KAAVONIA HINTON

JASON REYNOLDS’S STAMPED: A YOUNG ADULT ADAPTATION FOR ALL AGES

KAAVONIA HINTON

I can’t thank [Jason Reynolds] enough for his willingness to produce this sophisticated remix that will impact generations of young and not so young people. —Ibram X. Kendi

Jason Reynolds’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix of the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning (2020) joins a centuries-long tradition of adapting adult books for children, and as Ibram X. Kendi notes in the epigraph, such adaptations often play an integral role in fostering crossover readership (Falconer 2009, 11). Yet, critics tend to consider adaptations inferior to the original, arguing that they insult youth, “dumb down” information, assume youth are innocent and unknowing, and include sanitized excerpts free of scenes, words, and points of view that might be deemed inappropriate (Thein, Sulzer, and Schmidt 2013, 52). Perhaps we would view adaptations differently if we examined them as separate texts with less regard to the original, as Linda Hutcheon suggests in A Theory of Adaptation (2012). Hutcheon argues against exploring the

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fidelity of adaptations and instead asserts adaptations should be studied in three overlapping ways—as product, process, and reception (7, 8). Texts in their own right, adaptations present the critic with the opportunity to examine the process and purpose of adaptation as well as its reception across time, locale, and culture (xviii). Recent adaptations like Stamped introduce youth to narratives with mature themes such as race and racism. Instead of “dumbing down” or sanitizing Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, Reynolds, influenced by his own purposes for writing, created a distinct, innovative, antiracist adaptation that recognizes and respects youth as adept and shrewd. Antiracists combat inequality in society by recognizing and challenging racist beliefs, practices, and policies. Stamped should be read within the tradition of antiracist literature, books that invite self-awareness, self-reflection, change, and action in readers, especially White readers, whom authors seek to educate about the realities of racism and antiblackness (Ali 2020).

Sophisticated and unstable in response to growing interactivity, connectivity, and access afforded by the digital world, texts such as Stamped cannot be preserved for a single audience (Dresang 1999, 24; Hinton and Carnesi 2017, 80). Like many texts in a tradition of Black nonfiction such as Julius Lester’s To Be a Slave (1968) and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963), Stamped reveals the arbitrary distinction between children’s and adult literature, as racism is not restricted by age and impacts Blacks and nonblacks across generations. While To Be a Slave and The Fire Next Time represent a number of possible precursors, putting Reynolds in conversation with Lester and Baldwin underscores not only the specific historical context for Stamped and its antiracist intent, but also its pedagogical and aesthetic value. Written in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, Stamped educates and inspires twenty-first century readers of all ages to join a freedom struggle that began more than four hundred years ago.

A DIFFERENT VERSION OF ITSELF

Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning’s subject matter, critical acclaim, and bestselling status, coupled with the social and political moment, made Kendi’s history text for an adult audience a prime candidate for a youth adaptation. Kendi traces ideas about Blacks from early articulations during the fifteenth century to current day—categorizing them as either segregationist, assimilationist, or antiracist—through

the times, intellectual lives, and oral and written expressions of five historical figures: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis. Kendi’s scholarly text quickly captured attention from an audience of predominantly White American historians and academics. Stamped from the Beginning won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2016, appeared on numerous bestseller lists, and earned “Best Book” status by mainstream publications such as The Boston Globe, Kirkus, and The Washington Post. It was also nominated for several awards, including the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work of Nonfiction, 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, and the 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction. Despite the book’s success, Reynolds initially declined Kendi’s request to adapt Stamped from the Beginning for youth. The only writer given the opportunity to extend his term as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature for a third year (2020–2022), Reynolds has published several books and short stories for youth; sold his first adult book, The Mouthless God and Jesus Number Two, to Scribner (Deahl 2020, 14); and won numerous awards, including Coretta Scott King, Michael Printz, and Newbery Honor citations. Despite his accolades, Reynolds admitted to feeling intimidated by the prospect of adapting Stamped from the Beginning. But Kendi persisted and Stamped, the remix, appeared in 2020 as a co-authored book.1 In an interview Nikole Hannah-Jones conducted with Reynolds and Kendi for School Library Journal, Reynolds tells her that once he took on the task of adapting Kendi’s historical study Stamped from the Beginning, he asked himself, “How do I turn this into a different version of itself? And make it something fresh at the same time” (2020, 38). He accomplished his goal by using his signature voice and style and by following the edict on his website: “Here’s what I plan to do: NOT WRITE BORING BOOKS” (Reynolds 2020). About half the length of the source text, Stamped follows the same thought leaders featured in Kendi’s text and classifies ideas and people as either antiracist or racist (assimilationist or segregationist). But that’s where the similarities end.

While pairing adult writers with well-known YA writers capitalizes on the YA author’s established audience, it also suggests the YA author will adapt the text using an approach more closely aligned with the YA genre’s conventions, such as relatable voice, quick pace, relevant themes of identity formation, and social issues.2 At first glance, this marketing move appears to emphasize boundaries

between adult and YA literature, but the recent widespread appeal of YA—Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008) and Angie Thomas’s The Hate You Give (2017)—suggests adaptations such as Stamped appeal to intergenerational readers. Stamped’s crossover appeal becomes apparent when we read it as both YA literature and antiracist Black nonfiction.

A NONTRADITIONAL TEXT IN AN ANTIRACIST TRADITION

A text firmly rooted in a tradition of Black nonfiction, with obvious ties to its source, Reynolds’s Stamped is its own distinct product with both pedagogical and aesthetic value. As a YA writer, Reynolds brings characteristics of the YA genre to the process of transforming a history book for academics into YA nonfiction. Assumptions about audience shape the choices a YA writer makes, and YA conventions account for the crossover appeal of Stamped, or what Reynolds calls a “not history history book” (2020, 3). In The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership, Rachel Falconer argues that the audience for YA expanded at the turn of the twenty-first century (2009, 2). Books with considerable crossover appeal due to their accessible language, relevant issues and themes, innovative narrative style, postmodern formats, and reader-centric focus include JK Rowling’s Harry Potter (1997–2007) and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight (2008–2012) series, as well as single novels like Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) and Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief (2005). Katherine T. Bucher and I define YA as “prose or verse that has excellence of form or expression in its genre . . . provides a unique adolescent point of view and reflects the concerns, interests, and challenges of contemporary young adults. . . . In sum, it provides a roadmap for readers 12 to 20 years of age” (2014, 8). As this definition implies, the age of interest encompasses new adulthood, although many readers of Harry Potter and/or Twilight (well) above the age of twenty would probably insist those so-called YA books reflect their interests as well. Falconer’s work underscores the arbitrary nature of distinctions between texts for youth and texts for adults as well as between childhood and adulthood. She explains the relatively recent spate of YA books with crossover appeal in terms of shifting “reading tastes” that “reflect changing views of childhood, adulthood and the ambiguous spaces in between” (2009, 7). In Crossover Fiction, Sandra Beckett acknowledges that youth’s texts that employ innovative topics, formats, and

techniques that complement the ways we read and interact with digital texts (such as white space, bold type, and various font sizes) are more likely to crossover to adults (2009, 260).

While Stamped follows the basic structure of Kendi’s text, using the same five historical figures and categorizing ideas as segregationist, assimilationist, and antiracist, Reynolds makes rhetorical choices and uses certain stylistic techniques to invigorate the historical content for non-academic readers. Reynolds divides his table of contents into “sections” rather than “parts,” labeling them with dates rather than the names of individuals, thereby making it possible for readers, particularly youth, unfamiliar with the intellectuals featured to recall prior knowledge about the era. As we might expect, Stamped has fewer chapters, the majority of which Reynolds retitled. He chose to keep “Uplift Suasion” and “Black Power,” phrases likely familiar (and still relevant) to Black readers. By creating entertaining and enticing headings such as “The Story of the World’s First Racist,” “Battle of the Black Brains,” and “Murder Was the Case,” Reynolds captures his readers’ attention and contemporizes history. Some of the headings are reminiscent of popular programs and music. For example, the “Battle of the Brains” is an event at HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) and HSIs (Hispanic Serving Institutions) where students compete to create solutions to STEM and/or business-related problems, and “Murder Was the Case” is the title of a popular rap song. Typical of nonfiction for youth, the backmatter contains a “Further Reading” section, highlighting both fiction and nonfiction published between 1845 and 2019, including classics like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), a YA short story collection, Black Enough (2019) edited by Ibi Zoboi, and other work by Reynolds and Kendi. The fact that over half the recommended books were originally marketed to adults suggests the dual audience for this text.

