Martin Luther King Jr. and Anne Frank kindred spirits?
One was a man, the other a young woman. One was a Baptist minister, the other a Jew. One was African American, the other European. One spoke English, the other German. One lived in the United States, the other in Germany and the Netherlands.
How could they be kindred spirits?
A beautiful new children’s book, “Martin & Anne, The Kindred Spirits of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Anne Frank” (Creston Books), written by award-winning children’s author Nancy Churnin and illustrated by Yevgenia Nayberg, weaves together the parallels between the American civil rights icon and the teenage girl whose autobiography may be the most well-known book on the Holocaust.
Churnin, a Harvard-educated journalist and former theater critic, said she was looking for inspiration in 2017 as she worried about the rise in racism, anti-Semitism, and increased sense of polarization in the United States. For solace, she turned to the words of Martin Luther King Jr. and Anne Frank, two immortal figures who gave the world a message of hope, despite their own circumstances of despair, prejudice, and persecution.
As she searched their words and researched their lives, she realized they were both born the same year, 1929, a time of the stock market crash, Great Depression, and the fallout of economic uncertainty on vulnerable minorities.
Churnin started to connect the dots.
She discovered that both Martin Luther King Jr. and Anne Frank came from loving families and were the second child born to their parents. Both had older sisters. Both had a very proud heritage and saw themselves as part of the same human family. Both used their words to inspire and articulate a vision of a better world – Dr. King through his stirring speeches and Anne Frank through her intimate written conversations with Kitty, her precious diary.
“As I looked for their words of inspiration, Dr. King said things like, ‘The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice,’ and Anne said that she still believes that people are good at heart. For her to say something like that during the Holocaust is unbelievable,” Churnin said.
“This is what got to me about each of them,” she continued. “Each of them had seen the worst that humanity had to offer, of what people would do to each other, to innocent people, and yet they never lost faith or hope in humanity.”
Churnin said she was surprised at how neatly their life experiences lined up, from their family birth order to their doting parents to the prejudices they faced and the joys they were denied.
Young Martin was raised in the Jim Crow South and was rejected by a white friend because of his race. Anne is confronted with the rise of Nazis in Germany and in the Netherlands. Martin reads the signs, “Whites Only,” and is rejected because of the color of his skin. Anne is forced to wear the sign of the yellow Star of David, branding her a Jew, an outcast in society. Tragically, they also both died because of prejudice and hatred.
But both learned the power of words and used them to express hope for a better tomorrow.
“The fact that Anne died at 15 and Dr. King at 39 is a reminder that hate, and intolerance is a danger for all ages,” Churnin said.
“I’m hoping that by showing the parallel lives, you see how similarly they were marginalized, segregated, and persecuted. Even if it went to a different level with Anne, we need to step up and fight prejudice and racism whenever we see it. We need to focus on all that we do have in common.
“My hope for this book is that when kids see Martin and Anne side by side, their different genders, different races, different religions, different languages, different countries, that they can see that their hearts beat with the same hope for a more just world,” she said.
And that they, too, would become inspired.
