Teaching Civil Rights

Given our recent in-class discussion regarding how we learned about the civil rights movement, I was interested in looking at what sorts of books for elementary education are currently being published and marketed as educational. An amazon.com search turns up the expected Martin Luther King Jr. references, but also some surprisingly nuanced children's books.

For example, A Sweet Smell of Roses "pays tribute to the many unnamed children who participated in the African-American struggle for civil rights." Even the more typical I Am Rosa Parks seems to make an effort to recognize her education and background in the civil rights movement, as Classen does. For a slightly older audience, Amazon has books like Freedom Riders: John Lewis and Jim Zwerg on the Front Lines of the Civil Rights Movement, which similarly focuses on less well-known figures. These sorts of examples come up repeatedly throughout the search.

This brings me to my discussion question: Do you think that current authors are more aware and responsible when it comes to representing a more complete view of the civil rights movement? Do you think that even at a younger level, people are becoming more aware of the actual stories (books that debunk the historical myths come to mind), rather than simply accepting the fablized versions so often told?