How authors view the capabilities of youth readers determines how they write for them. Reynolds’s respect for his readers is evident in the multiple, complex stories, and characterizations of historical and contemporary individuals and events he presents in the text. By asking questions and evoking emotions, he conveys to his readers his confidence in their ability to critically analyze and reflect on the information he provides. For instance, Reynolds says that after Abraham Lincoln lost a senate election to Stephen Douglas, his rationale for ending slavery failed to recognize the inhumanity of the institution and instead focused on slavery’s impact on poor

Whites: “Because if labor was free, what exactly were poor White people expected to do to make money?” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 100). Reynolds goes on to explain that when Lincoln ran for president, his views shifted even further away from supporting Black people, especially after Lincoln’s Republican party was dubbed the “Black Republicans.” Reynolds explains the significance of Lincoln’s stance: “There were still racists in the North. Still racists everywhere. And why would racists want to vote for the party ‘in support’ of Black people?” (101). Reynolds’s questions expose Lincoln’s racist ideas and raise readers’ ire, as they discover that Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, heroically defending Black people’s right to liberty is a myth. Reynolds does not avoid difficult content in his adaptation. Reynolds’s direct and unflinching statements about rape and how it intersects with race and gender serve as an example: “Rape isn’t something to be taken lightly or to be turned back on the victim as a sharp blade of blame. But during this time, allegations of rape were often used as an excuse to lynch Black men, rooted in the stereotype of the slavery of the Black man and the preciousness of the White woman” (137). Reynolds is frank, concise, and sincere, neither dumbing down nor sanitizing the text for young readers, thus simultaneously conveying information in a way adults, especially those who would not read an academic work such as Kendi’s, can understand and use.

While Reynolds’s crossover text clearly speaks to the current political moment, seeking to inspire antiracism amid the latest rise of White nationalism, Stamped should be considered within a much larger tradition of Black literature that Rudine Sims Bishop, Violet J. Harris, and Dianne Johnson would call “oppositional.” Oppositional texts counter mainstream cultural stereotypes of Black people as lazy, immoral, unlawful, and/or unintelligent. Stamped teaches Black youth to resist internalizing racism so they can thrive in a racist country, a stance foundational to Black children’s literature as Du Bois and others have defined it (Bishop 2007, 35; Tolson 2008, 5; Harris 1997, 24; Johnson 1990, 15; Phillips 2013, 592; McNair 2008, 4). An oppositional text, Stamped is also a bridge builder, connecting multiple groups of readers. In Black Children’s Literature Got De Blues, Nancy D. Tolson argues that Black children’s literature cannot be placed solely in the world of children’s literature because much of it contains strong cultural understandings like that within Black literature [for adults]. And this literature is overlooked in much of Black “adult” literary venues

because it is written for children. So Black children’s literature sits between the two yet has the capability to connect to both. (Tolson 2008, 11) Stamped offers an example of a cross-generational text that draws on both the conventions of YA (considered an aspect of children’s literature) and Black nonfiction often considered as adult literature. Texts aimed at youth in Black American literature might be classified as antiracist, texts that seek to encourage readers to identify and oppose racism. Lester’s To Be a Slave and Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time—two examples of antiracist adaptations aimed at building bridges across audiences—serve as possible antecedents for Stamped. Like Stamped, both texts were created in response to highly fraught moments in the history of race relations in the US and offer historical perspectives written for multigenerational and multiracial audiences.

A Newbery Honor book and an American Library Association (ALA) Notable Children’s book, Lester’s To Be a Slave has been difficult to classify because of its organizational structure and subject matter. In Using Multiethnic Literature in the K-8 Classroom, Harris suggests To Be a Slave is a text for adults (1997, 22). Curiously, in The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), the entry devoted to Julius Lester, a crossover writer throughout his career, does not emphasize his contribution to children’s literature, though it does mention To Be a Slave (Bloom 1997, 434). These contradictory assessments stem from Lester’s decision to draw from a wide variety of texts, including interviews collected by the Federal Writers’ Project with former enslaved people. Lester kept the stark subject matter and voice in the narratives intact, offering an honest, realistic depiction of enslaved people’s lives from being sold and toiling on plantations to planning insurrections and eventually being freed. Using italics, Lester inserted his own voice, which coupled with Tom Feelings’s stunning illustrations, creates a representation of a time and an institution, slavery, in US history that established the structural racism that exists today. Lester’s collated quotations from enslaved people, frank and insightful commentary, and Feelings’ paintings make the book appealing to dual audiences. Lester’s impetus for writing To Be a Slave was initially fueled by childhood memories of his father explaining to him that his ancestors had been enslaved and by his desire to learn his heritage. But his objective evolved into a determination to convey enslaved peoples’ humanity

and to inform children and adults of slavery’s atrocious impact on the enslaved and their descendants, Whites, and the nation (8).

A collection of two essays, Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time is also addressed to an intergenerational and multiracial audience. Though not written for youth, Baldwin’s The FireNext Time still has the potential to transcend artificial boundaries around the age and race of its readers, hence its use in secondary schools. Similar to Lester, Baldwin emphasizes racism’s effect on both Blacks and Whites, particularly the disastrous impact of Whiteness, a concept that was rarely discussed at that time (Forde 2014, 578). Both essays initially appeared in magazines, The Progressive and The New Yorker, periodicals read by intergenerational liberal Whites (575). “Letter to My Nephew” first appeared in The Progressive in 1962 before it was revised and renamed “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation” and published in The Fire Next Time. Baldwin begins his letter by comparing young James to his father and grandfather. Next, Baldwin warns his nephew about the importance of self-definition and decolonizing one’s mind before the text reverts back to the content published originally in “Letter to My Nephew” printed in The Progressive (1962b). In addressing his nephew directly, using a conversational tone and sharing details about his own childhood, Baldwin connects with cross-generational readers and helps them identify racism and its pernicious power over generations of Black people.

Baldwin revised and retitled “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” originally published in The New Yorker in 1962, for publication in The Fire Next Time (1963). “Down at the Cross” focuses on Baldwin’s youth, the hypocrisy of religion, especially Christianity, which is complicit in racism in the country, and on the pernicious effects of internalized racism:

Negroes in this country . . . are taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world. . . . White people hold the power, which means that they are superior to blacks (intrinsically, that is: God decreed it so), and the world has innumerable ways of making this difference known and felt and feared. Long before the Negro child perceives this difference, and even longer before he understands it, he has begun to react to it, he has begun to be controlled by it. Every effort made by the child’s elders to prepare him for a fate from which they cannot protect him causes him secretly, in terror, to begin to await, without knowing that he

is doing so, his mysterious and inexorable punishment. (Baldwin 1963, 39–40) Baldwin seeks to help readers see, through his depiction of powerless children and adults psychologically harmed by racism, why they must confront bigotry and actively combat systemic racism. In doing so, Baldwin encourages reader empathy for the “Negro child” who slowly discovers he must learn to survive in a society where basic human dignities are denied, terror and trauma lurk, and protection is elusive (39).

Steeped in oral and sermonic influences often found in Black literature, The Fire Next Time uses the stylistic device of the letter for effect/affect, particularly its conversational/personal tone. “My Dungeon Shook,” the first essay in the collection, uses the structure of a traditional letter; however, the second essay’s subtitle, “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” suggests it is a letter while it actually begins with epigraphs and takes the form of a traditional essay, though its language, tone, and voice are emblematic of personal correspondence. Because Baldwin’s writing contains an engaging style, Kathy Roberts Forde notes, “Baldwin not only used narrative techniques (such as scene setting, emplotment, and dialogue) but also reported on contemporary events and engaged timely issues” (2014, 575). To Be a Slave, The Fire Next Time, and Stamped are all crossgenerational texts that use narrative techniques to shed light on racism and its adverse effects on the future of the nation.

Stamped’s timely subject matter, provocative style, and intriguing format appeals to youth and adults across race and ethnicity, prompting readers to think about how race, racism, and Whiteness require cross-generational awareness and action if we are to fulfill the country’s democratic promise. All three texts were published during pivotal movements in the US. The Fire Next Time appeared in 1963, the year Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote one of the most persuasive letters ever written to White, liberal America, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”; civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered; four young girls were killed by the KKK at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama; and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place. To Be a Slave arrived in 1968 at the peak of the Black Power Movement. Protests erupted across the country after King was murdered that year, and Black Americans called for explorations of Black history and heritage alongside an emphasis on Black political, economic, aesthetic, and

intellectual power. Reynolds’s Stamped was published in March of 2020, a year that would go on record as having the largest social justice protest effort in US history (Buchanan, Bui, and Patel 2020). Two months later, in May, a video of a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on George Floyd’s neck went viral, making it less possible for nonblacks to ignore contemporary racism and police brutality. For the first time, many nonblacks joined Black Lives Matter protests in streets across the US to demand an end to structural racism and violence against Black bodies. Each book—The Fire Next Time, To Be a Slave, and Stamped—inspired by its political moment, illustrates the stranglehold racism has had on the US since slavery. All three texts expand the national narrative to include Black history, educating readers of all ages about racism and inspiring them to become antiracist.

