Jumpstarts Read for the Record [Video]

Patricia: This book, Goin’ Someplace Special, which was illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, is autobiographical. It’s about when I was growing up in Nashville, and my grandmother and I used to go to a very special place once a week. And to get there we had to go through town and we rode the bus and came back around.

Now this is the South, the Nashville of the segregated South. That was the time when Nashville was segregated based on racial lines. There was so many places that blacks could not go and they had to ride the back of the bus. So when I started out begging my grandmother to let me go downtown by myself, she always said, “No, you have to go with me,” because they didn’t want us to be hurt by those circumstances.

They kind of buffered it with us and so I was not allowed to go, but then one time …