Saving Our Babies: A Surrogate Embrace

This book, in 3 volumes, is the result of an email consultation process initiated in 2002 by Professor C. Sade Turnipseed of the Los Angeles Unified School District (California, USA). This process focused on gaining insights from community members around the country about the conditions that children experience in USA's inner city communities and schools. Children were among those who responded and participated in this process. Click here for a more extensive summary of this consultation.

The anthology's preface, written by syndicated columnist Dr. Julianne Malveaux, offers an assessment of the youth mortality rate in the nation's capitol, Washington, DC. Divided into 3 phases, this compilation goes on to include:

• Phase I: "From The Mouths of Babes" - writings reflecting the voices of children, with a focus on the poor and vulnerable who live in the ghettos, the slums, and areas of inner cities that are plagued by violence and conflict. These writings address the question, "What do we (the village) have to do to show support and love for each other and ultimately save one another?" Teachers from around the United States worked with their students in introspective writing workshops; submissions from young participants emerged from these sessions.
• Phase II: "Mother Wit and the Original Mother Wisdom" - an array of short stories, poems, and proverbs that "offers tribute to the 'original' mother [Harriet Tubman] and her instinctual knowing of the spiritual paths that her children must take to find their way out of harm's way".
• Phase III: "VOICES, In The Whirlwind" - short stories, essays, quotations, poems, drawings, and reflections responding to the question, "What are we going to do NOW, to save our babies and ourselves?"