The+Watsons+go+to+Birmingham+-+1963

=**The Watsons Go To Birmingham - 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis.**=



The Watsons Go To Birmingham - 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis is a book about a strange family that lives in Flint Michigan called the Watsons. Wilona and Daniel Watson have two sons, Byron and Kenny, and a daughter, Joetta. Byron, the oldest child, is 13 years old and acts all cool because he's growing up. He gets himself into some trouble with his parents and they decide the best thing to do would be sending him off to live with Wilona's mother, Grandma Sands, in Birmingham, Alabama. The topic I chose to connect to this story is Segregation, because, other then Wilona, the Watsons have lived their whole lives in Flint and they don't know about how African Americans were treated in the South. When the long car ride is finally over and they reach Birmingham, they meet their Grandma Sands for the first time. They all have a good time, until one day when the youngest child in the family, Joetta, goes to Sunday school with some neighbors. The family is sitting around the house as they normally would, and they hear a loud empty bang, like thunder. All the neighbors come out of their houses to see what had happened, the church was bombed by two white men. Luckily Joetta wasn't in the church because she saw Kenny down the street and went to say hello. This book relates to Segregation because it's about a black family visiting down South and learning what it's like for other black families down there. Kenny is still too young to understand why two white men would want to do such a thing, but Byron explains it to him and Kenny doesn't feel ashamed anymore. "Kenny, things ain't ever going to be fair. How's it fair that two grown men hate Negroes so much that they'd kill some kids just to stop them from going to school? How's it fair that even though the cops down there might know who did it nothing will probably ever happen to those men? It ain't. But you just gotta understand that that's the way it is and keep steppin'."

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[|http://www.tesd.k12.pa.us/tems/library/Watson's.htm]