With the Might of Angels

With the Might of Angels
Book no.	40
Series	Dear America
Author	Andrea Davis Pinkney
Publisher	Scholastic
Published	September 1, 2011
Pages	331
ISBN	9780545297059
Setting	Hadley, Virginia
Timeline	May 1954 – May 1955
Preceded by
Chronology	The Fences Between Us
Publication	Cannons at Dawn
Followed by
Chronology	Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
Publication	Behind the Masks

With the Might of Angels: The Diary of Dawnie Rae Johnson is a historical fiction book written by Andrea Davis Pinkney. It is the fourth new book in the Dear America relaunch and the fortieth overall. The book was published in September 2011 and was followed by Susan Patron's Behind the Masks. It was republished with new cover art in April 2019.

After the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, Dawnie Rae Johnson gets an opportunity to attend her town's previously all-white school.

Dedication

"This book is dedicated to the legacies of Thurgood Marshall and George E. Bragg."

Book description

• 1st
• 2nd

"My name is Dawnie. This is my story....
Twelve-year-old Dawnie Rae Johnson's life turns upside down after the Supreme Court rules in favor of desegregation in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education. Her parents decide that Dawnie will attend Prettyman Coburn, a previously all-white school—but she'll be the only one of her friends to enroll in this new school.
Not everyone in Hadley supports integration, though, and much of the town is outraged at the decision. As she starts school, Dawnie endures the harsh realities of racism. But the backlash against her attendance at Prettyman Coburn is more than she's prepared for, and she begins to wonder if the hardship is worth it. Will Dawnie be able to hold on to the true meaning of justice and remain faithful to her own integrity?"

"Twelve-year-old Dawnie Rae Johnson's life turns upside down after the Supreme Court rules in favor of desegregation in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education. Her parents decide that Dawnie will attend Prettyman Coburn, a previously all-white school—but she'll be the only one of her friends to enroll in this new school.
Not everyone in Dawnie's town of Hadley, Virginia, supports integration, though, and much of the community is outraged by the decision. As she starts school, Dawnie encounters the harsh realities of racism. But the backlash against her arrival at Prettyman Coburn is more than she's prepared for, and she begins to wonder if the hardship is worth it. Will Dawnie be able to hold on to the true meaning of justice and remain faithful to her own sense of integrity?"

Plot

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For her twelfth birthday in 1954, Dawnie Rae Johnson receives a diary made by her younger brother Goober. Her father Curtis then shows her a newspaper headline, which reads "High court bans school segregation." Dawnie lives in Hadley, Virginia and attends Mary McLeod Bethune School, the town's school for black children. A few days later, Mr. Calhoun informs Dawnie that she will be giving a speech for the end of the year ceremony. She dreads giving the speech and having to wear the "Peach Melba" dress her mother Loretta purchases especially for the occasion. On the day of the ceremony, Dawnie's dress splits at the seams when she steps onstage, so she does not have to give the speech after all.

In July, Dawnie learns that her parents have signed her up to Hadley's all-white school, Prettyman Coburn. Dawnie is excited until she learns that her best friend, Yolanda Graves, will not be attending with her.

Historical Note

In America, Jim Crow laws kept black and white citizens racially segregated in public spaces like restaurants, movie theaters, pools, buses, and hotels. For schools, the belief of "separate but equal" was upheld. In reality, these public schools were not equal. Black students had "inferior" materials and facilities, and black teachers were underpaid and struggled to provide "proper learning tools for their students." A group of black parents worked with the NAACP to sue school boards for discriminating against black children. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of school integration in the case, Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954. Despite the ruling, there was much resistance against integration.

Harry F. Byrd was a U.S. senator and segregationist whom promoted the "Southern Manifesto" movement. In 1956, he started an initiative, called "massive resistance," which attempted to circumnavigate integration. The tactics used by the initiative were eventually declared illegal by Virginia courts. By 1957, less than two percent of southern schools were integrated. Two famous cases of school integration are cited next. Nine black students, called the "Little Rock Nine," enrolled at Central High School. Their attempts to enter the school were covered by the national media. In 1960, Ruby Bridges became the first black child to attend William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans.

