INTRODUCTION
This reading guide is designed to accompany Daveena Kenny, Shatyia Givens, Jocktavious Montford, and Geralyn Hooks’s book Breonna Marches Through Time. We hold the belief that anti-racist practice is a process of learning (and unlearning) over time. Reading Is Resistance sees reading as an opportunity to seed deeper conversations and possibilities for action around racial justice.
Lesson content was written by Zapoura Newton-Calvert and was designed to start and deepen anti-bias/anti-racist conversations in families and other learning communities.
BOOK THEMES
ACTION, JUSTICE, TIME TRAVEL, FANTASY, COMMUNITY, BLACK LIVES MATTER, POLICE VIOLENCE
GET THE BOOK
There is currently no read aloud available for this book; however, you can purchase Breonna Marches Through Time from Shout Mouse Press and support the amazing work they do with young underheard writers and illustrators.
BOOK SUMMARY
It’s the summer of 2020 and Breonna, an 8-year-old Black girl living in Washington DC, is not having her usual summer full of community fun and ice cream. Instead, her family is sticking close to home as they watch tensions and protests between protestors for Black Lives and police.
What else makes her summer a little bit unusual? Breonna finds that she can time travel, first visiting the 1955 sit-ins led by teacher Clara Luper and her 8-year-old-daughter Marilyn Luper Hildreth and then visiting a possible future of what may happen without current and past Black rights movements. Both time travel experiences inspire Breonna to take a leadership role in the movement for Black Lives happening now.
Time travel fiction gives the characters and the reader an opportunity to imagine their own timeline anew, to get direct inspiration from the past, and to be forewarned by possible futures. This book is no exception. Breonna is able to connect back to a legacy of young Black leaders in the movement for racial justice and to activate her own voice in a new way by seeing her own family as an integral part of the movement in the present and future. Activating young readers’ imaginations around seeing themselves in history and understanding their connectivity is a powerful step in raising young revolutionaries.
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