Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down (2010)

By Andrea Davis Pinkney. 
ISBN-13:  978-0316070164

On the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an important organization in the Civil Rights Movement, Andrea Davis Pinkney has published a story that teaches us about the 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter sit-ins that led to the organization’s founding.  Pinkney’s text captures the persistence of the students who initiated the sit-in by repeating their simple request to the waitress: “A doughnut and coffee, with cream on the side.” Pinkney uses recipe metaphors to define the key terms “segregation” and “integration” (“Combine black with white to make sweet justice.”) and clearly establishes the theme of non-violence by integrating quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King into the narrative (“Be loving enough to absorb evil.”)