Middle-grade historical fiction for Black History Month. Teach these Newbery winners together in a Civil Rights study.

Against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, The Watsons Go to Birmingham––1963 chronicles the sometimes violent, sometimes tender relationship between ten-year-old Kenny Watson and his older brother, Byron, an “official juvenile delinquent.”

When Byron eventually steps over the line one time too many, Momma and Dad finally make good on their threat to send him to stay with his strict grandma in Alabama in hopes that a summer in the deep south will open his eyes to “the kind of place the world can be.”

Soon after the family arrives, they find themselves at the center of one of the most tragic moments in America's history: the Sixteenth Avenue Baptist Church bombing.

Woodson’s novel-in-verse, Brown Girl Dreaming, covers similar geographic and thematic terrain similar to the Watsons, making the pair ideal companions for a middle-grade Civil Rights study.

Both works are Newberry winners that feature young African-American protagonists growing up in a nation on the brink of sweeping change. The sacrifices Birmingham’s Black citizens made in the summer of 1963 were pivotal to the passage of the Civil Rights Act the following year, and while

Curtis’s work is fiction, it draws on his childhood experience coming of age during this especially tumultuous chapter of American history.

Born in Ohio to a family of African-Americans who fled the agrarian south for more opportunities in northern cities, Woodson, like the fictional Watsons, is a product of the Great Migration. Her poetry—like Curtis’s fiction—echoes her childhood experience.

Beginning with Woodson’s birth in 1963, Brown Girl Dreaming picks up history where The Watsons leaves off.