Voices of Peaceful Protest

It’s been 40 years since Martin Luther King’s Birthday became a national holiday, and the question of how to celebrate it was probably best answered by the late John Lewis. The Georgia representative called it “a day on, not a day off,” “a day of action, a day of love, to give of ourselves to others and begin anew the building of the beloved community.” A new picture book about Lewis and two about Coretta Scott King make for illuminating reading on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s holiday and throughout the year.

Written by Alice Faye Duncan and illustrated by R. Gregory Christie, CORETTA’S JOURNEY: The Life and Times of Coretta Scott King (Calkins Creek/Astra, 48 pp., $18.99, ages 7 to 10) provides a stirring introduction to a woman who stood strong before and after her husband’s 1968 assassination. With telling details, Duncan describes the likely sources of Coretta Scott King’s fortitude: her remarkable parents, her religious faith and a willingness to defend herself. Coretta’s mother advised her two daughters to “get an education and try to be somebody,” and the book’s first half shows how Coretta became somebody in Alabama, Ohio and Boston.

Alternating between poems and prose, Duncan’s text is informative as well as emotionally powerful, with a sense of cosmic destiny about Coretta’s future with Martin sprinkled throughout: “Venus and Saturn converged/Two agents for change.” Christie’s illustrations similarly range from dreamlike images (young Coretta sitting on an impossibly high tree branch and gazing at the stars) to real-life documentation (Coretta celebrating her husband’s Nobel Peace Prize with him).

“Coretta’s Journey” includes harrowing episodes, like the burning by white supremacists of her childhood home, alongside the satisfactions of creating change in the world, raising four children and ensuring that Martin’s legacy would be honored. For 15 years, she pressed for a national holiday — the first established to honor someone other than Columbus or an American president.

Turning “My Life, My Love, My Legacy,” a 368-page memoir written for adults, into the picture book CORETTA: The Autobiography of Mrs. Coretta Scott King (Godwin Books/Henry Holt, 40 pp., $18.99, ages 4 to 8) must have been challenging. The text draws directly from the adult book, with bracketed information and ellipses indicating deviations from the original. Perhaps this approach was dictated by contractual necessity, but it distracts from her story. Transitions can be abrupt and some sentences are unwieldy: “Who could have dreamed that a little girl [who at age 10 hired herself out with her sister to pick] cotton for $2 a week in the piercing hot sun would rise to a position that allowed her to help pick U.S. mayors, congresspersons or even presidents?”

Happily, Ekua Holmes’s vibrant illustrations go a long way toward canceling out these quibbles. Starting with her luminous cover portrait, they do justice to a woman who had a mission well before her soon-to-be husband drove her home from their first date in his green Chevrolet. Holmes effectively incorporates pieces of the past — covers of Jet magazine, archival photos, bits of printed music and text — into her paintings, and her use of color and block shading helps to bring out the story’s many nuances. Despite the hardships endured, this art suggests, the couple’s marriage stands as the quintessential embodiment of what Coretta referred to in her memoir as “the power of love in action.”

Born 13 years after Coretta Scott King, John Lewis also grew up in rural, segregated Alabama. In FIGHTING WITH LOVE: The Legacy of John Lewis (Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster, 48 pp., $18.99, ages 4 to 8), Lesa Cline-Ransome and James E. Ransome show how Lewis’s quest for learning, his sense of faith and fairness, and “the sun-beaten, sweat-soaked, hunchbacked farming his family did day in and day out” set him on his path. And they make a key internal moment visible, as a teenage Lewis listens intently to one of King’s sermons on the radio: “John saw that the gospel could change not just hearts but laws, too.”

We follow Lewis as he goes to seminary in Tennessee, steeps himself in the principles of nonviolent resistance, engages in sit-ins in Nashville and gets jailed for “disorderly conduct.” In the summer of 1961, he marches onto a Greyhound bus as a Freedom Rider, seeking to desegregate buses and waiting rooms all over the South. Lewis then marches to Washington, D.C., where in August 1963 he speaks at the March on Washington. And he continues to march. The book ends in 1965, as he and some 600 others prepare to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.

When young readers are ready to hear the details of Bloody Sunday and Lewis’s subsequent, unflagging service up until his death in July 2020, his propulsive “March” graphic novel trilogy and its sequel, “Run,” await. In the meantime, “Fighting With Love” offers a fine and — thanks to James Ransome’s pencil drawings on “found, painted and purchased papers” — often gorgeous introduction to one of America’s most beloved heroes.