(+++) BRINGING OUTSIDERS IN

We Are Mighty: 12 Ordinary Americans Who Did the Next Needed Thing. By Sharon McMahon. Illustrated by Susanna Chapman. Knopf. $19.99. 

     Families that consider themselves “minority” or “marginalized” and that want to encourage children to strive for excellence in one area of society or another will appreciate Sharon McMahon’s We Are Mighty, which briefly profiles 12 Americans whose contributions range from the highly significant to the less-known but still important and useful. 

     This is, by design, a very skewed selection of people. Black people, for example, are five of the 12 chosen for these profiles – 40%-plus racial representation in a nation in which the actual percentage is about 13%. And four of the five discussed by McMahon – that is, 80% – are women. Furthermore, Susanna Chapman does something strange with her illustrations, giving several of the white profile subjects facial features and skin tones that make them appear dark-skinned: lighthouse keeper Ida Lewis, for example, and poet Katharine Lee Bates (and, even more clearly, Bates’ brother). The reasons for this are never stated, but clearly a broad definition of inclusivity is the aim, and families in the target audience will appreciate it. 

     As for the specific people chosen, the selection seems simply to reflect the author’s personal interests and advocacy. Lewis was a lighthouse keeper who saved so many lives that she was called the bravest woman in America. Bates wrote the words to America the Beautiful. Both were women who overcame the significant gender-based societal obstacles of their time to help people’s lives, whether physically or through emotional uplift. Also here are Gouverneur Morris, a Founding Father who was disabled after a carriage accident and who was a major force in creating the Constitution, and teacher Virginia Randolph, reporter and suffragist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and World War I ambulance driver María de López. Olympic champion Jim Thorpe is here, identified additionally as “Wa-Tho-Huk,” although the reason for that is never explained. Businessman Julius Rosenwald is included because of the schools he was responsible for building in cooperation with Booker T. Washington. Norman Mineta appears partly because he was a politician but primarily because he had been interned during World War II with other Japanese Americans. Teacher and civil rights icon Septima Clark is included, and baseball player Roberto Clemente, and civil-rights campaigner Claudette Colvin. 

     The book’s subtitle’s reference to “the next needed thing,” a phrase taken from an article in The Journal of Human Resources, may be intended as a generalization uniting these disparate figures, but McMahon’s choices and Chapman’s illustrations construe the phrase more narrowly, since what most of these figures have in common is a push for inclusivity, expansion of rights in various ways, and demonstrations through their actions that individuals from any socioeconomic and (especially) racial background can be significant contributors to society. The specific challenges faced by these 12 ordinary-but-extraordinary individuals are not always made clear – for instance, the dates of their lives are not given in the profile pages, so the societal circumstances each person faced in terms of gender, nationality or race are implied but not put explicitly in context (there is, however, a rather confusing timeline at the back of the book). The absence of explicit context somewhat reduces the effectiveness of the profile pages – that “Wa-Tho-Huk” reference to Jim Thorpe, for example, is actually quite significant, since he was the first Native American to win an Olympic gold medal for the United States, but that fact is absent from We Are Mighty. On balance, the book is self-limited by the author’s selection criteria and the narrow approach to the brief biographical sketches. Parents looking for inspiration here would do well to page through the book before buying a copy, to ensure some level of connection between their families and the individuals profiled by McMahon and portrayed by Chapman. If there is in fact a suitable relationship, the book will do what it intends to do by providing upbeat stories aimed at giving children uplift and a sense of potential in their own lives.