A Flea for Justice: Marian Wright Edelman Stands Up for Change

Bolling builds a third-person narrative around a Sojourner Truth quote in this forthright picture book biography of children’s and civil rights leader Marian Wright Edelman (b. 1939). When the then-four-year-old subject drinks from a fountain labeled “White Only” and is pulled away by a teacher, she “didn’t like being told that she couldn’t do something.” After learning about Sojourner Truth’s response to her talk being compared to the bite of a flea (“Lord willing, I’ll keep you scratching”), Wright Edelman seeks to end segregation-era inequities. She finds more and more ways “to make people scratch” as a college-age protestor and Mississippi’s first Black woman lawyer. And Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., she founds the Children’s Defense Fund to ensure that, through education, “all children had a future.” Grooms’s airbrush-style digital illustrations show Wright Edelman across the decades as this thought-provoking title asks, “What will you do to make someone scratch?” Back matter includes more about the subject and an author’s note. Background characters are depicted with various skin tones. Ages 6–9. (Sept.)