Loving vs. Virginia; A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case

The format is approximately 7.5 inches by 10.25 inches. 260 pages. Illustrated endpapers. Illustrations. DJ has some wear and soiling. Patricia Hruby Powell came to writing via a circuitous route. Before becoming an author, she danced throughout Europe and the Americas, performed as a trapeze artist, worked in lithography, and as a librarian. Now Patricia tells stories throughout the United States, and accents her tales for all ages with dance, worldwide percussion instruments, and life-like animal sounds. In the course of her career she has received numerous awards and fellowships for her storytelling and choreography. Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker, which won a Robert F. Sibert Nonfiction Honor, Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor, Boston Globe–Horn Book Nonfiction Honor, and Parent’s Choice Gold for Poetry. She is also the author of the documentary novel Loving Vs. Virginia, which was an Indie Next Pick; Struttin’ With Some Barbecue, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book; and Lift as You Climb, a picture book biography of Ella Baker. Shadra Strickland studied design, writing, and illustration at Syracuse University and later went on to complete her M.F.A. at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She won the Ezra Jack Keats Award and the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent in 2009 for her work. Strickland co-illustrated Our Children Can Soar, winner of a 2010 NAACP Image Award. Her books have received recognition from the American Library Association, Junior Library Guild, and other prominent literary organizations. From acclaimed author Patricia Hruby Powell comes the story of a landmark civil rights case, told in spare and gorgeous verse. In 1955, in Caroline County, Virginia, amidst segregation and prejudice, injustice and cruelty, two teenagers fell in love. Their life together broke the law, but their determination would change it. Richard and Mildred Loving were at the heart of a Supreme Court case that legalized marriage between races, and a story of the devoted couple who faced discrimination, fought it, and won. Derived from a Kirkus review: A powerful and riveting account of an American couple in love when that love was ruled illegal in many American states. In the early 1950s a boy and a girl in rural Virginia fell in love and got married. Her family was "descended / from African slaves. / And their owners." He was white. Their love was scorned and against the law in their state. The couple, Mildred and Richard Loving, alternate and sometimes join together to tell their stories in beautifully rendered free verse. Love, children, marriage, jail, flight to Washington, D.C., long court battles, and final unanimous vindication in 1967 from the Warren Supreme Court fill the pages, detailing every particle of their strong feelings for each other and the equally strong bigotry of the local sheriff and state judicial system. Full-page photographs of school segregation and civil rights demonstrations clearly set the time frame. Excerpts from court decisions, period headlines, and quotations from Dr. King strengthen the learning for readers. Strickland’s blue-, gray-, and yellow-toned illustrations have a strong retro feel and tenderly reinforce the written words. A song of love vs. a cacophony of hate—all in a beautiful model of bookmaking. (timeline, bibliography, credits and sources) (Historical verse fiction). Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The case involved Mildred Loving, a woman of color, and white man Richard Loving. In 1958, they were sentenced to a year in prison for marrying each other. Their marriage violated Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriage between people classified as ".…