s earlier No More! Stories and Songs of Slave Resistance chronicles black experience in the United States from Emancipation in 1863 to 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled that segregation was illegal. Rappaport’s narrative is engages both mind and heart, blending an accessible factual narrative with stirring stories chronicling the experience of individual African Americans. There is Jane Kemper, a former slave who searches for her four children, stolen by her former master, and Harriet Postle, who clutches her baby son whie refusing to reveal her husband’s whereabouts to the Klansmen who crash through her door. There are also brief stories about Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington, Jackie Robinson and others. African American songs and poems (such as Countee Cullen’s “The Incident”) add even greater emotional impact, as do Shane W. Evans’s oil illustrations in this notable volume. (Ages 10–14)

Dramatic first-person vignettes, along with poems and spirituals, trace American black history from emancipation through the Reconstruction and segregation, to the beginnings of the black Civil Rights movement.