Though accessible to readers of all ages and races, Stamped speaks directly to Black children living in a country not substantially different from the one Lester and Baldwin experienced. In the interview with Hannah-Jones mentioned earlier, Reynolds makes it clear he writes to affirm Black youth: “I want to write something that is for them, and about them, that speaks the language that they know, that does not need to be explained, [sort of a code] that is woven into swathes of our culture, to make sure that they feel emboldened, that they feel seen, and visible, and big, and human” (quoted in Hannah-Jones 2020, 37). Echoing Baldwin’s concerns about Black children internalizing racism, Kendi insists on talking to Black youth about the reality of racism:

Teaching young people about racism and antiracism protects them. So, that’s the irony. People think they’re protecting these young people by not teaching them. Can you imagine, you’re a 15-year-old Black boy, and you’re constantly harassed by police. And you don’t understand the [nature of police] brutality and harassment and profiling. That then causes you to look in the mirror and think that they’re harassing you because there’s something wrong with you. But if you understand the way racism operates, you’ll know there’s nothing wrong with you and everything wrong with police brutality. (Kendi quoted in Hannah-Jones 2020, 40) Navigating Black childhood and parenting in an anti-black society is complex. Kendi suggests, just as Baldwin did, that explicit instruction about racism and antiracism can prevent Black youth from internalizing racialized violence such as police brutality. By

affirming Black youth and teaching them how to recognize the systemic nature of racism, as well as centuries of sustained efforts to combat it, Stamped participates in a long “oppositional” literary tradition, preparing Black youth to live boldly in a racialized and racist world.

While Stamped has the express purpose of uplifting and arming Black youth, it has an additional purpose—to educate White readers. Beginning with its subtitle, the “you” beckons to the reader, who Reynolds views as an agentic potential antiracist open to the book’s prodding, “Something to get you excited about choosing your seat— the right seat—at the table” (2020, 3; emphasis added). Born out of an activist moment, Stamped seeks to foster an activist spirit or attitude in readers, particularly White readers, who might not know how to approach the table, let alone choose a seat. Reynolds also seeks to challenge White readers who might, consciously or not, consider themselves superior. Essentially, Stamped helps White readers understand the basic concept behind the declaration, Black Lives Matter: Reynolds uses the history of racism to teach Whites living in the twenty-first century that Black people are human.

Both Reynolds and Kendi assume that readers know racism is a problem but lack a critical framework for understanding how it manifests throughout US history as well as a vocabulary for talking about how it operates in our own era. In “A History Book That Isn’t: Finding A Way to Teach Racism to A New Generation,” a 2020 interview with Elissa Nadworny, Kendi makes clear the pedagogical intent of Stamped: “One of the things we’re trying to do with this book is provide people with the vocabulary of how to speak about and understand racism. Know what intimately racism is and how to identify it with language. What we’re trying to do is give people the ability to name what they see, what they experience, what they should be resisting” (quoted in Nadworny 2020). While the “people” Kendi refers to includes youth and adults, he and Reynolds assert that only one group is ready (and eager) to have candid conversations about race and racism. In the interview with Hannah-Jones, Reynolds presents adults as an obstacle: “I think it’s incredibly arrogant for adults to believe that young people aren’t ready or don’t want to have this discussion. It’s the insecurity of adults that continues to be a blockade for kids who are dying to stretch themselves emotionally and mentally” (quoted in Hannah-Jones 2020, 39). Kendi agrees: “I think that you have older people who are scared to or don’t know how to teach the history of racism to young people. This book can

show how they can have these conversations and, simultaneously, help them to overcome their fears” (quoted in Hannah-Jones 2020, 39). Both writers imagine their audience to be youth and adults and their purpose to be building a bridge between them.

Stamped’s antiracist message must be embraced by teachers, a key audience, and, in too many cases, another blockade on that bridge Reynolds and Kendi seek to build. White teachers make up the majority of the teaching force and historically have had little interest in or incentive to have frank discussions about race and racism, as many believe the topic has nothing to do with them. In “A Bridge Over Troubled Water: Social Studies, Civic Education and Critical Race Theory,” Cynthia Tyson makes clear “Public schools were not designed to stimulate controversy, and classroom teachers are not expected to teach students to question and challenge authority” (2003, 21). Reynolds and Kendi hope Stamped gives teachers the courage and confidence to challenge the status quo. Reimagining a text middle school teachers and librarians would likely adopt was a key motivation for adapting Stamped from the Beginning. In an interview with Sue Corbett, for Publishers Weekly, both writers identify middle-schoolers as their target audience: “I want them to have a clear-eyed sense of what the problem is. There are so many people whose journey doesn’t even begin until they get to college. Let’s arm them intellectually, beginning in middle school” (Kendi quoted in Corbett 2020, 12). Equipped with critical thinking and reading skills, youth can then examine racial/racist ideas and codes in other texts, including media and popular culture and in the world around them. Acquiring critical racial literacy will, Reynolds and Kendi argue, prepare readers of all ages not just to have meaningful conversations about race but to take a public antiracist stance.

“THIS IS A PRESENT BOOK”: CALLING READERS OF ALL AGES TO ACTION

Stamped offers readers an alternative to traditional history books. Reynolds’s use of humor, storytelling, and formatting sets Stamped apart from pseudo-objective texts found in schools. Book blurbs by YA authors Jacqueline Woodson and Renee Watson, on Stamped’s back cover, serve marketing purposes, but they also shed light on the deficiencies of school-sanctioned history texts. Woodson and Watson both say they wished the history book would have been

available to them during their youth. Their comments pertain as much to Stamped’s content as its style, drawing attention to the ageold problem with impersonal, dull, and rigid nonfiction, particularly historical accounts, found mostly, but not exclusively, in textbooks or curriculum supplements intended for young readers. Not only are classroom reading materials often boring, but traditional textbooks are ripe with antiblackness, from misrepresentations of Blacks to ignoring Black people’s historical contributions altogether (Brown and Brown 2010, 140). Reynolds creates a YA nonfiction book that (correctly) assumes its readers have negative ideas about the readability of history texts and possess insufficient knowledge of Black history and race/racism in the US. Reynolds describes his text as a new type of history book, “a book that contains history. A history directly connected to our lives as we live them right this minute. This is a present book” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 1–2). Stamped revises standard history textbooks in both content and form, providing young as well as adult readers historical knowledge, a critical framework, and a way of thinking and talking about race and racism that they can use.

Reynolds acknowledges that some readers might be apprehensive about his subject matter, so he proceeds cautiously: Uh-oh. The R-word. Which for many of us still feels rated R. Or can be matched only with another R word— run. But don’t. Let’s all just take a deep breath. Inhale. Hold it. Exhale and breathe out:

R A C E. (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 2; emphasis original)

He puts readers at ease by not only suggesting he and they share this anxiety and are therefore connected, but also by convincing readers that they have the tools needed to speak out against racist ideas. By using first person inclusive pronouns, he also suggests he will accompany them through the difficult parts of the YA book. Is Reynolds coddling readers? No, he is treading carefully, cognizant of the varying levels of experience readers might have with such difficult and disturbing topics while attempting to establish the trust needed to inspire readers to consider antiracism.

While Lester uses italics and Baldwin foregrounds his challenging childhood, Reynolds uses a varied language register and other stylistic devices to boldly establish his own presence in the text. He employs a mix of informal and formal diction: “Oh! And there are three words I want you to keep in mind” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 3). Though

Reynolds uses a directive to invite readers to participate in the text, he uses an interjection to humorously imply what comes next is an afterthought, though a great deal of the premise of the book rests on classifying racist ideas relying on the labels he will define. He presents the complexity of human beings and of what it means to be racist or antiracist while insisting that concepts such as the three used in the book to describe people, ideas, and actions are complicated, and individuals are full of contradictions. He admits “serious definitions” of the terms exist, but “I’m going to give you mine. Segregationists are haters. Like, real haters. . . . Assimilationists are people who like you, but only with quotation marks. . . . [and antiracists] love you because you’re like you” (3–4; emphasis original). Informal language, friendly tone, and references to air quotes, as understood contemporarily as a form of a wink and a nod, not only work together to define the terms, but these stylistic choices also make terms relatable, amusing, and memorable all while conveying solidarity with the reader. Reynolds also makes fun of himself and pseudoscience when he claims to rebuff comments about his “big head” by embracing the idea that it correlates with having a “big brain” (91; emphasis original). These self-effacing moves, along with references to his mother throughout the text and the use of first person, build trust with the reader and also lighten the mood of an otherwise weighty and complex topic.

