Karen Adams, Ed. D.
Dean, College of Education and Human Services
Central Michigan University
adams1ki@cmich.edu

Why Use Historical Fiction and Fictionalized Biography to Teach about Human Rights through Social Studies?

Through the careful selection of appropriate historical fiction, young readers can learn how authors use artifacts such as letters, diaries, newspapers, films, maps, and photographs in combination with a knowledge of history and their creative imaginations to create a piece of historical fiction.  This is an important way to help young readers learn to work with documents themselves—to become young researchers who observe the world around them, interview people in their communities, study first-hand sources on the internet through newspaper accounts and photographs, and evaluate the truth of these sources and what impact they have on the larger world.

Authors Explain their Purposes in Writing and Use of Resources and History

Lois Lowry, in the “Afterword” to her Newbery Award winning Number the Stars, explained for her adolescent and preadolescent readers that the central character, Annemarie Johansen, was “a child of my imagination” built from stories she had heard from a close friend who grew up in Denmark during the Holocaust and as a representation of the “courage and integrity of the Danish people under the leadership of the king they loved so much, Christian X” during Nazi occupation.  In telling the story from ten-year-old Annemarie’s perspective, Lowry also chose to emphasize the things that a young girl would notice such as the boots of the Nazi soldiers rather than their helmets.  Annemarie also imagines herself to be Red Riding Hood with her basket of goodies for grandmother as she takes the secret package that can save the lives of Jews escaping Denmark for Sweden. 

 
Drawing on primary texts to produce an exemplary novel accessible for ten to fourteen year olds, Lowry also emphasizes the role of the very young in the Danish resistance movement.  One such young man, Kim Malthe-Bruun, who was executed by the Nazis, wrote to his mother on the night before his death, “the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of human decency and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one.  That is the great gift our country hungers for, something every little peasant boy can look forward to, and with pleasure feel he is a part of—something he can work and fight for.”  It was Lowry’s goal that Number the Stars would make her readers hunger for that goal of a “world of human decency.”

Laurence Yep, in his “Afterword” to Dragonwings, also explains why he chose to tell his story, which he describes as “more of a historical fantasy than a factual reconstruction,” through the eyes of a young boy.  Set in San Francisco in the year leading up to the Great Earthquake as well as the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk, this is an important story and an important time in the development of our nation.  Yep built his basic story around newspaper accounts he discovered describing a young Chinese flier Fung Joe Guey who actually flew a plane in the hills of Oakland on September 22, 1909.  He could find no more information about Guey. “Like the other Chinese who came to America, he remains a shadowy figure.  Of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese who flocked to these shores we know next to nothing.”  But it is important to Yep to remember that “these Chinese were human beings—with fears and hopes, joys and sorrows like the rest of us.”  It is this humanizing that can take place through his fictionalized account, something that could not be gained from the scant newspaper accounts.  Yep chose to narrate this story “though the eyes of a recently arrived Chinese boy” and through his father who, like Guey, chose to pursue the dream of flight.

Not a widely read book, Walter Dean Myers’ At Her Majesty’s Request:  An African Princess in Victorian England is the perfect “starter” to assist middle grade students in beginning to use primary resources to construct a narrative text.  Myers’ presentation is spellbinding as he portrays the life of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, who was born in Dahomey (now Benin), the daughter of a king, captured by slave traders and sentenced to death, only to be saved at the last moment and subsequently transported to England where she is introduced to Queen Victoria who becomes Sarah’s protector and the godmother of her daughter.  This fictionalized biography could never have been written if Myers did not have a personal fascination with rummaging through old bookstores.  During one such foray he discovered a set of about fifty letters and other printed material about Sarah.  He even found that he already possessed a book written about her by Frederick Forbes who had originally saved her life.  When Myers ultimately discovered a photo of Sarah, he noted, “I realized that somewhere between the Victorian dress she wore and the African tribal scars etched into her face was the girl I wanted to write about.”  Hers is, for Myers, a life that exemplifies “the triumph of the human spirit and more than a touch of tragedy.”

