Summary

Brown Girl Dreaming follows the childhood of the African-American author, Jacqueline Woodson, from her birth to around age ten. Jacqueline is born in Ohio, the youngest child of three, in 1963, during the height of the Civil Rights Movement.  Written in free verse, Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming is a memoir of her childhood, a collection of passages about growing up between her father's Ohio and her mother's South Carolina in the sixties and then eventually moving part of the family to New York.

Big Ideas

• History can be passed down and preserved through storytelling. It is important to consider various perspectives. 

• Oral traditions are important to culture and history.  

• No one person has a single identity. People grapple with conflicting identities which change and grow as we experience life, and how we are seen through someone else’s eyes.