 Roy Jackson | Welcome to the third weekend of February with our contributor Roy Jackson. He once again brings us a fantastic historical fiction recommendation: The Rock and the River by Kekla Magoon. To remind our readers, Roy Jackson is a writer and educator whose scholarship and prose have appeared in various outlets. He holds degrees in English and Education, including an MFA from Youngstown State University. He is currently an assistant professor of education at Goshen College. Our many thanks to professor Jackson for his contributions to the blog this month! |
The Rock and the River by Kekla Magoon
Kekla Magoon’s 2009 historical fiction novel for young readers is strikingly timely, resonating with both recent events and ongoing societal issues. The Rock and the River is a carefully crafted novel that depicts a specific period and place in American history while remaining fully relatable, allowing readers across generations to engage, connect, and reflect. For this reader, that reflection is bittersweet, highlighting how little has changed over time.
 | The Rock and the River is a historical novel set in 1968 Chicago during the Civil Rights Movement. It follows 13-year-old Sam Childs, whose father is a respected, nonviolent civil rights activist modeled after Martin Luther King Jr. Sam admires his father but is also drawn to the ideas of his older brother, Stick, who secretly joins the Black Panther Party and believes more direct, forceful action is necessary. Early in the story, Sam’s friend Bucky is arrested and beaten by police, revealing the dangers young activists face, and these tensions escalate when Stick is shot and killed by police during a protest, an event that follows Bucky’s beating. Sam’s father is also stabbed during activism, a violent event that shakes the family and underscores the risks of standing up for justice. As protests, police violence, and racial tensions intensify, Sam struggles to understand both nonviolent and militant approaches and begins to question what justice and courage truly mean. The novel explores family loyalty, political awakening, and the difficulty of finding a path in a divided movement, showing how young people navigate danger, morality, and their own voices during times of social upheaval. |
For the privileged in America who often fail to see how events like the L.A. residents’ response to the Rodney King verdict, or the coast-to-coast protests during the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, unfolded, this novel is a wonderful launching and landing point to show that the juxtaposition between the pacifist and proactivist approach to protest can exist in the gray area in between instead of as a binary either/or. Magoon humanizes not just the Dr. King and Black Panther Party approaches in the home in which the protagonist Sam resides, but also the intergenerational trauma and evolution that may ebb and flow within many homes. Sam is faced with trauma daily at the hands of the police and mobs who brutalize his community, physically harm his friends and family, and continually raise their nightsticks at the marginalized residents of the city of Chicago. Unfortunately, as we all know too well, nightsticks have been replaced with guns, and bodily harm has been replaced by police killing citizens.
The novel is set against the backdrop of the 1968 protests and the assassination of Dr. King, an event that plays a pivotal role both historically and within the story, particularly when Sam’s father, a follower of Dr. King and a leader in the Chicago pacifist movement, is stabbed and aired on television while Sam and his family watch. Magoon draws readers closer to this moment by showing it through Sam’s perspective, allowing us to experience both the trauma of witnessing the loss of a pivotal figure in the movement and the personal fear and anguish of seeing his own father, who knows Dr. King and strives to follow his teachings, confronted with violence while upholding the principles of peaceful, nonviolent protest.
| In the same vein, Magoon offers a rounded and meaningful portrayal of the Black Panther Party movement, which is often mischaracterized in historical contexts presented to students. Through Charlie’s sibling Stick, the novel humanizes the party’s emphasis on education and community care. He is seen helping provide food for children and participating in local outreach efforts, gestures that complicate the narrow narratives many readers inherit. Rather than presenting the Panthers only through images of confrontation, Magoon frames them through relationships and everyday acts of responsibility, allowing young readers to understand the movement as rooted not just in protest, but also in service, dignity, and community presence. |  Kekla Magoon |
What is key in this depiction is that the novel resists framing the era as a simple binary of King’s movement as peaceful and the Black Panthers as violent. Instead, it reveals areas of shared purpose and overlapping concerns between the movements. The Panthers’ central tenet is not portrayed as aggression for its own sake, but as self-defense in response to persistent police brutality and systemic injustice. Through this lens, readers see that both movements sought dignity, safety, and civil rights for Black communities, even if their strategies and public images differed. Viewed from a contemporary perspective, the novel invites a more nuanced understanding that moves beyond “peace versus violence” and toward a recognition of parallel goals, internal debates, and the complexity of social change.
As students enter our classrooms with questions about the world today, Kekla Magoon’s The Rock and the Riverprovide a strong starting and ending point for meaningful conversations. Through the characters, readers experience the weight of inherited activism and the personal costs of standing up for justice. What makes the protagonist’s story especially compelling is that Magoon presents the 1968 movements without suggesting one was better than the other. The novel encourages discussion about who is harmed by police, who is allowed to respond, and how society determines whose rights, whether the First or the Second Amendment Rights, are protected or restricted. It also raises important questions about inequality, media bias, and the ways public narratives shape our understanding of protest, resistance, and justice. The novel helps readers understand why, historically, activism in response to systemic injustices shifted from King’s philosophy to the principles of the Black Panther Party without tipping the scale in favor of either approach. The careful balance Magoon achieves is a rare feat and one that invites thoughtful discussion in classrooms and beyond.
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