Children’s Book Program—A Song for the Unsung: Bayard Rustin, the Man Behind the 1963 March on Washington

National Archives Museum
Online

Poet, author, and professor Carole Boston Weatherford discusses her new picture book biography of Bayard Rustin. Rustin worked behind the scenes for the Civil Rights Movement including organizing the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, when a  quarter of a million activists and demonstrators from every corner of the United States convened in the nation’s capital. It was there that they raised their voices in unison to call for racial and economic justice for all Black Americans.

Carole Boston Weatherford—hailed by Huffington Post as a “master of picture book nonfiction”—is a Newbery Honor author, New York Times bestseller, and two-time NAACP Image Award winner. Since her 1995 debut, she has published more than 60 books, including these Caldecott Honor winners: Freedom in Congo Square, Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer: Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement, and Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom. Six of her books have won Coretta Scott King Awards or Honors.

This program is made possible in part by the National Archives Foundation.