Virginia Hamilton describes Anthony Burns:  The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave as “a narrative history of events surrounding Anthony’s life as well as a biography.”  She researched the narrative history aspects over a ten-year period, in that time collecting “source materials on an ordinary slave” during the years when the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was in effect.  But during her research, she learned about Anthony Burns in particular, a slave who had escaped “bondage only to be recaptured, and thus galvanized and unified the antislavery movement.”  He because sufficiently famous to be mentioned in “most of our history books.”  And, therefore, she made the decision to build her book not simply around the life of an unknown slave impacted by the Fugitive Slave Law but around Anthony’s life, explaining that “he somehow deserved more than a paragraph or a mere mention in the historical references on Slavery, Abolitionist Causes, and Famous Fugitives.”  As would be expected, she could find no information on his day-to-day life as a slave child or adolescent.  Details emerged only when he was brought to Richmond, Virginia at the approximate age of twenty and began to plan his escape.  She, therefore, followed the prerogative of the fictionalized biographer, inventing and back-filling.  In her “Afterword,” she explained for the reader how she chose to populate Anthony’s life with family members and friends as well as with actual historical figures such as P. T. Barnum and President Franklin Pierce and to build the story somewhat chronologically, even naming the chapters with specific dates and years.

Hamilton posed an important question that is at the heart of any study and use of authentic documents to create a narrative and slightly fictionalized story.  “You might ask, What does the life of a slave born a hundred and fifty years ago have to do with us?  Here was a poor fugitive who lived but nine years of his total life of twenty-eight years in freedom.  Yet he did become free, and he died a free man, so why not let it go at that?  What does a single slave out of millions like him, long gone and best forgotten, have to do with us—you, me . . . ?”  Part of her goal was to contrast Anthony’s life with that of the contemporary reader who might take the freedoms of the Constitution and Bill of Rights for granted, unlike those bound by the slavery of Anthony’s time for whom such freedoms were unknown.  She also wanted to produce a book in which neither the abolitionist movement, the abolitionists themselves, nor even the evil of slavery was at the center, but one in which “the oppressed slave, a common man, was at the center of his own struggle.  And even the title places the emphasis on Anthony Burns and his ultimate “Triumph.” 

Hamilton provides her readers with pertinent sections of the Fugitive Slave Act which had been enacted as part of the Compromise of 1850 revolving around the admission of new states into the union as slave-holding or free states.  She also includes a thorough bibliography and, in keeping with the narrative history that this books is, she includes an Index at the conclusion for those actually studying historical facts, events, and persons. 

Different Ways of Using Primary Research Tools in Fictionalized Biography

On the opening pages of Carver:  A Life in Poems, Marilyn Nelson reminds her reader of the seriously spiritual side of George Washington Carver—botanist, inventor, painter, musician, and teacher.

I thoroughly understand that there are scientists to whom the world is merely the result of chemical forces or material electrons. I do not belong to this class.

A personal relationship with the Great Creator of all things is the only foundation for the abundant life.  The farther we get away from self, the greater life will be.

Much is known about the life of Carver, and Marilyn Nelson has drawn from this abundance of material, including many photographs, to tell his story through poems.  Thus, young readers can explore another way of presenting the life of an historic person.  Carver was born a slave in Missouri in 1864, and was raised, after emancipation, by the white couple who had owned his mother.  They encouraged him to seek an education, and he finally earned a master’s degree and was invited to begin the agricultural department at the all-black Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. 

Carver faced serious challenges from those who would not recognize his great intelligence and accomplishments because of his color, but they did not discourage him from his efforts to make life better for farmers in the rural South through his crop studies and for his students at Tuskegee Institute.  Nelson carefully balances her poems between lighthearted descriptions of “Cafeteria Food,” during Carver’s undergraduate days at Iowa State, where “even when it’s good, it’s bad,” to descriptions of Carver as the class over-achieving “Curve-Breaker,” and the more darkly serious ones such as “The Perceiving Self” in which Carver witnesses a lynching.  Another poem mentions the criticism he received from the New York Times who felt  that he was bringing “ridicule” on his race and on Tuskegee “because REAL scientists do not ascribe their successes to ‘inspiration.’”  And yet this man of intelligence, perseverance, and faith made changes in the world that would impact the lives of farmers throughout the South and provide educational chances for people of color who would follow in his footsteps.  A true Renaissance man, he was also such an accomplished artist that he was named a Fellow in the British Royal Society for the Arts, the first black man ever so named, while at home he crocheted small presents for his friends. Carver:  A Life in Poems is an excellent model of how to use photographs and history to produce another type of literature—poetic historical fiction.

Marian Anderson’s life strongly impacted the world of singing, politics, and racial equality in the twentieth century.  Both Pam Muñoz Ryan in When Marian Sang and Russell Freedman in The Voice that Challenged a Nation have presented her life in different but equally powerful ways.  Freedman, as is his pattern, draws upon a number of first-hand documents, including photographs, letters, newspaper headlines and stories, performance programs, and interviews.  His use of these documents is a model for young readers to do the same.  When Freedman was awarded the Robert F. Sibert medal for The Voice that Challenged a Nation, Kathleen Isaacs recognized that “with profound respect for his subject and his reader’s intelligence” he “has elegantly constructed a compelling narrative enhanced by exemplary documentation and powerful, well-chosen photographs.”  This is an excellent description of first-hand documented biography. 

The first photograph in Freedman’s book is of Anderson in 1898 at age one, with no hint that this was a person who would perform before royalty in Europe and at the U.S. White House for Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.  He describes the world in which she grew up, one that was segregated and that required she use separate facilities at train stations and provided few hotel possibilities.  But she also accomplished many firsts.  She was “the first black concert artist to record Negro spirituals for a major American recording company, the Victor Talking Machine Company.”  She was the “first black vocalist to appear as a soloist with the Philharmonic Society at Philadelphia’s prestigious Academy of Music.”  And she was the first black artist to sing at the Metropolitan Opera.  The sense of history attached to Marian Anderson is a model for young readers to understand the need to research the person or event they would place in a story.

Marian Anderson’s famous recital at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday 1939, to an audience of 75,000, followed much furor after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to rent Constitution Hall for this purpose.   In the process, Eleanor Roosevelt very publicly resigned from the DAR in her nationally syndicated newspaper column, and worked with her husband to ensure that Marian would sing publicly to a large and integrated crowd.  Franklin Roosevelt is quoted as stating, “I don’t care if she sings from the top of the Washington Monument, as long as she sings.”  This is an important event and one about which many resources exist.

Pam Muñoz Ryan and Brian Selznick in When Marian Sang also present the life of Marian Anderson for younger readers in a unique way that matches text and illustrations to her life.  Playing on Anderson’s role as a vocal performer, the book’s opening pages appear to be a musical program in which Scholastic Press presents, for its “Season of Two Thousand and Two” this story of the “True Recital” of Marian Anderson, with the “Libretto” or story by Pam Muñoz Ryan and the staging or decorations by Brian Selznick.  As the story is told, words from many of the songs so often associated with Anderson are printed in the text. 

Ryan also describes at length Anderson’s recital at the Lincoln Memorial, and Selznick’s illustrations show very clearly in individual faces the diversity present in her audience on that special day.  This has clearly been a presentation of the “True Recital” of Marian Anderson’s entire life—one that brought social and political change as well as much beauty to the world.  Because this is a book for younger readers does not mean that it was not based on serious research and reliance on authentic texts.  In the “Encore” or Afterward of the book, the reader is directed to some of these texts.  At http://www.nara.gov/exhall/originals/eleanor.html is Eleanor Roosevelt’s actual letter of resignation from the DAR.  The Marian Anderson Historical Society’s website, which provides much factual information about her life can be found at http://www.mariananderson.org.  The University of Pennsylvania Library maintains a virtual exhibition about Marian Anderson at http://www.library.upenn.edu/special/gallery/anderson.org.  Both author and illustrator explain their very personal reasons for wanting to create this book, and they include notable dates in Anderson’s life and provide a “Selected Discography” as did Russell Freedman.  Live Oak Media has released a CD of When Marian Sang on which Gail Nelson reads the text and sings some of the songs made famous by Anderson, the text of which are included in the book as part of the “true recital.”

Talkin’ About Bessie begins in a most unusual manner for a book intended for young readers of fourth through seventh grade.  It opens at a wake or gathering to mourn the passing of aviator Elizabeth “Bessie” Coleman, where “Bessie eyes the gathering of family, friends, and acquaintances from her place in the photo on the mantel.”  Those gathered begin to respond with memories of Bessie, and in this quite unique way the fictionalized biography of Bessie Coleman is presented.  Through these stories, we meet her father, a “man of African and Choctaw blood” who had left the family in east Texas when Bessie was a baby to find prosperity in Oklahoma.  We also meet her mother who remembers Bessie’s love for reading at a young age and her sister who remembers Bessie’s sense of responsibility as the oldest child left at home.  Her elementary teacher remembers Bessie’s thirst for knowledge and her fortitude in walking the four miles to school no matter how hot or cold the weather.  She seemed “greedy . . . hoarding facts and figures like gold coins she was saving up to spend on something special.”  We also learn about Bessie’s hard work in the cotton fields as well as doing laundry for the whites in the mansions across town.  And there is also a reflection by one of her white “laundry customers” who recognized the quality of her work but found disturbing the fact that Bessie did not look down when she came to the back door “like they were supposed to in those days” but instead looked this woman “straight in the eye, like we were equals.”

Eventually Bessie leaves east Texas behind and moves to Chicago where she studies French for a year in preparation to travel to France to become a pilot—a dream not available in the segregated world of the U.S.  Her love of math as a child in school pays dividends as she studies the intricacies of airplane engines and maneuvering a plane.  When she does return home she gives daring air shows for as many as 10,000 at a time—crowds that she demanded be integrated rather than white-only.  Toward the book’s conclusion, Bessie speaks to the reader, describing the two great blessings of her life—to have “experienced the joy of flight” and to have “shared it with others of my race.” 

Nikki Grimes explains her use of “source material” about Bessie Coleman and about aviation for the young readers in her afterward.  She explains that this “oral history” contains “voices, styles of speech, and characterizations” that are part of the “imaginary devices used to bring Bessie’s true story to life.”  Some characters are actual historic persons, while others are composites such as teachers or friends.  She also credits those who have provided significant information about early aviation.  This is a wonderful model for young readers to use in putting together their own stories through the use of first hand historical study and use of the “imaginary devices” they possess.

Picture Books Can Have a Big Punch with Fictionalized Biography and Authentic Text

Tonya Bolden’s story, Maritcha:  A Nineteenth-Century American Girl, is a fascinating retelling of Maritcha Lyons’s unpublished 1928 memoir entitled, Memories of Yesterdays:  All of Which I Saw and Part of Which I Was.  Born and raised in New York City’s lower Manhattan to parents who ran a boardinghouse, Maritcha had a better standard of living than most of her neighbors.  The Lyon’s family boardinghouse also served as a safe-house for run-away slaves on their way to Canada, and the family members were often in danger for the risks they took to help others.  Her father’s work ethic and strict code of moral justice would prepare her for the challenges that she would face later in life.

After riots forced them from their home, the family relocated to Providence, Rhode Island.  There Maritcha wanted to attend high school, but none existed for blacks such as she.  To gain admittance, Maritcha had to make her appeal to the Rhode Island state legislature.  The legislature agreed that she could be admitted if she could pass a set of examinations to prove her aptitude for doing high school work.  Although she passed with flying colors and then excelled in her studies, it was not until her senior year in high school that students and teachers actually accepted her.  She remains in the history books as the first black person to graduate from Providence High School. 

This in-depth picture book with historical photographs and images that illustrate the time period is more than the story of young black girl.  This is also a period piece that brings the late 1800’s and early 1900’s to life.  Meticulous detail has been paid to daily events, people, and places that helped shape New York City and the United States during this time in history.

Doreen Rappaport and illustrator Bryan Collier have used the actual words of Martin Luther King, Jr. very powerfully in telling his life story in Martin’s Big Words.  Collier explained that because churches were such a major focus and metaphor for King as a minister and proponent of non-violence, he chose to use the imagery of stained glass windows for their many colors, representing many races, and to use imagery such as four candles in the last picture to “represent the four girls who were killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church” in Birmingham.  He blended such painted imagery with collage to “piece together” the many events of King’s life.

Rappaport chose to use words for the text in a sparse but forceful manner.  King’s world as a child is filled with reminders of segregation such as the “WHITE ONLY” signs everywhere that made him feel bad.  His mother’s reminder that “You are as good as anyone” supports and encourages him.  Inspired by the “big words” in his father’s preaching, Martin dreams of using such words himself, and, of course, it is his own speeches that will eventually stir a nation to social change.  In bold print throughout the story are quotations from Martin Luther King, Jr.  “Hate cannot drive out hate.  Only love can do that. . . . Love is the key to the problems of the world. . . . Sooner or later, all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together.”  And, finally, his “I Have a Dream” speech is quoted in which he envisions an Alabama in which “little black boys and black girls will join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”  Although his life is cut short by an assassin’s bullet, Rappaport reminds her young readers that “His big words are alive for us today.” 

Included in Martin’s Big Words are a chronology of important dates in King’s life and a list of suggested additional books and notes about the use of the more than 200 related Web sites, including the King Center in Georgia.  Rappaport and Collier have shown clearly how the text of Dr. King’s speeches and the facts of his life can be bound together through symbolic illustrations and sparse text to create a very moving piece of literature.

In Nikki Giovanni’s Rosa, a retelling of the historical events surrounding Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, readers are presented not only an insight into Mrs. Parks as a person, but also a chronicle in words and images of the Civil Rights events of that time.  When Rosa Parks started her day on December 1, 1955, she was someone’s daughter, Raymond Park’s wife, and the best seamstress in Montgomery, not a radical trouble-maker looking for a cause to ignite.  She was tired of separate and definitely tired of “not equal,” but her refusal to vacate a seat on the bus for a white person was also because she was physically tired.  Suddenly overcome with all that “tiredness,” she cast her lot as she denied the bus driver’s shouts for her to move and was eventually arrested for her refusal.  Giovanni eloquently surmises Rosa’s actions as she writes, “She had not sought this moment, but she was ready for it.”

This version of the events that lead to the largest and longest boycott of public buses in US history emphasizes the role of the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery, the NAACP, and Martin Luther King, Jr. who gave voice to this cause.  To make the clear the historic movement to this event, Bryan Collier provided a double-page fold out with powerful images of African American people of all ages walking and then celebrating the Supreme Court decision that established segregation on buses as illegal.  Collier explained, in his “Illustrator’s Note,” that he painted Mrs. Parks to look “as if light is emanating from her.  To me, she is like a radiant chandelier, an elegant light that illuminates all our many pathways.”  Nikki Giovanni, in her “Author’s Note,” explained that “Rosa Parks is a cooling breeze on a sweltering day; a sun-dried quilt in fall . . . the promise of renewal at spring.  It is an honor and a responsibility to explore the bravery of her acceptance of history’s challenge.”  Older readers can be challenged to consider other such brave characters of history and to investigate actual texts such as newspaper accounts, websites, photographs, films, and history books that they can use to put together the same kind of simple but powerful retelling of such a life.

Toni Morrison’s first historical work for children and adolescents, Remember:  The Journey to School Integration, uses archival photographs and sparse but carefully chosen words to describe a time “years ago” when “children of different races could not go to school together in many places in the United States.”  She explains the segregation that allowed students to be separated “according to the color of their skin,” separated into schools that were separate but not equal.  The opening photographs portray these separate schools.  In a group of first and second graders holding their basal readers, a young black girl ponders, “The law says I can’t go to school with white children.  Are they afraid of my socks, my braids?  I am seven years old.  Why are they afraid of me??”

With the 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, a “day that will live in glory,” many problems arose as this law was implemented to provide equal access to restaurants, water fountains, voting booths, homes, and jobs.

Throughout the book are shockingly compelling photographs such as a young boy of five or six dressed in the white cape and pointed cap of the Ku Klux Klan above a sign stating “southern whites are the Negroes’ best friend but NO INTEGRATION” and preteen boys holding signs that read “We won’t go to school with Negroes” and “We the pupils of this school . . . don’t want Negroes in our school.”  The hatred in the faces of whites as they shout at young black students trying to walk into previously segregated white schools is always painful to view, as are the photos of individual black students at isolated lunch room tables or alone in classrooms where the white students have chosen to boycott. 

Morrison provides details about each photograph as well as more information about the end of segregation in the U.S.  Remember is an excellent model of photo-journalism, of telling a story through photographs that can speak multitudes.  Morrison tells her story as though figures from the photographs were speaking in first person, responding to the events around them.  The response might be from a black man’s reflection of the separate water fountains, side by side, from which the same water is flowing:  “Seems foolish but it’s not.  It’s important if you want to make a grown man feel small.  It’s extra work and costs more money to have two fountains when one will do, and to pretend water cares who’s drinking it.  But I guess some folks will do anything to make themselves feel big.”   Or the response might be from a small black child attended a previously whites-only school and faced by the screaming and angry faces of white women, “They are trying to scare me.  I guess they don’t have any children of their own.  But didn’t grownups used to be little kids who knew how it felt to be scared?”

Graphic Organizers, Writing Activities, and Electronic and Print Resources for each Book
(click on image of book for link to resource page)