STEP BY STEP!

A girl recounts the struggles she and her friends went through to be admitted to an all-white school in Rigaud and Penn’s nonfiction picture book.

Narrated in the voice of Black student marcher Joyce Clemons, the story opens with Joyce explaining that she and her fellow students had to walk 600 miles to be treated fairly at school. When Joyce was young in the 1950s, even though segregation was against the law, the Hillsboro School Board wouldn’t let Black students attend Webster Elementary, an all-white school, even after a fire had damaged a Hillsboro school Black students attended. Together, Black mothers and students marched to Webster every day, only to be turned away at the door. But they kept going: “We stepped over the box lines on the calendar, across the rows of dates, and down the page, until it flipped and we started at the top again.” They marched for 300 days—two school years—before a judge ruled in their favor. Rigaud and Penn navigate themes of injustice and prejudice from a child’s eye view, making it easy to see that the system wrongly kept Joyce and her friends out. Lilly’s painterly digital illustrations integrate photographs and news clippings, firmly grounding the story in historical evidence. The book includes portraits of the 19 mothers who marched, and endnotes offer a timeline and further historical details.

A timely book about the importance of persevering in the struggle for equality.