Baseball legend Jackie Robinson, the first black player in the sport’s major league, is well known for breaking the color barrier—but less so for his behind-the-scenes role as a civil rights activist who encouraged his children to foster their own relationship to the burgeoning movement for equality.
Child of the Dream: A Memoir of 1963 (Scholastic, Sept. 3) is his daughter Sharon Robinson’s vividly rendered middle-grade narrative inspired by the family’s curation of her father’s personal effects for the opening of the Jackie Robinson Museum in New York, named in his honor and scheduled to open in December 2019.
The book—which took two years to write—centers on the Robinson family’s respect for and support of the oft-overlooked Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963. Civil rights leaders in the city put thousands of their youngest citizens in the spotlight to showcase their courage; they were met with fire hoses, police dogs, and jail. Child of the Dream details how Sharon and her brothers, David and Jackie Jr., raised money for the Birmingham children through jazz concerts in Stamford, Connecticut, where they were living at the time. The book alsofeatures rare, intimate photographs of the Robinson family.
“We always had the public in on some of the great moments and some of the most painful moments of my life,” says Robinson. “My dad shared comfortably….The reason he shared comfortably, what I learned from him—many of our experiences can help other families. I grew up with that philosophy.”
Robinson says that today’s generation reminds her of her young self. When she visits young people in classrooms, learning about their lives, she says she is inspired by their “lifting their voices and creating their own fundraisers. I wanted to share that that is a value our family shared. I love that I can go back to a personal story but it’s a contemporary problem. We’ve been through this before. We do make progress.”
Joshunda Sanders is the author of the children’s book I Can Write the World.
