Who Was Ida B. Wells? by Sarah Fabiny is a short life story for 8 year olds about a woman who made a career out of refusing to go quiet.<\/p>\n
Ida was born on a farm in Mississippi in 1862 to parents who were enslaved, which meant she was born enslaved too. Six months later Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.<\/p>\n
Her father had never been to school. He used to have his friends round and ask Ida to read the newspaper out loud to them, partly because he was proud of her and partly because he wanted her to see what words could do.<\/p>\n
She was sixteen and staying at her grandmother’s when yellow fever came through her town. It took both her parents and her baby brother. Friends of the family started working out which relative would take which child, and Ida wouldn’t have it. She sat the teaching exam, put her hair up and let her hems down to look older, and kept her brothers and sisters together.<\/p>\n
Then there’s the train. In 1884 she bought a first-class ticket, sat in the carriage reserved for white women, refused to move when the conductor told her to, and was dragged out of her seat by three men. So she got off, hired a lawyer and won (she was twenty-one and five feet tall).<\/p>\n
That’s the shape of the whole life, and the book keeps it moving. Short chapters, plain sentences, and boxed pages that stop to explain Jim Crow, or Reconstruction, or what a boycott actually is, so a reader isn’t left nodding along to a word they don’t know.<\/p>\n
You do need to know what’s in it, though. Ida’s life’s work was writing about lynching, and this book explains lynching properly. A friend of hers who ran a grocery shop was taken out of a jail cell by a mob and killed. It says plainly that people were hanged and left where others would see them, and it gives the numbers. Near the end it describes a man murdered in Texas in 1998.<\/p>\n
None of it is gory and none of it is lingered over. It’s written to be understood rather than to shock. But this isn’t one to hand across and walk away from, and a child who is easily upset by real cruelty will want you in the room.<\/p>\n
For a reader who takes to it, Who Was Muhammad Ali? is the same short-chapter treatment of another American who gave things up rather than stay quiet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Who Was Ida B. Wells? by Sarah Fabiny is a short life story for 8 year olds about a woman who made a career out of refusing to go quiet. Ida was born on a farm in Mississippi in 1862 to parents who were enslaved, which meant she was born enslaved too. Six months later […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11674,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":9737,"lr_next_read_anchor":"Who Was Muhammad Ali?","lr_seo_hook":"Born enslaved, dragged off a train seat, and she sued the railway and won."},"book_tag":[20],"age_group":[26],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[888],"class_list":["post-9735","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-real-life-books","age_group-books-for-8-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-sarah-fabiny"],"yoast_title":"Who Was Ida B. Wells? by Sarah Fabiny | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"Born enslaved, dragged off a train seat, and she sued the railway and won. For ages 8+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n