I don’t know what resources educators might have used in 1973 and 1974 to try to put Watergate into some sort of context for their students, or to what extent they even tried. Perhaps in that era before round-the-clock marination in media coverage, the subject of a president’s misdeeds and Congress’ obligation to investigate and address them could be easily sidestepped during the school day.

But as so many of us are reminded each hour (at least) that we’re awake, times have changed. One way that they’ve changed is that Watergate now is the context — or at least some of the context — for viewing the current impeachment inquiry by the U.S. House of Representatives.

Another change is that, thanks to the increasingly expansive view within children’s publishing of what stories can and should be told for young readers, there are age-appropriate resources for a variety of difficult topics. Topics including presidential abuse of power, Constitutional violations, and impeachment.

I could not have imagined, when I began writing What Do You Do with a Voice Like That? The Story of Extraordinary Congresswoman Barbara Jordan in 2013, how relevant it would be in 2019.

I viewed Congresswoman Jordan’s story as essential history, and I strove to both show her timeless significance and the explain the momentousness of her specific times in the main text (excerpted above) as well as in the timeline at the back of the book:

How I wish that we, as a nation, had made different choices — choices that would have kept What Do You Do with a Voice Like That? from being quite so timely, quite so relevant.

But here we are, and here’s my book, wonderfully illustrated by Ekua Holmes and published last year by Beach Lane Books/Simon & Schuster. I hope educators will put Barbara Jordan’s story to use, so that maybe we won’t need it quite so much a generation or two from now when the young readers of today are leading our country.