A Flea For Justice

A Civil Rights activist began her quest for justice as a child.
Growing up in segregated South Carolina, Marian Wright Edelman was admonished for drinking from a fountain meant for white people—an experience that left its mark on the then-4-year-old. Her hero, the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, once responded to a white man’s dismissive remarks (“Why I don’t care any more for your talk than I do for the bite of a flea”) with a determined “Perhaps not, but Lord willing, I’ll keep you scratching.” Calling herself a “flea for justice,” Marian fought injustice any way she could: As a child, she switched the signs on segregated water fountains, and while in college, she participated in protests at restaurants that refused to serve African Americans. As the first Black female lawyer in Mississippi, she defended activists arrested for helping African Americans register to vote. She marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and, after he was killed, channeled her efforts into young people’s education, establishing the Children’s Defense Fund and Freedom Schools. Bolling writes in a lively, even playful tone, frequently posing questions to her young audience, returning often to the flea metaphor, and leaving readers with a final challenge: “What will you do to make someone scratch?” Close-ups of faces—Marian’s, Sojourner Truth’s, and King’s, as well as those of the students whom Marian touched—dominate Grooms’ vivid digital art.
A spirited account of a life devoted to service.
—Kirkus Reviews

Bolling builds a third-person narrative around a Sojourner Truth quote in this forthright picture book biography of children’s and civil rights leader Marian Wright Edelman (b. 1939). When the then-four-year-old subject drinks from a fountain labeled “White Only” and is pulled away by a teacher, she “didn’t like being told that she couldn’t do something.” After learning about Sojourner Truth’s response to her talk being compared to the bite of a flea (“Lord willing, I’ll keep you scratching”), Wright Edelman seeks to end segregation-era inequities. She finds more and more ways “to make people scratch” as a college-age protestor and Mississippi’s first Black woman lawyer. And Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., she founds the Children’s Defense Fund to ensure that, through education, “all children had a future.” Grooms’s airbrush-style digital illustrations show Wright Edelman across the decades as this thought-provoking title asks, “What will you do to make someone scratch?” Back matter includes more about the subject and an author’s note.
—Publishers Weekly