. . . If You Lived at the Time of Martin Luther King

I can say the book was very insightful at the times. Can't believe how people lived then. Read the part about the children's book with different rabbits. Bet the author could get into some serious trouble in those times if he was found out. Times were really nuts back then.

My son loved this book.

This is a great book for an introduction to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for my 11 and 10 year old.

Reason for Reading: Read aloud to ds as part of our history curriculum.As with all "If You..." books, the book is presented in a series of questions and answers which progress naturally from a beginning point to an ending. After the brief introduction which leads us up to the plight of the black people in the US in the fifties and sixties the book starts with the question "What was segregation?" This is a very thorough book which looks at the Civil Rights Movement from the earliest rumblings of the brave lone men and woman who took a stand by sitting on a bus in the white section or sitting in diners for white people all the way through to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination and modern day prejudice. Though the book's title refers to MLK, this is not a biography of him and he is not mentioned until well into the book. Of course once he is mentioned then he and the movement become inseparable, but the book is about the times first.My son was very interested in this book, and with us being Canadians this was the first time he had heard about this topic in such depth. Of course, we have come across the subject in our readings to date and I've discussed it with him but this book really brought the reality of the situation, mostly in the Southern US, to life for him. He was plain outright flabbergasted at the "whites only" and "no coloreds" signs that were posted everywhere and everything that was actually involved with segregation. It was a real eye opener for him that a world like this once existed and we tried to imagine what it would be like for us today if we were out in the world with so many rules against what we were allowed to do and where we could go and he found it near impossible. He is glad that Canada is a free country and that we were a welcome destination for the slaves back in those days. (from previous studies) This book definitely made an impact on him and I personally was well pleased with it, also.

Even though If You Lived At the Time of Martin Luther King is a picture book, it doesn’t pull any punches. It discusses lynching and what it is, the KKK, and the multiple killings, bombings, and other violence related to the civil rights movement. It doesn’t go into graphic detail but it still may be too much if you have a sensitive child. It’s too much for my seven and nine year old boys at this point, but I’m hoping I can read it with them in the next couple of years. This book is 79 pages long so if you read it with your child, I would plan on it taking two or three sessions to get through. Fortunately it’s divided into sections so there are pre-made stopping points.I loved that this book didn’t sugar coat the fact that even though the civil rights movements is over there is still more work to be done and inequality still exists in America. This book was published in 1994 so there is no mention of Clinton or Obama. It would wonderful if an updated version was released.I think this book is appropriate up through middle school. Even though it’s a picture book, it’s not babyish in any way. I highly recommend this book if you are wanting your children to have a good overview of the history of black people and civil rights in this country from the end of slavery up until current day.

This is a perfect read for those middle grade elementary school students. It has a just-right balance of text, information about ML King and illustrations.

Whenever teachers in our predominantly white elementary school ask me to recommend a title pertaining to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or to African American history, this is one of the first books I suggest for grades 4, 5 and 6.The question and answer format lends itself to reading aloud and then discussing topics that come up, like segregation, white supremacy, the Montgomery bus boycott, etc. I recently read part of this book to a fourth grade class who just had "segregation" as a vocabulary word. The students were quite attentive and asked some excellent questions.The title is a bit misleading in that some might view it as a biography of Dr. King. While many sections do draw upon personal events in Dr. King's life, such as when he was a youngster riding in the car with his father and he heard a police officer call his dad "boy." Or again, when he was young and he was told he could no longer play with his white friends. But as the title says, it's really about if you lived at the "time" of Dr. King. Therefore, it's an excellent introduction to many aspects of the Civil Rights movement.While the watercolor illustrations are an improvement over the black and white drawings in earlier editions of this "If You Lived At the Time Of" series, in this case I think the text could be more fully enhanced with actual photographs, especially since many of these illustrations are copied from well-known photographs.All in all, this is an excellent introduction to the Civil Rights Movement for upper-elementary students (and apparently for middle-school students according to another review here). This is one title that, in my opinion, should be in every elementary school in the nation. Recommended.

I love these books! I use them for teaching history to my homeschooled first-grader, and she has learned so much about life in America over the centuries. She enjoys them so much, she sometimes pulls them out to reread them on her own time, after we've finished that era in our schoolwork. This book on MLKJr is no exception.