“Crawling leads to walking, but to walk one must stand.” 

Medgar Evers: He Taught His Kids to Crawl so We Could Stand looks at moments in time - our history, racial past, even our current state of politics. It’s a riveting story, told in fittingly kid-friendly language, that explores how power and superiority corrupts everyone: those new to it and those resisting its loss. 

In Medgar Evers: He Taught His Kids to Crawl so We Could Stand, Katina Rankin teaches children that history’s mistakes can linger if we aren’t willing to stand up and tell the truth - that there will always be abuses of power unless we jointly take a knee to prove a point, and that the arc of the universe doesn’t bend toward justice unless we’re willing to do the work, even if it includes crawling to get the pendulum of justice to swing toward honesty. 

Each moment is filled with words of its era, with quotes intertwined into the conversational setting of a loving family’s home. The storytelling provides deeper insight for children than some history books. 

The author supplies an in-depth analysis of civil rights through a family’s dialogue of various aspects of the movement often just glossed over in school textbooks. 

Medgar Evers: He Taught His Kids to Crawl so We Could Stand also teaches kids now is always the time to do what’s right. It gives children hope, teaching them justice delayed is not justice denied.