Through the Looking Glass Children's Book Reviews
As Good as Anybody
Illustrator: Raul Colon
Picture Book
For ages 6 to 9
Random House, 2008 ISBN: 978-0375833359
When Martin Luther King Jr. was a boy, he would get angry when he saw the “Whites Only” signs around his hometown. He “stomped his feet” with frustration, but his father told him that things would not always be this way, and his mother told him not to forget that he was “just as good as anybody.” As an adult Martin never forget this important lesson, and he spoke out against racism and the Jim Crow Laws that oppressed his people.
Far away in Warsaw, a little boy called Abraham Heschel grew up learning the true meaning of compassion from his father, who was a Rabbi. When he was a young man, Abraham went to Germany to study, and while he was there he came to experience racial hatred first hand. Even in his homeland he saw signs that said: NO JEWS. So Abraham went to America, where “everyone was treated fairly,” or so he had heard.
In America, Abraham marched in support of peace and equal rights for all. When he heard that a man called Martin Luther King Jr. was asking for people to march with him, Abraham travelled south to Selma in Alabama to support the civil rights movement. Together the white Jew and the black Christian marched, shoulder to shoulder.
This incredibly powerful book shows young readers how two very different men came together to protest an injustice that grieved them. Though they were from different races and practiced different faiths, they both believed that marching for peace and justice was “God’s work.”
With a memorable text and Raul Colon’s beautiful artwork, this is a book that every child should read.
