On the evening of June 19, 1982, Vincent Chin was beaten in the middle of a street in Detroit, Michigan after going to a club for the evening. He was going to be married in a little over a week. Instead of people attending his wedding, they went to his funeral. The question is raised was Vincent killed because he was Asian? At this time in America, there was a lot of anti-Asian sentiment in part due to the fact that the United States car industry was beginning to face stiff competition from countries like Japan. Of course, the United States has had a long history of having racist tendencies toward immigrants and citizens of Asian ancestry, including going back to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act which was the first time the country put immigration limits on who could enter based on race.
For the first time, across America, Asian Americans were unified in wanting to make sure justice was served. However, there were many obstacles in the way to making this happen. The fact that Vincent Chin was of Chinese ancestry led the government beginning to question if Chin’s civil rights had been violated because of his race.
From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry by Paula Yoo is a remarkable book focusing on another Civil Rights movement in the United States and one that many probably have never heard about.
Recommended for grades 8 and up.
accordance to their sentence. Many boys stayed well after the time they were supposed to be released.
mom, or his mom’s boyfriend, and the pain of feeling like he had to hide his family’s situation from the world. In fact, at times, it feels like to Rex, there will never be a time when he doesn’t have some kind of pain.
The twentieth anniversary of the Twin Towers falling and the attack on the Pentagon and the flight that went down in Pennsylvania just happened. This book In the Shadow of the Fallen Towers by Don Brown is a graphic novel that takes the reader onto the front lines of the disaster as it was happening, moment by moment, and then also looks at the aftermath for many of the first responders.
When the sharecroppers got together to discuss how to unionize, they knew they were doing something dangerous. After all, black people in the United States didn’t just decide they wanted to get a fair shake of things. After all, historically speaking, why would they think that was even possible? And in 1919, especially in the South, there was no way they were going to get fair prices for the cotton they had spent months growing and cultivating, unless they worked together. Even as they headed into the meeting at the church, they were nervous. Nervous enough to hire guards to be on the look out. But what happened was beyond their worst imaginings.
came about, and where so many of the ideas we still believe today actually had their origins? When we look back at the history of enslaved people in our country, how is it that so many beliefs that were started hundreds of years ago to justify this horrific economic machine are still around, over 150 years after the abolition of the official practice?
when he couldn’t find a good job. He came to America and stayed for many years, mostly working as a waiter. He even married an American woman. However, he never felt he was doing anything really important. So when his mother came for a visit from Germany and saw that he wasn’t doing anything super special, he decided to move back to Germany. What George didn’t realize was that Germany under Hitler had become a very repressive country and he was even more limited in what he could do. He did have one skill though and that was that he had lived in America for many years and could speak English and knew about America life and culture. He was just the sort of man that Hitler and the Nazis were looking for to infiltrate the U.S. and start taking out the manufacturing structure.
When Chuna and her mother decided to go on a trip to American and to the state of Alabama, Chuna didn’t think much of it. After all, she and her mother were always going on trips outside of South Korea. However, when her mother tells her she is going to marry a man and they are now going to live in America, Chuna’s world falls apart. She knows hardly any English, and her new “cousins” and stepsister are distant and not open to helping her at all navigate this new world.
were all CAUGHT! All of these people were famous for something and they all got too “caught” up in what they were doing, and it led to their downfall.
bringing terror to civilians and military leaders alike, they had a list of things they wanted. Specific things. Art things. Hitler, who had started out trying to get into art school, considered himself a lover of art and an artist, and as such, he wanted to get certain pieces and keep them in a new museum, in his former hometown of Linz, Austria. It would be called Gemaldegalerie Linz, but soon, it became known as the Fuhrermuseum – of course nicknamed after the Fuhrer himself, Hitler. The problem was, where would he get all these masterpieces to put in this amazing museum? Most of them were already in other museums and private collections. So it was determined that as Germany and the Nazis went into areas and occupied them, they would work from a list and gather as many of the pieces Hitler wanted as possible. And so it began.
Books in the Middle: Reading for Middle School 