The section includes nineteen photographs of events and people mentioned in the book. Detailed captions are given to the photographs of Elizabeth Eckford and the Greensboro protests. A map concerning the legality of school segregation before Brown v. Board of Education is also included. Following the photographs, there are three more sections discussing the historical figures mentioned in the book, Negro History Week (now Black History Month), and a timeline of civil rights events that happened during Dawnie's lifetime.

Characters

Main article: List of With the Might of Angels characters

• Dawnie Rae Johnson, a twelve-year-old who begins attending a previously all-white school. As a result, she and her family face racism and hardship in their small town of Hadley, Virginia.
• Goober Johnson is Dawnie's kind eight-year-old brother whom has a fixation with peanuts. He is described by his mother as having a "special way of seeing things."

Author

Main article: Andrea Davis Pinkney

Andrea Davis Pinkney is an American author as well as the vice president and editor-at-large for Scholastic. Her work focuses on African-American history. With the Might of Angels is Pinkney's only entry for Dear America. At age six, she began attending an all-white school "more than a decade" after Brown v. Board of Education. Pinkney described feeling a "keen sense of loneliness and isolation as the school's only black student." After discovering a collection of materials about Brown v. Board of Education among her father's things, Pinkney felt compelled to "craft a school integration story for today's readers."

Editions

• Physical
• eBook
• Audio

With the Might of Angels
Reprint
9781338530957
(April 2019)

With the Might of Angels
Dear America eBook
B005HE2QFG
(September 2011)

• Narrator: Channie Waites
• Publisher: Scholastic Audio
• Published: September 1, 2011
• Running time: 6 hours and 37 minutes
• No. of discs: 6
• ISBN: 9780545353977

Videos

Andrea Davis Pinkney interview about With the Might of Angels

With the Might of Angels (2019 edition) trailer

Acknowledgments

Like Dawnie Rae, I was blessed "with the might of angels" in the creation of this book. Special thanks to Katherine Wilkins, reference librarian, Virginia Historical Society, whose careful attention to the details involving school integration and legislation in the state of Virginia helped me solidify and round out the facts in Dawnie's narrative.
I thank my cousin John Mullen, whose colorful recounting of his own integration experiences in Newport News, Virginia, gave life to Dawnie's story and that of her family. Thanks, too, to Rhonda Joy McLean, who integrated her school in Smithfield, North Carolina, and who generously shared her memories with me.
Thank you, all my friends and colleagues at Scholastic for inviting Dawnie Rae Johnson into the Dear America fold, and for fostering a love of history through the Dear America series.
Elizabeth Parisi, special thanks to you for designing such an engaging book cover. Thanks, too, to artist Tim O'Brien for your portrait depicting Dawnie with beauty and dignity. Thank you, Elizabeth Starr Baer, for your amazing copyediting talents and your eagle-eyed fact-checking of the material.
Rebecca Sherman, my agent, and Lisa Sandell, my editor, you are both angels without whose might I could not have written this book. I thank you for your keen editorial insights, and for the care with which you each helped me polish Dawnie's story.
Thanks to Mom, for being the keeper of memories, and for somehow always managing to pull the right rabbit from the right hat, at the right moment.
Finally, thanks to the angels who live under the same roof as I do–my daughter, Chloe, and son, Dobbin, who listened to Dawnie's story for months and offered invaluable suggestions for making her real.
Finally, a loving thank-you to my brightest angel of all, Brian Pinkney, for reading each and every one of this diary's entries, for laughing in all the right places, and for helping me bring power and grace to Dawnie Rae and the Johnson family.

Notes

• The portrait of Dawnie Rae on the cover was illustrated by Tim O'Brien. The background is a detail of a photograph titled High school, Knoxville, Tenn.
• The cover of the second edition was illustrated by Mike Heath.
• For the purposes of the story, With the Might of Angels is set in the fictional town of Hadley though the county, Lee County, exists in Virginia.
• A photograph of George Edward Chalmer Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James Nabrit Jr. is included in the main body of the text, instead of the historical note, as a part of the story.

See Also

Dear America navigation
← Publication → Cannons at Dawn Behind the Masks ← Chronology → The Fences Between Us Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

External links

• With the Might of Angels Discussion Guide at Scholastic (archive)
• With the Might of Angels at Teaching Books