Reynolds uses asides—text set off parenthetically—on nearly every page, creating a visually appealing, lively, and relatable text. He also uses asides to great effect for humorous and/or ironic purposes: “Voluntary slaves? Richard Baxter was clearly out of his mind” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 22); “cue the scary music” (32); “gross” (91); “Nooooooooooooo!” (186); “Vote for Hate!” (191). Reynolds wants his readers to understand the absurdity of arguing that slavery made Black people savages, so, in an aside, he compares it to telling someone they are attractive: “for a (insert physical attribute that shouldn’t be used as an insult but is definitely being used as an insult. . . . )” (46). Some asides, however, are formally labeled notes; they tend to convey the kind of factual information contained in traditional textbooks, but in a conversational style: “Note: This was the start of the shift, where the Democratic and Republican parties start transforming into the ones we have today” (152). Reynolds shows his personality as well as his knowledge and investment in his subject matter via these asides, drawing readers into the book and

helping them recognize inequality in society in the past (and present), one of the first steps toward antiracism.

Unlike authors of traditional history textbooks, Reynolds uses rhetorical questions to establish a conversational tone, build readers’ trust, and critique historical figures. In the section about Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Prince Henry of Portugal’s biographer, Reynolds asks, “Seems like Zurara was just a liar, right? A fiction writer? So, what makes him the world’s first racist?” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 7). Later, Reynolds points out the absurd and paternalistic nature of arguments against granting land to formerly enslaved Black people by imagining what lawmakers were thinking: “How will they know how to care for the land if it’s just given to them?” To evoke a chuckle, Reynolds responds to this imagined thought, “Um . . . really?” (109). In a discussion of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, Reynolds poses a rhetorical question to his readers: “The film was based on a book called The Clansman. Can you guess what this movie was about?” (136). After refuting Benjamin Rush’s claim that Phillis Wheatley was intelligent because she had not been a slave, Reynolds directs his rhetorical question to Rush: “See how that works, Mr. Rush? Mr. Enlightened? Huh?” (47). Reynolds also often uses rhetorical questions to emphasize a point and urge the reader to think about what racism and antiracism look like. For instance, activism made Angela Davis a target for politicians who tried to get her fired from her teaching job at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Reynolds poses a series of questions in response to Davis’s situation: “But how could she be a threat while at the same time Republicans were claiming racism was over? What would she be threatening? What would she still be fighting? Why would she need to be fired?” (221). The questions, in rapid succession, encourage readers to do two things—interrogate so-called colorblind ideology and imagine themselves as Davis, taking a stand against racism. Reynolds’s rhetorical questions add humor, convey information, advance the narrative, and engage readers in a living history, one that impacts their everyday lives.

Reynolds’s use of music and language enlivens historical content, making his text accessible to a wide audience. Reynolds uses musical references to revitalize interpretations of historical events and figures, adding a performative element long established in Black American literature (Gates 1988, 89; Wiggins, Jr. 1997, 564). Reynolds uses references to music in Stamped in analogies and other creative expressions to contextualize the modern era: “beat drop,”

“Record scratch,” and “breakbeats of racism—looped samples pulsing on and on” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, x, 46, 92). Entire passages of Stamped resemble rap, defined by Gerard Early as a “highly stylized form of chanting, derivative of toasts and aspects of black sermonic recitation” that contains “explicit political content that is meant to express the concerns and preoccupations of young blacks living in urban areas today” (1997, 519). With his references to music, Reynolds further establishes a sense of familiarity and comfort in readers while underscoring the connection between art and activism. Similarly, he uses informal language to establish familiarity and comfort in readers. When Reynolds discusses Gabriel Prosser’s botched attempt to orchestrate a slave revolt, he puts it this way, “Gabriel Prosser was eventually caught and hanged. Game over. Well, not completely. More like, game changer” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 70). He then goes on to recount the fear Prosser’s attempt evoked which resulted in colonization efforts, including Thomas Jefferson’s idea that enslaved people should be sent to Africa or to the Caribbean. Reynolds’s style helps capture readers’ attention, establish a conversational tone, intimacy, and trust with the reader, and leads readers to interpret events in a way that might lead to activism.

Reynolds makes creative choices with regard to formatting that further distinguish his text from standard history books. Bold, large fonts, and white space work together to express and evoke emotion, action, and response. Words such as “race” and “privilege,” for example, appear in large, bold font surrounded by white space, demanding attention to content and reminding readers of the unease and fear the mention of such words invoke in some people (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 2, 27). Creative use of white space and bold font type add to the book’s visual appeal, and the use of white space indicates consideration for intergenerational white readers Reynolds assumes might be encountering frank, historical perspectives on race/racism for the first time and require a break in the text to process their thoughts and emotions. A blank, grey page prefaces each chapter, and between some chapters and sections, blank, grey pages are accompanied by a page with a small silhouette of either a boy or girl surrounded by whiteness. While digital readers require white space to “pause and reflect” (Dresang 1999, 24), white space in Stamped allows time for processing information and feelings depicted most vividly with periodic uses of the word “P A U S E” with space between each letter, visually suggesting inhale and exhale.

However, “P A U S E” written in this way throughout the book serves multiple purposes. Sometimes Reynolds uses it to suggest a reader stop and reflect; other times, he uses it to clarify, change the subject, or emphasize the complexity and contradictions of a historical figure’s actions or words. An example of the latter, combined with repetition, takes place during Reynolds’s discussion of Thomas Jefferson:

He’d apologized for slavery—

P A U S E.

He’d apologized for slavery.

U N P A U S E. He’d retired and returned to Monticello, so he could . . . run his plantation—

P A U S E.

So he could run his plantation?

U N P A U S E. (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 73)

The placement of the text, the font size, and the repetition prompt readers to slow down, pay attention, and process the contradiction. While traditional history books appear to be objective and have presented Jefferson as a revered statesman and founding father who was a champion of democracy and proclaimed, “all men are created equal,” Reynolds uses techniques to encourage readers to think critically about Jefferson’s paradoxical statements and actions. At Reynolds’s urging, readers reflect on Jefferson’s apology for slavery alongside his decision to return to Monticello, where his comfort and livelihood were made possible through the toil of enslaved people. Reynolds trusts readers to conclude that Jefferson was more complex and controversial than traditional history books suggest.

Employing formatting devices such as all caps and italics (and occasionally humor), Reynolds writes history that speaks loudly and clearly to his readers. Reynolds combines white space, all caps, and bold text on a page to capture the reader’s attention and to emphasize an important, jarring, and often erroneous, anti-black thought. For example, all caps help produce humor, “And in 1776, before anyone could spell W-E W-A-N-T S-L-A-V-E-R-Y, Thomas Jefferson . . . sat down to pen the Declaration of Independence” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 55–56). Reynolds arranges the final text of a passage that expresses negative views of enslaved Africans on the page as if it is a stanza, the last line, “Africans couldn’t be loved,” is followed by “EVEN BY GOD” (19), connoting both the dangerousness and the absurdity of such a claim. Another example occurs

when Reynolds points out that philosopher Lucilio Vanini altered perspectives about Africans: “Like Africans went from savages to SAVAGES, which revved up the necessity for Christian conversion and civilizing” (23). Although the bold font serves to mock and ridicule such a claim, Reynolds skillfully implies that the claim was taken seriously and had grave implications for Black lives. Reynolds uses white space coupled with diction and font size and type not only to encourage pondering and interacting with the written word, but also to emphatically express an idea he hopes to sear into the readers’ minds. Chapter seven, for example, contains one sentence in all caps: “AFRICANS ARE NOT SAVAGES” (53). With one fourword sentence in all caps, Reynolds rejects racism and affirms Black humanity. Reading the text aloud, a reader might feel compelled to add, PERIOD.

