by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix

A Friendship for Today, by Patricia McKissack, Scholastic Press, 2007,
ISBN 978-04-3-966098-3
Available at Powell's Books

It’s 1954, and Rosemary is scared about being the only African-American student in her class at a new elementary school in Missouri.

In A Friendship for Today, McKissack deftly shows the discomfort and difficulties students faced during the first days of school desegration in the United States.

Rosemary feels “like everything around me is wrong.”  She is especially uncomfortable because her best friend suddenly can’t attend school due to polio.

There is plenty to fret about in addition to her former running partner’s paralysis and the unfriendliness of her classmates. Rosemary is worried about her parents’ endless arguing and her father’s frequent absences.

From bad to worse
Rags, a mottled black, white, and brown cat that Rosemary found near death by the railroad tracks, is another major concern. Rags spends her days lying in a box, healing so slowly that she barely seems to be alive. Rosemary talks to Rags about her troubles and tries to understand why Rags “won’t meow, or purr, or make any sound.”

Making matters worse, at school, Rosemary must sit next to Grace, a poor white girl who lives near Rosemary and whose family is well known for being racist.

In a note at the end of the book, author Patricia C. McKissack said that she based the story on her own experience of being the only black student in her sixth grade class in the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood, Missouri, in 1954.

That was the year the U.S. Supreme Court made it illegal for states to maintain separate public schools for black and white students in its Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision.

Adjusting to desegregation of public schools
Although Missouri remained part of the Union during the U.S. Civil War, slavery was legal there at its outset. Due to this fence straddling and the fact that it was just north of states that broke away to form the Confederate government, Missouri was called a “border state.”

While unofficial segregation of schools was a problem throughout the U.S. in 1954, segregated schools were the law in 17 southern and border states, including Missouri. McKissack wrote that Missouri integrated its schools immediately following the Brown decision, but it took decades for the south to comply with the law.

A Friendship for Today clearly shows the wariness of whites and blacks as they adjust to this historic change. The chilly atmosphere in Rosemary’s class begins to improve when her kind and creative teacher conducts an experiment intended to help the students develop tolerance.

Practicing prejudice
Mrs. Denapolis surprises the class by announcing that all the blue and green-eyed students will be barred from the cafeteria and will have to eat lunch in the classroom. She implies that this is necessitated by their inferiority.

“I’ve always been told green-eyed people are inferior,” Mrs. Denapolis says and adds, “Not too smart, a little bit slow… if you know what I mean.”

The daylong experiment jolts the class and causes tears, but is successful. It is an experience that sets the unimaginable in motion for Rosemary and Grace, who reluctantly become friends.

Empowering teachers to create change
Perhaps McKissack had a clever, insightful teacher such as Mrs. Denapolis. Or perhaps she based this part of her story on the experience of Jane Elliott, an Iowa teacher who conducted a similar experiment shortly after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968.

As Stephen Simpson noted in a 2005 article in The Seattle Times, over the years, Elliot’s experiment “was repeated, filmed and became a symbol both of what is wrong with our country and what can be right. Her lesson showed every teacher in every classroom in the nation the kind of power they have.”

Books such as A Friendship for Today further increase that power by giving teachers excellent tools for encouraging discussion about how far our nation has come and how much further it must go to erase intolerance.

McKissack has written many books for children by herself and in conjunction with her husband, Fredrick. One of their co-authored projects is the outstanding upper elementary picture book Christmas in the Big House, Christmas in the Quarters, which depicts the differences between the lives of plantation owners and their slaves prior to the Civil War.

McKissack has said, “I write because there’s a clear need for books written about the minority experience in America—fiction and nonfiction. I also write for the love of it!”