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<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\nTitles include Julie\u2019s Heritage<\/em> (a black high school girl grapples with racism and dating), Why Did You Go to College Linda Warren?<\/em> (good-girl Linda gets embroiled with anti-war activists during her first year of college), Lots of Love, Lucinda<\/em> (Corry\u2019s white family invites a black student from the south to stay with them and go to school in the North), Willow Hill<\/em> (Val\u2019s highschool is integrated when a new housing project gets built) and Buenos D\u00edas, Teacher<\/em> (Jennifer gets involved in social protest when she teaches at a rundown school in a Mexican-American neighborhood).<\/p>\n The gem of this special shelf is Margaret Pitcairn Strachey\u2019s Where Were You That Year?<\/em> wherein college girl Polly Masterson travels south to register black voters in Mississippi. Now seems the right time to look back on this peppy call to action. For like Polly, aren\u2019t we all wondering what we will tell our future children when they ask what the hell we were doing to fight injustice in 2017?<\/p>\n Classic Line:<\/strong> \u201cI\u2019m now a part of the most exciting thing that is taking place in the United States today!\u201d<\/p>\n During orientation and training in Batesville, Polly learns about non-violence, the movement history, pores over A Pictorial History of the Negro<\/a>, participates in bull sessions on racism, and prepares for the violence and harrassment she can expect in the field. Shortly after Polly successfully role-plays the proper defensive measures to take during an unfriendly traffic stop, the trainer gives her the green light. \u201cI\u2019m now a part of the most exciting thing that is taking place in the United States today!\u201d thinks Polly.<\/p>\n Polly is sent to Lee, where she lives in the Freedom House with a rotating roster of other volunteers, organizes a black youth group, sorts clothes for giveaways, and takes part in the door-to-door canvassing grind, trying to convince local blacks to register for the Freedom Vote. Housing is bare bones and over-crowded, food and money are in short supply, and local law enforcement is a far cry from the Officer Friendlies of other Y-teen tales. The white volunteers are hardly idealized either; Freedom House-mates Ariel and Joe shirk work and eat Polly\u2019s food until she resorts to locking it in her suitcase.<\/p>\n In addition to locking up her cans of juice, Polly learns she must sneak out of the black-owned caf\u00e9 when the cops cruise by. She discovers that local black ministers are afraid to let her teen group meet in their churches. Periodically she yearns for the boy she left behind: \u201cWhat she would not give to have Hank here now!\u201d But in spite of these unfamiliar hardships, Polly perseveres, dodging cops, teaching Freedom classes, and learning lots of new songs. \u201cIt\u2019s worth all the discomforts, all the petty annoyances with someone like Ariel, and just rice for supper!\u201d she thinks.<\/p>\n One day there\u2019s a knock on the door and who should it be but Hank, who\u2019s joined the movement in order to pursue Polly, but has learned to love the COFO, SNCC, etc. for themselves: \u201cI realize that butting in down here, as I called it, is the only way conditions can be changed!\u201d In the shabby Freedom House, he snaps the gold basketball charm Polly had returned to him back on her bracelet. They are now in sync, united in love and activism.<\/p>\n This pretty much ends the romantic tension in the book, and the next 95 pages are filled with the day-to-day routine of a civil rights worker in 1964 \u2014 constant anxiety, poor living conditions, and police harrassment. Hanks wonders aloud, \u201cWhat will it be like when we get home and don\u2019t have to be on the lookout for a policeman, a sheriff, or white rabble?\u201d Worn down by the work and food theft, Polly gets a bad cold and moves in with a helpful black family to recuperate. She becomes close with their teenaged kids, Billy and Avis, and even finds a place for her youth group to meet.<\/p>\n Crisis hits when she and Hank are pulled over by a sheriff and arrested on a trumped up charge of vagrancy. Like the well-trained civil rights volunteers they are, they refuse to be finger-printed, demand that they be charged and given a phone call or released, and have an answer for every attack. \u201c\u2018Seems to me, Sheriff,\u2019\u201d says one deputy, \u201c\u2018this little girl\u2019s smarter than you.\u2019\u201d Despite this admission, Hank gets beaten up, and they both spend the night in jail. Bailed out, they get chased by a carful of white guys shooting guns. The Freedom House is vandalized.<\/p>\n These two events \u2014 the jail time and the car chase \u2014 are the book\u2019s peak experiences, as harrowing as this Y-teen version of civil rights activism gets. There\u2019s plenty off-stage violence, but our young couple in love emerge unscathed, eternally focused on the positive. Their case is transferred to federal court, and they head back to Seattle for the Christmas holidays. On the final pages Hank brings the book back to its Y-teen roots, with an oblique marriage proposal: \u201cwhen you told me not to look back later and ask where was I in 1964 that I didn\u2019t do anything, I started wondering \u2014 suppose my own children asked me that years from now? Then I realized that you wouldn\u2019t be the mother of those children unless I had done something.