The author of several free verse novels for youth, Reynolds’s penchant for poetry writing comes through in Stamped, a nonfiction text with both pedagogical and aesthetic value. Reynolds initially considered himself a poet before children’s author Christopher Myers convinced him to try writing YA (Biedenharn 2017, 57). In Stamped, Reynolds arranges words and lines like poetry, varying the format of the text and thereby challenging, in dramatic fashion, expectations of standard history books. Reynolds’s unconventional method enhances the pedagogical value of his work. For example, when Reynolds offers an example of assimilationist thought, he presents it as poetry: Make yourself small, make yourself unthreatening, make yourself the same, make yourself safe, make yourself quiet, to make White people comfortable with your existence. (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 66) Presenting his argument against assimilation in poetic form, Reynolds captures the attention of his readers, whose eyes will follow the shifting left margins to the ultimate (and insidious) purpose of assimilation—to placate White people. In another example of text arranged on the page like poetry, Reynolds uses white space, repetition, and parallel constructions to set the scene for Jonathan Jackson’s attempt to free his brother in the 1960s:

Jonathan Jackson walked into a courtroom in California’s Marin County. He was holding three guns. He took the judge, the prosecutor, and three jurors hostage. He freed three inmates who were on trial. He led the hostages to a van parked outside. (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 194) Reynolds describes the action in a way his readers can see, invoking a sense of urgency.

Reynolds incorporates numerous lists in Stamped, creating an interactive, accessible resource for his readers. Some lists distill a significant amount of information such as the one that sums up hundreds of years of racist theories about Black people (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 49–50). Other lists provide plot summaries of books and movies such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (94–95) and Planet of the Apes (186) or statements, such as the Black Panther Party’s “Ten-Point Platform” (183–84). These lists allow readers to control their experience with the text: They can either quickly scan information (as many readers do with online resources) or slowly take it in, perhaps in a way that prompts further research of their own. Texts with varied font size and types, bold print, and white space complement a highly stimulated world, using fonts and graphics to provide the feel of hypertext and multisensory stimulation that allows the reader to determine the extent to which they interact with a given text (Dresang 1999, 12). This type of control is important when readers encounter texts with complex and controversial subject matter such as Stamped. As opposed to traditional history books that encourage rote memorization of dates, people, and events, Stamped promotes critical thinking and a way of talking about race/racism that readers can use in their everyday lives.

Reynolds personalizes as well as historicizes and contemporizes racism, resisting the dominant impulse to relegate racism to the past. Reynolds explains, for example, that the stances—segregationist, assimilationist, and antiracist—can apply to the reader and to him: “And, actually, these aren’t just the words we’ll be using to describe the people in this book. They’re also the words we’ll be using to describe you. And me. All of us” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 4). Reynolds’s suggestion of self-reflection, self-critique, courage, and comradery puts him in direct conversation with Baldwin. At

the end of The Fire Next Time, Baldwin makes a plea that resonates today, more than fifty years later: If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. (Baldwin 1963, 119)

Writing in the era of challenges to Confederate monuments and Black Lives Matter, Reynolds wants readers to join him and become that “handful” that will change society.

MAKING ANTIRACISM COOL To attract readers of all ages who might be interested in taking “the right seat” by opposing segregation and assimilation, Reynolds adapted Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning using style, formatting, and techniques absent from standard history books. In his interview with Nadworny, Reynolds reflects on his creative process in a way that erases the arbitrary line between childhood and adulthood:

Can I make this something cool? Because there’s currency in cool. There always has been, there always will be. It matters to them. It mattered to me. It still matters to me, right? If it ain’t cool I’m probably not gonna rock with it. This is how I am. I’m still that person . . . how do I take it and make it feel like a fresh pair of Jordans. (Quoted in Nadworny 2020)

While referencing currency and Jordans might suggest the commodification of antiracism, Reynolds is alluding to sneaker culture and using it, as he did with music and other pop culture references in his “present” book, to make his point relatable. Jordans are valuable among “sneakerheads,” and within the sneaker community, opinions on social media can seem trendy, but they can also be quite influential, changing the rankings, social status, and resale price of sneakers. Sneaker culture references aside, Reynolds aims to be transformational. On one hand, the “this” in “make this something cool” is Kendi’s long, scholarly text. Reynolds wanted to take Stamped from the Beginning and “make it feel like a fresh pair of Jordans.” Clearly, Reynolds aimed to write an attractive book about a challenging topic readers would want to obtain, read, learn from, and talk about. He also suggests young people gravitate toward things they consider

“cool” and similar qualities continue to attract us aesthetically despite maturity, so why wouldn’t innovative formatting, style, and humor be valued by youth and adult readers alike? On the other hand, the “this” in “make this something cool” is antiracism. Reynolds defines an antiracist as “someone who truly loves,” and he wishes to encourage readers to adopt antiracism in order to rally them to become activists committed to eradicating White supremacy during a time when overt White supremacist ideas and actions in schools, curriculum, politics, and public spaces like the US Capitol Building are gaining more visibility and viciousness daily. Reynolds asks readers to consider, as Baldwin did before him, what the US would be like if simply loving people as they are became cool. He admits working toward antiracism is challenging and warns readers to move beyond social media activism, telling them to “fight against performance and lean into participation” and “learn all there is to know about the tree of racism. . . . [and] actively chop it down” (Reynolds and Kendi 2020, 253). Because of Reynolds’s understanding of audience and genre, he created an adaptation that views youth as capable and knowledgeable and that presents race, racism, and power as serious threats to human life, but he does so in a humorous, hopeful, and conversational tone that entertains, encourages, politicizes, and educates readers of all ages. Having an adaptation of Stamped from the Beginning just might take the history in the book to places that only a cool YA “remix” like Stamped can go.

NOTES

The author would like to thank the co-editors of this special issue, Laura

Dubek and Ellen Butler Donovan, for their insightful comments and keen editing. 1 When adapting texts for youth, authorship is typically shared between the author of the original text and the author who adapts it. 2 Stamped is one of many adaptations that involve pairing the adult writer(s) with a well-known YA writer. In 2019, noted YA nonfiction author

Tonya Bolden adapted Carol Anderson’s nonfiction book, One Person, No

Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy (2018), for young adults. In some cases, YA adaptations also have peritext such as forewords written by popular YA writers. For example, White Rage (2016) by

Anderson became We Are Not Yet Equal (2018) when Bolden adapted it, and its foreword is written by Nic Stone, bestselling YA author of Dear

Martin (2017), an antiracist novel.

WORKS CITED Ali, Mishti. 2020. “We Need to Talk about the Anti-racism Genre.” galdem. December 23, 2020. https://gal-dem.com/anti-racism-genre-black -lives-matter-race-literature/. Baldwin, James. 1962a. “Letter from a Region in My Mind.” The New Yorker,

Nov. 17, 1962, 59–144. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/11/17 /letter-from-a-region-in-my-mind. . 1962b. “Letter to My Nephew.” The Progressive, December 19–20, 1962, 19–20. https://progressive.org/magazine/letter-nephew/. . 1963. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial. Beckett, Sandra. 2009. Crossover Fiction: Global and Historical Perspectives.

New York: Routledge. Biedenharn, Isabella. 2017. “Young Adult’s Bright Prince.” Entertainment

Weekly 14 (38): 56–57. Bishop, Rudine Sims. 2007. Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Bloom, Karen R. 1997. “Lester, Julius.” In The Oxford Companion to African

American Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris, 434. New York: Oxford University Press. Brown, Keffrelyn D., and Anthony L. Brown. 2010. “Silenced Memories:

An Examination of the Sociocultural Knowledge on Race and Racial

Violence in Official School Curriculum.” Equity & Excellence in Education 43 (2): 139–54. Buchanan, Larry, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel. 2020. “Black Lives

Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History.” New York

Times. July 3, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us /george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html. Bucher, Katherine T., and KaaVonia Hinton. 2014. Young Adult Literature:

Exploration, Evaluation and Appreciation. 3rd ed. Boston: Pearson. Corbett, Sue. 2020. “Unearthing the Roots of Racism with Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi.” Publishers Weekly 267 (2): 12. Deahl, Rachel. 2020. “Deals.” Publishers Weekly 267 (30): 14–15. Dresang, Eliza T. 1999. Radical Change: Books for Youth in the Digital Age.

