Take My Hand

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

I asked him if he remembered what Montgomery was like in 1963. I was thirteen years old, I said. It was the year George Wallace was elected governor and declared segregation would define the South forever. The year students were hosed down in a Birmingham park. The year hundreds of thousands of people marched on Washington demanding their civil rights. The year President Kennedy promised a civil rights bill but was later gunned down in front of his wife.

Whether it was the Birmingham church bombing or Ruby Bridges, there wasn’t any justice for little Black girls, and never had been.

This novel is a work of fiction loosely inspired by the real-life case of Relf v. Weinberger. In June 1973, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, sisters aged twelve and fourteen, were sterilized without their consent in Montgomery, Alabama, by a federally funded agency.