Tonya Bolden

“It is time to rethink America.”

Adapted from Anderson’s bestselling White Rage (2016), this book summons young people to bear witness to the devastatingly expansive strategies white citizens have taken up to preserve the racialized violence that emerged from the founding of the nation. What is white rage? White rage works “subtly, almost imperceptibly” in American halls of power, utilizing an array of policy assaults, legal contortions, and physical violence to punish black resolve show more and block efforts toward full and equal citizenship. Anderson writes in an accessible narrative form, showing young people through pivotal historical events the ways in which white rage has been able to effectively undermine black-led social movements for equality and justice. It begins with the rise of the 19th-century Black Codes and the emergence of Jim Crow during the betrayal of Reconstruction. It continues into the Great Migration, when many black families chose to move North for opportunities and were met with extreme racist violence from white hate groups. The text carries us up to the current president and is enhanced by archival photographs. In her foreword, celebrated young adult author Nic Stone (Odd One Out, 2018, etc.) reminds us that it’s not just about exposing the roots of American racism, but what we do about it now.

Revealing our racialized past and arguing that we must refashion our nation in pursuit of a new, beloved, and just society. (discussion guide, sources, resources, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

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”Each created thing is an indispensable factor of the great whole.”

“In dirt is life.”
—George Washington Carver

Tonya Bolden’s 2008 biography of African American “plant doctor,” “peanut man,” and notable agricultural innovator George Washington Carver is lively and informative. The author not only gives readers aged 10 to 14 details about Carver’s life and accomplishments, but she also presents her audience with details about the times—living conditions, attitudes, and show more ways of doing things—and introduces lots of new vocabulary. I’m not the target audience, but I sure learned a lot.

I believe my first encounter with Carver was through a Scholastic Book Club edition many years ago. It’s nice to know his story is still being presented to kids. Bolden’s book has a good balance of text and photographic content. We see photos of Carver, his paintings and sketches, and many personal items (including his school slate and microscope), as well as images of a number of important people in his life, including the white couple (Moses and Susan Carver)who ended up raising him and his brother.

The author notes that when George (born in Missouri in 1863 or 1863) was a mere baby, he and his mother, Mary, a slave on the Carver farm, were abducted. Thieves had come looking for gold, but, failing to find any, they settled for him and his mother instead. A tracker sent out by Moses Carver was able to retrieve only baby George. He and his elder brother, Jim, grew up and worked on the Carver farm, performing labour in exchange for room and board. They would never see their mother again.

George’s sickliness in childhood—he suffered from a number of respiratory ailments and also had a stammer—seem to have had a significant impact on how his life would unfold. He carried out lighter household and farm tasks—caring for the garden and collecting eggs, for example. Even as a child, he was innovative and creative, skilled at many handicrafts, including knitting. Above all, from the very beginning, he had a deep love of and curiosity about the natural world. Bolden writes wonderfully about this:

Exploring the woods was George’s perpetual pick-me-up, his best adventure, his bliss. Wandering. Wondering. Watching for wonder. Whistling along to birdsong. All the while, he wanted to know the “why” of everything, from the varieties of rain to the beauty of begonias, believing that there was a God and that all of nature was God’s creation.

Not surprisingly, he eventually became interested in art and poetry.

Mariah Watkins, the healer and midwife he boarded with when he moved to Neosho, Missouri to attend a school for negroes, recognized his potential. “You must learn all you can and then go out into the world and give your learning back to our people.” An art teacher encouraged him to study horticulture at university in Ames Iowa, where her father was a professor. George was the first Black student and later the first Black professor at what would become the University of Iowa.

After earning his master’s degree in Iowa, Carver was recruited by Booker T. Washington to design and run the agricultural department, teach courses, and do research at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The mission of the institution was to provide negro students, who were often poor and starving, with education as a means of survival. According to Bolden, on Carver’s train journey to the institute, he was distressed by what he saw of the landscape, later writing that “Everything looked hungry: the land, the cotton, the cattle, and the people.” “Cotton,” he said, “had sapped the soil’s vitality.” Over the next many years, he would work to restore the earth’s nutrients and introduce plants that would help to remediate hunger. Big on his list were peanuts, sweet potatoes, and soybeans, and he was constantly coming up with products that could be made from them. He believed that with advancing scientific knowledge many plant-based products could replace meat. In the end, however, none of his creations succeeded.

At the conclusion of her fine book, Bolden discusses the many ways in which Carver was honoured. Within six months of his death, the US Congress passed legislation for the creation of George Washington Carver National Monument, the first national park created in the name of someone other than a president. Carver was not without his critics, however. Some scientists rejected his accomplishments as insufficiently scientific: he had attributed his discoveries—his “revelations”— to “the Great Creator”. Activists criticized him for rejecting open protest of segregation, saying he’d been honoured by whites only because he was non-threatening.

Bolden is an accomplished writer and her book is both informative and enjoyable. I really have nothing to compare it to, but it’s succeeded in whetting my appetite to learn more about a significant Black American innovator. show less

This YA adaptation of Anderson’s breakthrough 2018 book of the same name for adults demonstrates her scholarship on racial discrimination and voter disenfranchisement, presenting an urgent case for political intervention.

“The millions of votes and voters that disappeared in 2016 were a long time in the making,” begins this deep historical investigation. The excitement of the Reconstruction era, when newly enfranchised black men were able to leverage such transformative policies as the show more shaping of the public school system, led to white people inventing de facto and de jure mechanisms to prevent black America from having any real political power. Civil rights struggles achieved the 1965 Voting Rights Act in a period of U.S. global ideological competition, but simmering anger and backlash from whites strove to undo voter protections for black citizens. Coverage of the controversial 2000 presidential election results shows how the GOP–led reinvention of voter disenfranchisement strategies undermined federal government–backed voter protections in order to focus on eliminating voter fraud. Persuasively emphasized throughout the book is the disproportionate impact of these policies on black citizens, as Anderson argues with clarity that predatory racial animus lies at the center of the American democratic project, culminating with the winner of the 2016 presidential election. Bolden’s (Inventing Victoria, 2019, etc.) adaptation will fire up a new generation of civic activists through its gripping presentation.

A significant people’s history and call to action for youth. (discussion guide, resources, notes, photo credits, index) (Nonfiction. 13-18)

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Great biography of a truly impressive woman -- detailed, yet easy to read. Dramatic in parts, and very well documented. Highly enjoyable read. One of the gifts of this book is how clearly it lays out the many barriers in her path, and celebrates that she kept going anyway, and used her success to chart a path for others. Truly an inspiring person.