New York: H. W. Wilson. Early, Gerard. 1997. “Music.” In The Oxford Companion to African American

Literature, edited by William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and

Trudier Harris, 517–19. New York: Oxford University Press. Falconer, Rachel. 2009. The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership. New York: Routledge. Forde, Kathy Roberts. 2014. “The Fire Next Time in the Civil Sphere: Literary Journalism and Justice in America 1963.” Journalism 15 (5): 573–88. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-

American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hannah-Jones, Nikole. 2020. “Remixing it Up: Jason Reynolds Recast

Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning and It Is Not a History

Book.” School Library Journal 66 (3): 37–41. Harris, Violet J. 1997. “Children’s Literature Depicting Blacks.” In Using

Multiethnic Literature in the K-8 Classroom, edited by Violet J. Harris, 21–58. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon Publishers. Hinton, KaaVonia, and Sabrina Carnesi. 2017. “On the Street: A ‘Radical Change’ in Urban Fiction Featuring Youth.” The Dragon Lode 35 (2): 79–88. Hutcheon, Linda. 2012. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Taylor & Francis Group. ProQuest Ebook Central. Johnson, Dianne. 1990. Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and Promise of African

American Literature for Youth. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Kendi, Ibram X. 2016. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of

Racist Ideas in America. New York: Nation Books. McNair, Jonda C. 2008. “Comparative Analysis of The Brownies’ Book and

Contemporary African American Children’s Literature Written by

Patricia C. McKissack.” In Embracing, Evaluating, and Examining African American Children’s and Young Adult Literature, edited by Wanda M.

Brooks and Jonda C. McNair, 3–29. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Nadworny, Elissa. 2020. “A History Book That Isn’t: Finding A Way to

Teach Racism To A New Generation.” NPR. March 14, 2020. https:// www.npr.org/2020/03/14/814630039/a-history-book-that-isnt-finding -a-way-to-teach-racism-to-a-new-generation. Phillips, Michelle H. 2013. “The Children of Double Consciousness: From

‘The Souls of Black Folk to The Brownies’ Book.’” PMLA 128 (3): 590–607. Reynolds, Jason. 2020. “About.” Jason Reynolds. https://www.jasonwritesbooks.com/about. Accessed Sept. 15, 2020. Reynolds, Jason, and Ibram X. Kendi. 2020. Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix of the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the

Beginning. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Thein, Amanda Haertling, Mark Sulzer, and Renita Schmidt. 2013.

“Engaging Students in Democracy through Adolescent Literature: Lessons from Two Versions of Wes Moore’s Memoir.” English Journal 103 (2): 52–59. Tolson, Nancy. D. 2008. Black Children’s Literature Got De Blues: The Creativity of Black Writers and Illustrators. New York: Peter Lang. Tyson, Cynthia. 2003. “A Bridge Over Troubled Water: Social Studies,

Civic Education and Critical Race Theory.” In Critical Race Theory Perspectives on Social Studies: The Profession, Policies and Curriculum, edited by Gloria Ladson-Billings, 15–25. Greenwich, CT: Information Age

Publishing. Wiggins, William H., Jr. 1997. “Performance and Pageants.” In The Oxford

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KAAVONIA HINTON is a professor in the Teaching & Learning Department at Old Dominion University and the author of several articles and books, including Angela Johnson: Poetic Prose (2006), Integrating Multicultural Literature in Libraries and Classrooms in Secondary Schools (with Gail K. Dickinson, 2007), Sharon M. Draper: Embracing Literacy (2009), and Young Adult Literature: Exploration, Evaluation and Appreciation, 3rd ed. (with Katherine T. Bucher, 2013). She is also the co-editor of the book series, Life Writing in Education (Information Age Publishing).

DREAM KEEPERS

ELLEN BUTLER DONOVAN AND LAURA DUBEK

When Langston Hughes made his literary debut in the pages of The Brownies Book and The Crisis in 1921, the nineteen-year-old could not have imagined the incredible impact he would have on generations of writers. This section contains profiles of artists of that next generation and their work for children and young adults. Drawing from existing scholarship scattered among various monographs, reference works, articles, reviews, and interviews, we present these biographical sketches alphabetically, without regard to whether the artist has been recognized as a writer for children or adults. Our intent is to prompt scholars and teachers of American literature, African American literature, and children’s/YA literature to commit to a fully integrated canon where Black children, too, sing America.

MAYA ANGELOU (1928–2014) Since its publication in 1970, Maya Angelou’s first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, has garnered praise and generated controversy. A Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) Best Book for Young Adults (1970) and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book (1971), Angelou’s frank and lyrical accounting of her traumatic coming-of-age raises questions about appropriate content for young readers, content that often prompts book banning campaigns. The

COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 49.3 Summer 2022 Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286 © Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2022

American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) has collected data on challenges to books since 1990. The reasons cited for challenging Caged Bird include offensive language, sexually explicit content, violence, and unsuited for age group. In an interview published in Journal of Reading, Joyce Graham asks Angelou to specify the appropriate age for Caged Bird, something the writer refuses to do. Angelou does, however, offer a response that suggests her faith in adolescents’ ability to tackle tough subjects: “I think a young man or woman of 14 . . . by the age of 14 and certainly by 15, an American child should have read The Grapes of Wrath, Intruder in the Dust, Main Street, American Dilemma, Armies of the Night, The American Way of Death, Woman Warrior, and The Fire Next Time so that they will know what their country is made of” (quoted in Graham 1991, 409). James Baldwin, the author of the last text on Angelou’s reading list, suggested the power of Angelou’s work for both young and adult readers: “I have no words for this achievement, but I know that not since the days of my childhood, when people in books were more real than the people one saw every day, have I found myself so moved” (1970).

Born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, Angelou spent most of her childhood with her grandmother, Annie Henderson, in Stamps, Arkansas. The child of divorced parents, she also spent time in St. Louis with her mother, Vivian Baxter. Baxter’s boyfriend raped eight-year-old Maya, the poet who would grow up to pen “And Still I Rise” (1978) responding to her trauma by refusing to speak for five years. (Her uncles responded to her rape by murdering the rapist.) In Caged Bird, Angelou credits two women with providing her the stability and love she needed to thrive: her grandmother and Mrs. Flowers, a teacher in Stamps who gave her poetry to read and recite. Angelou spent her adolescence living in San Francisco with her mother. At age sixteen, one month after graduating from Mission High School, she gave birth to her son, Guy Johnson. In the six autobiographies that follow Caged Bird, Angelou chronicles a rich and full life of artistry and political activism. She married and divorced three times, the first marriage to Tosh Angelos (1949–1952), whose name she changed and made her own. From 1981 to her death in 2014, Angelou served as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University.

A prolific writer, Angelou produced autobiographies, poetry, picturebooks, and various media for young people. Her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name (1974), focuses on her life from

age seventeen to nineteen. In the 1980s, she published Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship, illustrated by Etienne Delessert (1986); Maya Angelou: Poems (1986); and Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987), a response to drawings of Black women by Tom Feelings. In her literary history of Black children’s literature, Rudine Sims Bishop notes that Sheba is “not a tribute to children, but a powerful and sensuous celebration of Black womanhood. As such, its primary audience is likely to be found among teenagers and adults” (2007, 100). In the 1990s, Angelou published a poetry collection, I Shall Not Be Moved (1990), as well as three picturebooks illustrated by Margaret Courtney-Clarke: And My Best Friend is a Chicken (1994), My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me (1994), and Kofi and His Magic (1996). Kofi introduces children to an Ashanti boy and his life in a West African village. In 2002, a picturebook series promoting cultural diversity called “Maya’s World” launched with Angelina of Italy, followed by Izak of Lapland (2004), Renee Marie of France (2004), Mikale of Hawaii (2004), and Cedric of Jamaica (2005).

Angelou’s work has provided inspiration for other artists. In Life Doesn’t Frighten Me: Poem (1993), Sara Jane Boyers presents Angelou’s poem, published in 1978, alongside paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, produced during the 1980s, in a stunning picturebook. Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem (2005) became a picturebook in 2008, with mixed-media illustrations by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher. Amazing Peace was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work for Children.

Readers of all ages have various opportunities to learn about Angelou. In 1979 CBS produced a television adaptation of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (screenplay by Angelou). Her work appears in multiple collections, including My Soul Looks Back in Wonder (1983), illustrated by Tom Feelings; Who Do You Think You Are?: Stories of Friends and Enemies (1993); and Read and Rise (2006). Her profile in the picturebook series, Poetry for Young People, was named a Best Book by School Library Journal Book Review Stars (2007), Middle and Junior High School Library Catalog (2008), and Best Children’s Books of the Year (2008). Many of her books have sound recordings and/or video adaptations, and she narrates for other artists’ work, including Mark Bozzuti-Jones’s Lil Dan, the Drummer Boy: A Civil War Story, illustrated by Romare Bearden (2003) and nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work.

