Midnight Without a Moon is the first of two books about thirteen-year-old Rose Lee Carter, an African American girl who lives with her sharecropper grandparents, brother, and cousin on a cotton plantation in rural Mississippi, 1955. Civil disobedience is taking root in the civil rights movement, and although the NAACP, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is fighting for them through the courts, Rose, her family, and community are constantly terrorized by whites. Black people are murdered for trying to register to vote, and even Rose is run off the road by a group of white boys in a truck.
Their mother abandoned Rose and her brother, Fred Lee, when she married a wealthy man and later moved to Chicago with her new family. Their grandmother, Ma Pearl, is mean to them. She favors lighter-skinned blacks like Rose’s cousin, Queen, and thinks Rose is ugly because she is darker than midnight without a moon. Like many of their neighbors, Ma Pearl is too afraid to support the civil rights movement. The plantation owners, who also own the shack where they live, threatened to throw them out if they participated in any NAACP activities. Ma Pearl works as a maid for the owner’s wife, while Papa, Rose’s grandfather, farms cotton. Rose and her brother have to work in the fields when they’re not in school and during the harvest they have to drop out of school to help Papa.
When a fourteen-year-old African American boy named Emmett Till, who was visiting from up North, is lynched by white men for supposedly flirting with a white woman, Rose and her best friend Hallelujah, the preacher’s son, hope for justice in the court trial.
Rose’s aunt left Mississippi to escape the violence and seek a better future, as many blacks had done. When she comes to visit to attend the trial, Rose dreams of returning with them to Saint Louis. She wants to go to college and have a hopeful future, but part of her wants to stay and fight for her rights the way Hallelujah and his father do. Rose’s aunt invites her to move to Saint Louis. Now Rose must choose whether to leave for a better future up north or fight for her rights in her home, Mississippi.
A Sky Full of Stars, by Linda Williams Jackson, continues Rose’s compelling story.
Author Linda Williams Jackson, who is from Mississippi and grew up on cotton plantations, reminds us of the courage of black people who fought for their rights under such harsh and dangerous conditions. Children of the nineteen fifties, like Rose, became the college students of the early sixties who were the backbone of the civil rights movement.