\u201d Polly is suffused with a \u201cglow that spread through her entire being,\u201d as they drive North, leaving Mississippi behind.<\/p>\n Historical Context:<\/strong> This book checks off lots of historically accurate details, while soft-pedaling the very real danger volunteers in Mississippi faced in 1964. John Lewis\u2019s March<\/em> trilogy conveys the unceasing, horrific level of violence, which left many Freedom Summer volunteers exhibiting the same battle fatigue symptoms displayed by war veterans.<\/p>\n As March<\/em> and Taylor Branch\u2019s Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years<\/em> will tell you (or wikipedia and half a dozen other websites if you want the short version), Freedom Summer was the brainchild of Robert Moses<\/a> (the SNCC activist, not the highway builder) who\u2019d been organizing in Mississippi since 1961. Moses proposed flooding the state with thousands of volunteers who would register voters, organize \u201cFreedom Schools,\u201d and also work on something called the Freedom Vote<\/a>, part of a strategy to challenge the Mississippi delegation at the 1964 democratic convention.<\/p>\n The first couple hundred volunteers had barely arrived when Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner<\/a> were murdered. Although their deaths fueled the most headlines, the violence didn\u2019t stop there: \u201cthere were 80 workers beaten, 1,000 arrests as well as 37 churches bombed or burned,\u201d (per Swarthmore\u2019s Global Non-violent Action Database<\/a>). Polly learns of violence via the phone tree that connected volunteers, but the book focuses with peppy positivity on the movement\u2019s small victories.<\/p>\n The book also softpedals the tensions between the mostly black organizers and the mostly white volunteers, tensions that caused considerable debate in SNCC: \u201cThere had been several complaints about white volunteers trying to take over,\u201d Lewis writes, continuing that activists were irritated because \u201cthe press had focused much of their attention on the white workers, often identified by name, shown working alongside nameless blacks.\u201d<\/p>\n Contemporary Critics:<\/strong> \u201cThe book has the impact of timeliness and of unbelievable but terrifying experiences but suffers the flaws of most books written to order\u2014too much information overwhelms the plot in the earlier chapters. Characters lack warmth and depth despite the inevitable emotional overtones of the story. The romance between Polly and Hank who joins her in Mississippi is too pallid to be believed. Recommended only until a better fictional account of this stage of our nation\u2019s history is written. Many recently published books of non-fiction on the same subject possibly serve a better purpose.\u201d My Take:<\/strong> Allie Beth\u2019s \u201ctoo pallid\u201d line above (was the double entendre intentional?) is accurate, but despite its flaws, I love this book. It illuminates a forgotten corner of history, one of the many campaigns that made up the complex mosaic of civil rights actions in the early sixties. Sure the characters are a bit flat; but it\u2019s a very even-handed flatness. Polly and Hank hardly have more depth than Billy and Avis, their black teen proteg\u00e9s, and the book is blessedly free of those tormented attempts to render Southern black speech phonetically. Also Strachan focuses on the nuts and bolts of the daily activist routine \u2014 the preoccupation with food, money, and small discomforts \u2014 which give the book a documentary feel, albeit somewhat sanitized. But the book\u2019s real appeal is the way it combines the clich\u00e9s of teen romance with violent social upheaval. In no other book is the contrast between these two elements so extreme. It\u2019s a like a prom date at a church bombing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There\u2019s a treasured shelf in my collection of mid-century teen fiction and career girl books. It holds those rare voumes in which the burgeoning civil rights movement of the sixties collides with the whitebread high school fantasies of the fifties … Continue reading ![](\"http:\/\/monicanolan.com\/images\/WhereWereYou_600x894.jpg\")
Plot:<\/strong> Little Polly Masterson surprises everyone when she decides to join the voter registration movement in Missisippi, far from her Seattle home. Her parents have never taken her seriously. Social-worker sister Joan disparages the volunteers as \u201chalf-baked kids.\u201d Boyfriend Hank thinks Polly is motivated by a crush on another activist. But it\u2019s idealism that fuels Polly and sends her ridesharing her way south with three other volunteers, alternately learning the lyrics to \u201cWe Shall Overcome\u201d and worrying about who Hank took to Sally\u2019s party.<\/p>\n
\n\u2014 Allie Beth Martin, Director City-County Library, Tulsa, OK. Library Journal<\/em>, October 15, 1965<\/p>\n