I wrote a book called Freedom Like Sunlight: Praise Songs for Black Americans, and I was very happy with that book, I still am, in fact it’s being reissued this year, came out in 2000, but it’s been reissued. And I just thought I had more to say about the subject, and specifically I had something to say about international civil rights leaders.
People like Nelson Mandela and so forth. So I did, and fortunately an editor agreed with that and published When Thunder Comes.
Some of these people I really didn’t know that much about, Sylvia Mendez who was a predecessor to the Brown vs Board of Education, but for Latinos in California, I didn’t really know that much about her, since then I’ve been in touch with her because the poem I wrote about her when she was a little girl and became the fulcrum for the Latino civil rights movement.