Take My Hand - Facts

The book starts in Memphis, where Civil lives in 2016. Memphis is a city on the Mississippi River in southwest Tennessee.

Most of the events take place in Montgomery in 1973. Montgomery is the capital city of Alabama. 

 

The characters talk about Martin Luther King, who was connected to Montgomery through his Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King Jr. ( January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister, civil rights activist and political philosopher who was a leader of the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. 

Civil went to university in Tuskegee. Tuskegee is a city in Macon County, Alabama, with a rich history deeply connected to African American heritage and American history in general.

In Tuskegee there was experimention on black men who were untreated for syphillis. The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male was a study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on a group of nearly 400 African American men with syphilis as well as a control group without. The purpose of the study was to observe the effects of the disease when untreated, to the point of death and autopsy. The men were not informed of the nature of the study, proper treatment was withheld, and more than 100 died as a result.

The characters refer to the murder of Medgar Evers. Medgar Wiley Evers (/ˈmɛdɡər/; July 2, 1925 – June 12, 1963) was an American civil rights activist and soldier. Evers was murdered in 1963 at his home in Jackson, Mississippi,  by Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens' Council in Jackson.

A woman mentioned as having had an appendectomy without permission was Fannie Lou Hamer. Fannie Lou Hamer underwent a hysterectomy, a procedure to remove her uterus, during a surgery for a tumor in 1961. This surgery was performed without her consent and was part of a larger pattern of forced sterilizations of Black women in the South, known as the "Mississippi appendectomy". Hamer became a vocal advocate against this practice, which was used to control the Black population. 

Erica and India, the girls in the book, are based on two real characters: Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf. Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf (who were 12 and 14 years old in 1973, respectively) are two African-American sisters who were involuntarily sterilized by tubal ligation by a federally funded family planning clinic in Montgomery, Alabama in 1973.

Civil's character is based on their social worker, Jessie Bly. Jessie Bly was a social worker who played a crucial role in bringing to light the forced sterilization of the Relf sisters in the 1970s. She found the two sisters after their unauthorized operations and reported the incident, which led to a significant legal case regarding involuntary sterilization in the United States.