page 167 Language Arts, Volume 96, Number 3, January 2019 On April 23, 1951, 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns led her classmates in a strike for equal edu- cation at the Robert Russa Moton high school for Black students in Farmville, Virginia. Students tricked the principal into leaving the campus; after his departure, Johns and 450 of her classmates met to discuss a walkout to demand a new building that was equal to the White school next door. Following Johns’s lead, the students refused to attend classes for two weeks. The protest ultimately inspired a court case—one of fve that the US Supreme Court reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Teri Kanefeld (2014) chronicles this history in her biography of Johns written for young people, The Girl from the Tar Paper School: Barbara Rose Johns and the Advent of the Civil Rights Movement. This, however, is neither a story of racial prog- ress nor a celebration of youth activism, as the stu- dents’ strike did not result in a new school. Rather, Kanefeld’s (2014) biography of Johns deals real- istically with entrenched opposition to civil rights. The county closed all the public schools and created a private academy that accepted only White pupils. This meant that Black students were not allowed to attend any schools, and African American school- teachers lost their jobs. The schools in Prince Edward County were not fully integrated until 1980—almost 30 years after Johns led the student walkout. Kanefeld’s (2014) refusal to paint a story of an individual hero overcoming adversity may strike some as an anomaly, especially because it is a biography—a genre that often sticks to a script in which an exceptional person overcomes adversity and succeeds. Kanefeld’s (2014) text resists this tradition and instead focuses upon collective strug- gle and an ongoing fght for civil rights that contin- ues into the present moment. I open this article with The Girl from the Tar Paper School (Kanefeld, 2014) as an example of life writing for youth that takes as its subject a young activist and as a book that makes visible an ongoing struggle for racial justice. Life writing is “the preferred umbrella term for the heterogeneous genres, modes, and media of autobiographically- infected storytelling and self-presentation” (Smith & Watson, 2017, n.p.). These genres include auto- biography, memoir, biography, or testimonio, and span formats such as picturebooks like Duncan Tonatiuh’s biography of Sylvia Mendez, Sepa- rate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez & Her Fami- ly’s Fight for Desegregation (2014), or Ed Young’s autobiographical The House Baba Built: An Artist’s Childhood in China (2011). Other modes include graphic memoirs like Cece Bell’s El Deafo (2014) In this column, the author takes a critical perspective on life writing and argues that language arts classrooms should incorporate the use of children’s nonfiction and literacy practices that support multiple identities, languages, modes, and histories. Elizabeth Marshall Life Writing and the Language Arts Research & Policy