Hope in a Classroom // The Remarkable Story of Black American Students, Teachers, and Schools from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement (Pre-Order, Jan 12 2027)

After emancipation, freed people of all ages wanted to go to school. From the story of John McCline, who learned to read as a boy serving in the Union Army, through the teachers who built one-room schoolhouses across the rural South during Reconstruction to the student-led movement to desegregate schools during the Civil Rights movement, Imani Perry’s intimate and sweeping social history narrates this powerful desire for education and literacy–and how African Americans built and maintained an education system even while segregated and unequal public education failed them. These schools taught Black children to believe in themselves and their future despite Jim Crow and the institutionally racist society they lived in.

Informed by a rich trove of letters, diaries, and other archival materials,Hope in a Classroomis a necessary, expansive new narrative of the Black American experience for young readers, delivered in a propulsive and soaring voice.

Imani Perryis the National Book Award-winning author ofSouth to Americaand an interdisciplinary scholar of race, law, literature, and African American culture. She lives outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is a professor at Harvard University.

• Publisher: Norton Young Readers
• Publish Date: January 12, 2027
• Pages: 288
• Language: English
• Type: Hardcover
• EAN/UPC: 9781324019299
• Dimensions: N/A
• BISAC Categories: Kids