Defiant: Growing Up in the Jim Crow South by Wade Hudson

Defiant: Growing Up in the Jim Crow South Reviews

• 
  Jan

  I would have assigned this as required reading for my eighth graders when I was teaching. I am retired now and absolutely enjoyed the book. The memoir is a well-written depiction of life growing up in northwestern Louisiana during the 1950's and 1960's.
  
  Not only does the memoir depict the close-knit family and rich cultural legacy of his neighborhood in Mansfield, LA, it also shows the dangers of simply getting on the city bus to go downtown to buy school clothes. Wade remembers the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Birmingham marches and bombing, the Freedom Summer of 1964, and the assassinations of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The memoir personalizes this turbulent time in American history.
  
  Wade Hudson was a charming and bright child as well as a leader among his friends and schoolmates. He and his brother started a baseball team when they were just 9 and 10 years old, because the Black children in Mansfield did not have one. A fun fact: the pitcher on his little league baseball team was Vida Blue, future Cy Young winning pitcher for the Oakland A's!
  
  Defiant is an excellent YA memoir, and I highly recommend it!
• 
  Edward Sullivan

  Hudson offers young readers a vivid, engaging, and insightful memoir about growing up a black boy in Jim Crow-era, rural Louisiana. He shares many colorful stories about his family, friends, the teachers who influenced and encouraged his creativity and intellectual curiosity, getting "saved" and baptized at a church revival, his love of baseball, and about becoming a committed civil rights activist as a college student.
• 
  Barbara

  I admire the work that this author and his wife, Cheryl Willis Hudson, have done with their publishing house, Just Us Books, and since I grew up during the same time period that Hudson himself did [well, just a little later], I was curious to learn more about what led to his involvement in the civil rights movement. After all, rural northwest Louisiana where Hudson was born and grew up might seem to be an unlikely place to give birth to a social activist--and yet it was. Mansfield, Louisiana is a small town where everyone seemed to know everyone, and where adults took responsibility for the neighborhood children. In many respects, Hudson was like most young boys of that era. He loved playing baseball, attending church, and spending time with his friends and siblings. The oldest boy in the family, he was responsible for making sure the younger members were safe and stayed in line. He describes the meals shared with friends and family and the love and support he felt from those around him, often individuals who were not related to him, as well as his complicated relationship with his father, and his love for school and learning. Clearly, Wade honed his leadership skills through school, church, and the community around him, and as he grew up, he became increasingly aware of the disparities between whites and Blacks. In this memoir, he describes the fears associated with venturing into the white section of town and not being able to try on clothing being purchased. Since his narrative begins when Wade is incarcerated in a small jail cell in East Baton Rouge because of his involvement in SOUL, a student activist group at Southern University, and then reels backward in time to his formative years in DeSoto Parish. Readers will be able to taste the delicious dishes Wade enjoyed as a boy, experience his brushes with death during health scares, and feel the warm love with which he was showered. They will also follow his growing awareness of racism and his need to take some sort of action to make his voice heard and work toward systemic change. Although much of what he describes may seem far in the past and almost impossible to believe, middle grade and teen readers will learn a great deal from his descriptions of growing up in the segregated South in the 1950s and 1960s and reflecting on how far our nation has or has not come since those times. Wade Hudson's well-written and deeply engaging story helps readers today understand the need to be defiant and how much someone's origins and early experiences shape his/her/their future. I hope high school teachers and librarians will recommend this title to students and that adults will read it as well. It would have been easy for Wade Hudson and others like him to sit quietly and accept the status quo. Instead, he took a different path, one that has made all the difference in the world and in Hudson himself.
• 
  Amelia

  Wade Hudson grew up in a shotgun house. Born to a loving family with plenty of children, he was surrounded by both structural inequity and love. Even young, he knew he was meant for something special. He walked his own path, sang his own songs. He learned what it meant to be faithful, to be creative, to be educated in a world that didn't want him to be any of those things.
  
  Chronicling his life from his youth up until a warrant was put out for his arrest--he hadn't been involved in a crime, but his blackness was crime enough--Hudson explains how his family and community shaped him into who he is and how they had given him a c. hance to escape his hometown and prove himself.
  
  This was an inspiring biography that I fully believe would benefit any child interested in memoirs and understanding this country's recent history.
• 
  Traci

  Wade Hudson’s story starts when he is in college and his work for the civil rights movement draws the attention of white city officials. He and two friends are falsely accused of plotting to kill the mayor and other powerful white men in an effort to keep Jim Crow laws firmly in place. After he is arrested, the story moves back in time to Wade’s early life and follows him as he grows up in the Jim Crow south, eventually ending up back in the jail cell where it started. This is an important story and is especially relevant as we see news stories on a daily basis that remind us that there is still so much work to do in the fight against institutional racism & inequity.
• 
  Jan

  In these tumultuous times, with our divided nation grappling with racism and struggling to come to terms with our history, Wade Hudson's memoir offers readers the opportunity to share his experiences growing up in a close-knit black community in the Jim Crow South. Students often find it difficult to fathom racial inequities rampant before the passage of civil rights legislation, and while memoirs are always subject to the vagaries of memory, the essence of what it meant to be a black boy growing up in Mansfield, Louisiana, in the 1950's and 60's comes through loud and clear. Notes, Timeline, and Sources are included in the end matter.
• 
  Robin

  Thank you to Random House Children's, Crown Books for Young Readers, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
  
  
  This book is the memoir of Wade Hudson's early life (birth through college) growing up in Louisiana during the era of Jim Crow segregation. I enjoyed reading about Hudson's close-knit family and the everyday things they did together as well as the fun times he spent with his friends growing up in a time without cell phones and video games. I wish that Hudson would have included more stories of segregation and how it impacted his life.
  
  This would make a great addition to a middle grade or middle school unit on civil rights or general American history. A couple of parts felt a little too overly religious so public school teachers may want to exclude those chapters from their lessons.
• 
  Brenda Kahn

  Conversational, compelling and an important and necessary addition to any library.
• 
  Celeste

  I wanted to love this book-I loved Warriors Don’t Cry and love reading about the Civil Rights Movement. But I felt like it was all over the place and read more like a bunch of bullet points.
• 
  Elara

  Shows a different perspective!
• 
  Great Books

  Wade Hudson shares his memories of a growing up during the Jim Crow era, including his drive to become involved with the Civil Rights Movement, and his desire to bring change to his hometown. Reviewer #10.