My Selma: True Stories of a Southern Childhood at the Height of the Civil Rights Movement

Willie Mae Brown's My Selma is a book of true stories for 11 year olds about growing up Black in Selma, Alabama, while the fight for the vote went on all around her family.

What happens

It opens with the Selma she loved. Biscuits dripping with butter and fig preserves. Sunday drives in the station wagon to see her cousins. Radios playing Mahalia Jackson and Martha Reeves. Her dad, Dah, dropping off boxes of food to anyone hungry and taking only a smile as payment.

Then, in the very same chapter, she tells you what else Selma was. Grown men called "boy". Voter registration queues stretching for blocks, with nowhere to go to the toilet. Men in white hoods riding through at night with torches. And Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, only weeks after two of her own siblings were arrested at another protest.

The later stories come in closer to home. The family moves into a big white house on Range Street, one of the first Black families on the street. Mama turns out to have quietly saved the whole seven thousand dollars (Dah can hardly believe it). A white neighbour's wife keeps sending over jars of honey, while her husband makes it very clear he doesn't want them there.

And there's Willie Mae herself, almost a teenager, working through the phone book to find a summer babysitting job. She sets one price for Black mothers and a higher one for white mothers. She also forgets to mention to Mama that she's been ringing white families. You can imagine how that goes down!

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This is a true account and it doesn't soften anything. The worst racial slur is written out in full, more than once. Lynchings are named, and there's a line about white men taking advantage of Black women. For a reader meeting this history for the first time, it's a lot to take in on the opening pages, and plenty of children will want a grown-up nearby to talk it through.

If your reader is already asking big questions about fairness, though, this is a very powerful way in. It isn't a textbook. It's a girl who cries all the way to her dad's cotton fields, sinks into her grandmother's feather bed and remembers exactly what a classmate hollered the day President Kennedy was shot.

What to read next

For another Southern family seen through a girl's eyes, try Let the Circle Be Unbroken. Cassie Logan rides home in the family wagon through Mississippi in 1934, past a huge cotton plantation and the tenant shacks where their neighbours live.