Eileen Harrison Sanchez is an author who retired from a forty-year career in education that started as a teacher and ended as a district administrator. Her debut novel is “Freedom Lessons: A Novel” on which she draws on her own remarkable experience as a young, white teacher in the Jim Crow South during desegregation to write her immersive work of fiction inspired by those events. It is the story of Colleen, a white northern teacher who enters into the unfamiliar culture of a small town and its unwritten rules as the town surrenders to mandated school integration.

“Freedom Lessons” is told alternately through three points of view: by Colleen, an idealistic young white teacher, Frank, a black high school football player and Evelyn, an experienced black teacher. This is the story of how the lives of three very different people intersect in a rural Louisiana town from July 1969 to November 1970. It begins as Colleen and Miguel, newlyweds, are driving to Fort Polk and their vehicle overheats. Miguel is Cuban and has been transferred to the Louisiana army base where he would serve as a drill sergeant for a year. Colleen later gets a job at the local black school until seemingly overnight, the school is ordered shut down and the neighboring white school is forcibly integrated. Frank is determined to protect his mother and siblings after his father’s suspicious death even if it means keeping evidence from the crime scene a secret from everyone around him. Being forced to attend the now integrated white school means he lost his position as a star football player and others lost positions of power, including the president of the student council. Evelyn does not want public schools to be integrated because she believes, as other like her do, that black teachers do a better job with black students and prefer to follow the Freedom of Choice plans, where everyone ‘chooses’ to be with their own.

As the years go by, the era of Brown v. Board of Education, Jim Crow laws and civil rights is in danger of becoming a distant memory. That is why it is vital that the topic gets revisited, especially by authors with first-hand knowledge, which gives their voice authenticity, as is the case with “Freedom Lessons.” Eileen Harrison Sanchez spent a year teaching in rural Louisiana and, as a teacher and an outsider, experienced the effects of segregation and forced integration and how it affected those around her. Far from being a white savior story, Colleen does not come in and “saves the day,” this is a well-researched and balanced novel that successfully gives three different viewpoints of one of America’s darkest periods. The language is easy to understand and simultaneously poetic: “The houses were set behind huge trees with Spanish moss dripping from the trees, like curtains shielding the lives of the tenants.” The characters are well developed and relatable and considering the topic, it is appropriate for all ages and should be required reading in schools. “Freedom Lessons” is a must-read for fans of historical fiction and a gentle reminder of how far we have come as a country and how much we still need to learn.

May 17, 1954: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark US Supreme Court case. The court unanimously declared that state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students was unconstitutional. In 1955, the court ordered states to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.”

*The author received a copy of this book for an honest review. The views and opinions expressed here belong solely to her.