Freedom Lessons - by Eileen Harrison Sanchez (Paperback)

About the Book

Louisiana, 1969. Colleen, a white northern teacher, enters into the unfamiliar culture of a small southern town and its unwritten rules as the town surrenders to mandated school integration. Frank, a black high school football player, protects his family with a secret. Can Evelyn, a prized member of the black community, put aside her distrust and value Colleen's unproven efforts?

Book Synopsis

Louisiana, 1969. Colleen, a white northern teacher, enters into the unfamiliar culture of a small southern town and its unwritten rules as the town surrenders to mandated school integration. Frank, a black high school football player, protects his family with a secret. Can Evelyn, a prized member of the black community, put aside her distrust and value Colleen's unproven efforts?

Review Quotes

2022 Canadian Book Club Awards: Finalist, Fiction
2020 Story Circle's Women's Book Awards, Historical Fiction
2020 Sarton Finalist: Historical Fiction
Chosen as a 2020 Pulpwood Queens Book Club pick
2019 Best Book Awards Finalist in Fiction (Multicultural)

"When 'all deliberate speed' becomes 'all of a sudden, ' not much changes. An intermittently potent illustration of the formidable obstacles to equality that remained-and persist--post-Brown v. Board of Education."

--Kirkus Reviews

"This powerful tale offers a beacon of hope that individuals can inspire change."

--Library Journal

" . . . a deftly crafted novel that, although a work of fiction, is based on the author Eileen Sanchez' personal experience teaching in Louisiana in the late sixties. Freedom Lessons is heartfelt, unflinching novel, and inherently riveting novel about the unexpected effects of school integration during that time takes on the issues our nation continues to face regarding race, unity, and identity."

--Midwest Book Review

"Freedom Lessons is a captivating and well-written story. Reading this book has changed me personally and professionally. The Deep South no doubt plays its role--the further you read in the story, the more hot and humid it starts to feel around you. Eileen succeeds where historians and academics like myself fail--recounting major societal events through the inescapable and complex humanity of her characters. A distinguished educator herself, Eileen fully delivers on the challenge of framing what teaching and learning was during this era, and Freedom Lessons forces us to ask the question of what it should be now."

--Michael R. Hicks, Ed.D., Assistant Professor of Education, Centenary College of Louisiana

"Inspired by the author's real-life experiences, Freedom Lessons is a candid and nuanced novel about a young Northern woman who spends a year teaching in the 1960s Jim Crow South. In the process, she learns more about herself and her country than she ever expected. Freedom Lessons is illuminating and gripping, and a worthy addition to the literature of the civil rights era."

--Amy Hill Hearth, New York Times and Washington Post best-selling author and recipient of two American Library Association Notable Book citations

"In her riveting novel, Eileen Sanchez makes us feel the pain of a Louisiana community as deeply rooted prejudice undercuts school integration. Through her three characters--a white teacher from out of state, a hometown teacher scarred by personal slights, and a high school senior denied a football career when his team is relegated to second string--we experience their heartfelt frustrations while wishing history had treated them more kindly. Sanchez's fiction gives us a glimpse into the truth of a highly flawed time and place, and the corrosive nature of prejudice that unfortunately persists today."

--Michelle Cameron, author of The Fruit of Her Hands and Beyond the Ghetto Gates

"Told in alternating viewpoints, this impressive novel reaches back in time to the early days of school integration, and to a place in America where resistance to integration was substantial."

--Historical Novel Society

"This powerful story of lives shaped by school integration in the deep south shows us the fear and deeply held prejudices that marked the time, the place, and the people. But we also see the