Angelou is featured in several reference volumes devoted to YA writers: Twentieth-Century Young Adult Writers (St. James Press),

Writers for Young Adults (Scribner’s), and Authors & Artists for Young Adults (Gale). Beginning in January 2022, she will appear on a series of commemorative quarters, part of an effort to represent women on US currency. Nearly all of Angelou’s work remains in print or accessible in sound recordings and/or video.

JAMES BALDWIN (1924–1987)

James Baldwin’s niece remembers exactly how she felt when her famous uncle’s book for children arrived at her house in 1976: “It was just magical,” she tells Alexandra Alter. “It showed how much we meant to him, and how sacred and precious our young lives were to him” (A. Karefa-Smart quoted in Alter 2018). Alter interviewed Aisha Karefa-Smart and her brother Tejan Karefa-Smart for a New York Times story about the reissue of Baldwin’s Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood by Duke University Press in 2018. Aisha and Tejan were the inspirations for two of the book’s characters: eightyear-old Blinky and four-year-old TJ.

Originally published in 1976 by Dial Press, Baldwin’s book about Black childhood has, until recently, been largely if not completely ignored. A towering figure in the African American literary tradition, Baldwin merits mention in encyclopedias focusing on World Biography, US History, Twentieth-Century Literature, African American Literature, and Theater. The Oxford Encyclopedia of America Literature (2005) contains the most comprehensive biographical essay on Baldwin and his work, and yet even that essay includes no mention of his children’s book; Little Man Little Man does not even appear in the list of Baldwin’s Selected Works. The lack of critical attention to Little Man reflects, in part, the perception that the book stands alone and apart from Baldwin’s other work. Nicholas Boggs, the scholar largely responsible for its reissue, underscores this point, arguing that the book’s consignment “to the footnotes of Baldwin’s career and to the margins of both the African-American literary tradition and the field of children’s literature” should not surprise us because “there is simply no other book quite like it” (2015, 131). While granting a measure of originality to Baldwin’s children book, a more convincing explanation for why Little Man has been ignored is the apartheid in and of (Black) children’s literature that this Special Issue calls on critics to end.

In his dismissive reading of Little Man Little Man for The New York Times Book Review in 1977, Julius Lester, a Newbery Award Winner,

betrays a preference for one aspect of children’s literary apartheid: “Children’s literature is a genre unto itself,” Lester insists, “as demanding in its way as that more generally knighted as ‘literature.’ Literary figures seldom recognize this, and their attempts to write for children are often embarrassing.” While acknowledging that Little Man shares features of books written for young readers, Lester uses his review to protest what he views as one artist’s encroachment on another’s territory: “Children’s literature is a province of its own, a fact which the literati do not take seriously enough” (1977). Baldwin would probably agree with both those assertions while avoiding the conclusion that writers should limit their work to certain genres, subjects, and audiences.

Lester’s view about established writers for adults venturing into the world of children’s books is often shared by reviewers, who serve as gatekeepers for which books get purchased, read, and written about. In a review of Little Man Little Man for School Library Journal, Linda Silver, an Ohio librarian, declares Baldwin’s book a failure because child readers will be “forced to reconcile their point of view with TJ’s, with the author’s, and with the illustrator’s, which is sometimes grotesque.” While not specifying such grotesqueness, Silver includes an illustration that features the alcoholic Miss Lee descending the stairs with text not included in Baldwin’s book: “Tipsy and tantalizing, Miss Lee lets TJ feel like a ‘Little Man.’” For Silver, the fatal flaw of the book seems to be that it is all just too real, the world TJ experiencing too complex for his young mind to process. She concludes that “Baldwin writes through children to other adults” (Silver 1979, 29).

Little Man Little Man does seem different from Baldwin’s other, more familiar work, but in many ways the book is quintessential Baldwin—fearless, prescient, lyrical, compelling, and full of compassion for its characters. The watercolor illustrations by Yoran Cazac complement a story that seeks to portray the realities of Black urban life through the perspective of four-year-old TJ. The subject matter engages directly with debates in children’s literary studies about childhood innocence and race as TJ witnesses drug use, police brutality, and alcoholism. The book’s theme—the redemptive power of love—resonates throughout Baldwin’s complete oeuvre, and its insistence on the necessity and power of literacy strikes the dominant chord in the African American literary tradition.

Reading Baldwin’s children’s book within the context of his relationship with Richard Wright makes visible a through line otherwise

obscured by a critic’s preoccupation with genre and audience. Baldwin made his writing debut in 1949 with a contentious essay in Partisan Review. “Everybody’s Protest Novel” marks the beginning of a series of writings in which Baldwin responds to Wright, the author of Native Son (1940), the first novel by a Black writer chosen for the Book-of-the-Month club. In that oft-cited article, Baldwin critiques Wright for presenting Black people in ways that deny the complexities and joys of Black identity and life. While Boggs points out that Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood signifies on Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood (1945), he puts more emphasis on the setting of the final scene (a basement apartment) and thus the book’s connection to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Given TJ’s age, Mr. Man’s occupation (super of the building), and Miss Beanpole’s penchant for watching at her window, a more apt connection may be to Ann Petry’s The Street (1946). Like Baldwin, Petry also published works for children as well as featured child characters in her adult novels. Connections could also be made between the Black urban childhood in Little Man and works by June Jordan, Walter Dean Myers, and others.

The reissue of Little Man Little Man gives scholars new opportunities not only to discuss Baldwin’s work and legacy but to challenge common perspectives and prejudices related to his spectacular and arresting work for children.

ARNA BONTEMPS (1902–1973)

Arna Bontemps was the first Black author to be recognized by the American Library Association with a Newbery Honor for his history for children, The Story of the Negro (1948). He and Langston Hughes were the first Black writers for children to be published by mainstream presses.

Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, where his family had deep roots. Before Bontemps started school, racial violence and persistent outbreaks of tuberculosis prompted the extended family to migrate to Southern California where they settled in a semi-rural community that would eventually become Watts. His parents converted to Seventh Day Adventism from their childhood religious training (his father was raised a Catholic and his mother a Methodist), his father eventually becoming a minister. The denomination enforced strict rules about exposure to secularism, practices which shaped Bontemps’s education and career. His mother died from

tuberculosis when he was eleven. His father sent Bontemps to live with his maternal grandmother on her farm in a nearby rural area where he was exposed to Black folk culture through his grandmother’s brother who served as a source of stories, family history, songs, and connection to remaining family members in Louisiana. In part to separate Arna from this influence and culture, which his father repudiated, the senior Bontemps sent him to a Seventh Day Adventist boarding high school. Arna subsequently attend Pacific Union College, also associated with the denomination. At each institution he was the only or one of the only Black students. Arna’s relationship with Seventh Day Adventism became increasingly conflicted: reading fiction was prohibited, and his father never accepted his decision to become a writer. Yet, Arna taught at Seventh Day Adventist schools in New York, Alabama, and Chicago to support himself and his family for over a decade.

After graduating from Pacific Union, Bontemps determined to build a career as a poet. Returning to his father’s home, he took several jobs to earn his keep while he wrote. In 1924, his first published poem, “Hope,” appeared in Crisis. This achievement prompted him to move to New York City where he soon met Hughes, Countee Cullen, and the other young writers who would become illustrious in the Harlem Renaissance. In 1926 and 1927, Bontemps received further accolades in the form of the Alexander Pushkin Award for Poetry offered by Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life and a first prize for poetry from Crisis. Bontemps’s participation in the inner circle of Harlem Renaissance writers diminished when he married Alberta Johnson in 1926 and they started a family. Bontemps’s family responsibilities shaped his career: he scrambled for teaching and other jobs to supplement his writing income and even after he took the position of Chief Librarian at Fisk in 1943, he bemoaned the lack of time he could devote to writing.

Bontemps began his career writing for adults, publishing poetry and novels. But in 1931, he invited Hughes to collaborate on a story for children based on Hughes’s observations of Haitian life collected during his trip to the island in 1931. The result, Popo and Fifina, Children of Haiti, illustrated by E. Campbell Simms (1932), was commercially successful. It was followed by You Can’t Pet a Possum, illustrated by Ilse Bischoff (1934), written when Bontemps and his family lived outside of Huntsville, Alabama. The story follows eight-year-old Shine Boy’s widening experiences in his Black rural neighborhood, including his adoption of a stray dog, meeting new friends, and a

trip to Birmingham to visit his uncle. The novel concludes with Shine Boy celebrating his ninth birthday, his birthday wish before he blows out the candles on his cake expressing a continuation of the joys and pleasures of his life. Though the illustrations reinforce negative stereotypes, the story depicts a close-knit joyful community.

