Over the years we’ve read many books about Dr. King (this is still my favorite) and on Saturday, his birthday we read Happy Birthday, Martin Luther King Jr (it was okay). Today, we found another good one!

Gage already knows quite a bit about Martin Luther King Jr. and he took an hour long Outclass class about him this morning, so I was excited to find this picture book with a new approach.

In the Rabbi and the Reverend: Joachim Prinz, Martin Luther King Jr., and Their Fight against Silence is fantastic. Rabbi Prinz and his family had been kicked out of Nazi Germany for speaking out. In America he found the same kind of injustice in the South and he joined his voice to others in the civil rights fight, forming a friendship with King.

He spoke at the March on Washington and this was part of the speech included in the book. It’s something Gage and I talk about often.

“When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned…was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problems. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence. America must not remain silent.”