Brown Girl Dreaming (racism, civil rights, and the young mind)

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Brown Girl Dreaming, a narrative told in verse by Jacqueline Woodson, follows an African American girl and her family's lives living in the 1960's and1970's in Brooklyn and South Carolina. The 1960's is when the Civil Rights Movement was at its height. Therefore, it becomes a prominent theme with Jackie being African American and living in the south for a good part of her early life. Jacqueline Woodson is able to gives us narrative of the Civil Rights Movement from a point of view rarely seen, that being an African American child in South Carolina.
Her telling of events that she went through displaying racism has an interesting dichotomy that only a child could have at the time. The dichotomy was a mix of confusion on why they are being treated differently while at the same time having the understanding of the danger that her family and her experience. The example I think demonstrates this dichotomy best would be from the poem “greenville, south carolina, 1963.” An excerpt reads as follows,
On the bus, my mother moves with us to the back.
                                    It’s 1963
                                   in South Carolina.
                                  Too dangerous to sit closer to the front
                                          and dare the driver.  (Woodson, pg. 30)
This excerpt from the poem is something very real, raw, and emotional. It baffles me that this was less than sixty years ago. This passage shows that from a child Jackie understood from an incredibly young age that her life was valued less than the lives of the white people by society. As a child she was able to understand this but there was no reason to why. She never knew why, but she was told by society that having dark skin makes you less important and not to challenge the status quo because it could be very dangerous for herself and her family. I am very glad that I was able to gain a little perspective and see how it was to live in Greenville in the 1960s as a black woman. I am also incredibly glad that she was able to find inspiration and a dream after seeing a picture of a girl that looked like her in the library. 

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