Like many Black authors of his generation, Bontemps wrote for children to remedy the absence of literature that reflected Black culture, identity, and language. He recounts that as a twelve-year-old he scoured the local library for information about Black history and found nothing. His writing for children includes tall tales, realistic fiction, biography, and historical fiction and was written for a range of childhood readers. He produced the first comprehensive collection of Black poetry for children, Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers, illustrated by Henrietta Bruce Sharon (1941). The anthology includes not only work by his contemporaries such as Hughes and Effie Lee Newsom and respected poets of the previous generation such as Paul Lawrence Dunbar, but also traditional rhymes, folk songs, and ballads. Sad-Faced Boy (1937), illustrated by Virginia Lee Burton, the first children’s story set in Harlem, and Lonesome Boy (1955), illustrated by Felixs Topolski, depict the complexity of Black childhood with sensitivity and humor.

In addition to writing biographies of famous figures such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and George Washington Carver, Bontemps profiled contemporary individuals who successfully pursued careers previously unavailable to Blacks in We Have Tomorrow, written with Maria Palfi (1945). Tomorrow, designed for adolescents on the cusp of making plans regarding the course of their own lives, is an early example of young adult nonfiction. Bontemps won a Newbery Honor for The Story of the Negro, illustrated by Raymond Lufkin (1948; rev. 1955), his history of Africa and the Black diaspora, written in his characteristic intimate and friendly narrative voice. In Chariot in the Sky, illustrated by Cyrus Leroy Baldridge (1951), Bontemps introduces readers to the history of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in a novel about an enslaved teen who gains his freedom after the Civil War and, when he hears of the new school that will admit Blacks, travels to Nashville in hopes of furthering his education. Chariot is among the first historical novels for children that features the Black experience.

Bontemps collaborated with Jack Conroy to write a number of tall tales in the 1940s and 1950s: The Fast Sooner Hound, illustrated by Virginia Lee Burton (1942); Slappy Hooper, the Wonderful Sign Painter,

illustrated by Ursula Koering (1946); and Sam Patch, the High, Wide & Handsome Jumper, illustrated by Paul Brown (1951). He also wrote a history of Black migration in the US: They Seek a City (1945; reissued in 1967 as Anyplace But Here). A number of Bontemps’s stories were published posthumously, including two collaborations with Hughes—The Pasteboard Bandit, illustrated by Peggy Turley (1997) and Boy of the Border, illustrated by Antonio Castro L. (2009), both of which feature a Mexican boy as the protagonist—as well as his fantastical Bubber Goes to Heaven (written in 1932 or 1933; pub. 1998) depicting heaven as an idealized Black community.

Despite minimal recognition during his lifetime, Bontemps’s contribution to the tradition of Black children’s literature is significant. In addition to his ground-breaking work in providing books, stories, and poems to young Black readers, Bontemps, like Hughes, celebrated Black folk culture and Black language in the face of derogatory stereotypes, and he presented Black vernacular to young readers in an easy-to-read manner and without caricature.

GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1917–2000)

The biographical headnote for Gwendolyn Brooks in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature urges readers to consider Brooks’s novel, Maud Martha (1953), alongside the poetry for which she is much better known. Indeed, the coming-of-age novel, comprised of thirty-four vignettes, develops themes and sounds notes similar to those found in much of Brooks’s award-winning poetry. The same could be said for the work Brooks wrote specifically for children: Bronzeville Boys and Girls, illustrated by Ronni Solbert (1956); Family Pictures (1970); Aloneness (1971); The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves, illustrated by Timothy Jones (1974); Beckonings (1975); Young Poet’s Primer (1980); Very Young Poets (1983); Winnie (1991); and Children Coming Home (1991).

For eighty-three years, Brooks called Chicago home. The South Side was the inspiration for and the focus of much of her work. Keziah Corinne Wims, her mother, taught elementary school in Kansas before moving to Illinois with her husband and newborn daughter. David Anderson Brooks worked as a janitor and filled the family home with books. Keziah made sure Gwendolyn and her brother had library cards. At age seven, young Brooks wrote her first verses, and at age thirteen, she saw her poem “Eventide” published in American Childhood, a magazine for young readers. She met James

Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, each of whom encouraged her to keep writing. And she did, becoming a regular contributor to the Chicago Defender at age seventeen; more than seventy-five of her poems appeared in the Black newspaper’s “Lights and Shadow” column. Brooks graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1936 and married Henry Blakely three years later. She had two children: Henry (1940) and Nora (1951).

Brooks published her first work specifically for children seven years after she won the Pulitzer Prize for Annie Allen (1949). In Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature, Rudine Sims Bishop puts Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956) in company with work by Countee Cullen and Effie Lee Newsome, noting that several of the poems in Bronzeville are widely anthologized and “after a half century, can be considered classics among contemporary American poetry” (Bishop 2007, 56). In 2007, Amistad/HarperCollins reissued Brooks’s Bronzeville with illustrations by Faith Ringgold. The book earned a Parents’ Choice Award in Poetry, and several publications named it a Best Book, including Booklist, Children’s Catalog, Choices, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly. Reviewers called attention to the timeless quality of Brooks’s poems as well as Ringgold’s stunning and vibrant illustrations, which, compared to the pencil sketches of the original 1956 version, leave no doubt as to the racial identity of the children whose urban lives Brooks and Ringgold both celebrate.

In 1969, Brooks left her publisher, Harper & Brothers, making a conscious choice to publish in, and thus support small Black presses: the Detroitbased Broadside, Chicago’s Third World Press, and her own Brooks Press and the David Company, both launched in 1982. From 1969 until her death in 2000, Brooks served as poet laureate of Illinois, establishing yearly awards for young people that she funded herself. She lectured at colleges and gave countless readings at schools, prisons, and hospitals. In 1983 she was appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, and in 1989 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. Brooks considered the Jefferson Lecturer Award, which she received in 1994, to be her greatest honor.

Brooks warrants mention in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, Nancy L. Huse calling her “innovative and exacting in depicting the social construction of childhood” (2006). Haki R. Madhubuti, who had a close personal relationship with Brooks,

describes her legacy as “that of poet, teacher, advocate for children and ‘little people’ and a person who lived a life promoting kindness and quality” (2000, 15). Known for his participation in the Black Arts Movement, Madhubuti founded the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Creative Writing and Black Literature at Chicago State University in 1990. At the time of Brooks’s death in 2000, he served as director emeritus, honoring the legacy of the first Black American to win a Pulitzer Prize, a writer whose career spanned more than fifty years and continues to find expression in the work of others. Jan Spivey Gilchrist illustrated Brooks’s poem in We Are Shining (2017), and the first volume of Graphic Gwendolyn (2021), an illustrated poetry series, features two of Brooks’s poems in comic book form—“Tommy” and “The Boy Died In My Alley.”

ASHLEY BRYAN (1923–2022)

Bryan described himself as an artist-teacher, a description that remained true to his artistic commitment until the end of his life. As a storyteller, illustrator, and artist, Bryan viewed his body of work as engaging his audience of adults and children with “Black contributions to our world” (Virtual Maine Arts 2020).

The second of six children of parents who emigrated from Antigua, Bryan grew up in the vibrant immigrant community of the Bronx. He made books beginning in kindergarten where, as part of the process of learning the alphabet, the students drew pictures to illustrate each letter and the teacher provided the materials to bind the pictures together into a book. He credited that experience with his desire to make books, a hobby that continued throughout his childhood. At the age of sixteen, he graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School and compiled a portfolio to serve as an application for a scholarship to art school. Despite fine praise for the quality of his portfolio, he was told a scholarship to a “colored” student would be a “waste.” Bryan describes this experience as his first confrontation with racism (Virtual Maine Arts 2020). On the advice of his high school teachers, he enrolled in a semester long postgraduate program at his high school and the following summer sat for the entrance exam to Cooper Union College of Art and Architecture, which did not require an interview and which offered (until 2012) a tuition-free art program. He was accepted into that program, but his education was interrupted by World War II. Bryan continued to draw throughout his war service (which included the invasion at

Omaha Beach), keeping his sketchbook in his gas mask and sending home his drawings for safe keeping. His war experience profoundly affected him, prompting him to enroll as a philosophy major at Columbia University. After his graduation in 1950, he studied painting in France, returned to the Bronx where he taught art to children for a few years, and then received a Fulbright to study painting in Germany.

When he returned to the US from Germany, he built a career combining teaching with making art, particularly illustration, using his income to help raise his sister’s five children. He taught art at Queens College, The Dalton School, Lafayette College, after school programs for children, and Dartmouth University (1974–1988). Prior to his entrance into the children’s publishing market, