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?”