‘A Long Time Coming: A Lyrical Biography of Race in America From Ona Judge to Barack Obama’
By Ray Anthony Shepard
Art by R. Gregory Christie
Calkins Creek, 336 pages

Ona Judge did not want to be George Washington’s slave, and she ran away. Another runaway slave, Harriet Tubman, perhaps the greatest intelligence agent this country has ever produced, led expeditions into the slavocracy to make sure more of her race also escaped — so that like Frederick Douglass, also a runaway, they could join the fight for freedom.

One such was the journalist Ida B. Wells, who continued the struggle for equality by reporting on the lynching of her fellow Black Americans. She was preparing the country for the days when Martin Luther King Jr. and President Obama worked within the structures of nonviolent protest and political office to secure the more perfect union promised by the U.S. Constitution.

Ray Shepard deals with a fraught history in his lyrical group biography, evoking the rising up of humanity and its enlightenment as pictured in R. Gregory Christie’s illustration of Ona Judge holding up a lighted lantern that Mr. Obama raises still higher. “These story poems,” Mr. Shepard notes, “are poetic profiles of resilient lives, revealing the natural and universal desire for fairness.” 

History is neither sentimentalized nor sanitized, as each of these figures is drawn as a complete human being, frustrated by events, subjugated by powerful and menacing forces but forming a kind of chain of influence and persistence in the long time coming of racial justice.

Mr. Shepard’s most powerful portrayal is of Martin Luther King Jr. So much is known about King’s public and private life that anything less than a candid and searching depiction would be a disservice to the young adults for whom Mr. Shepard is writing — though the quality and insight of the writing surpasses any reason not to recommend this book for adults.

In these prose poems, King experiences victory and defeat in his marches and protests, feeling fearful, exhausted, and depressed by the slow progress — the long time coming — of his effort to achieve civil rights for his race. 

No other figure in this book was bugged and hounded like King. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI wiretaps were sent to President Johnson, and Hoover authorized a letter sent to King that suggested he commit suicide if he did not want his private life exposed. Here is how Mr. Shepard pithily handles King’s unique plight:

“The Protest Preacher

For almost a decade as Martin

marched for peace and racial justice

the United States fought a war

in Southeast Asia.

The war had killed more

than a hundred thousand

Americans and their allies

and more than three million Vietnamese. Yet Martin had remained silent.

After months of thought and prayer

he broadened his mission from civil rights and denounced the Vietnam War.

His aides warned:

It would cost him the support

of President Johnson

who had persuaded Congress to pass

the Civil Rights Bill of 1964

and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It would turn off northern White moderates

who wanted Martin to stay in the civil rights lane. It would unnerve older Blacks

who would fear it made them

look unpatriotic.

It would be proof to the Guardians

of why Martin Luther King Jr.

had to be stopped.

It would give the FBI another reason

to leak stories of his affairs to the press

and destroy him

quicker than a blast of dynamite.”

King took incoming from all sides. The reference to racists like “the Guardians” of white supremacy and to dynamite are an ominous portent of what is to come in a following poem: 

“The Guardians’ sharp sharpshooter squeezed 

the cold trigger and a single bullet 

exploded on contact.”

This fully researched book has a timeline, suggestions for further reading, a bibliography, and source notes — all quite necessary, since Mr. Shepard notes, “These fact-based profiles are tied together like chapters in a novel. It is my way of showing the legacy of race in American history and our lives,” including, as he makes clear in a poem, his own.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography” and, with Lisa Paddock, “Thurgood Marshall: Perseverance for Justice,” a young adult biography.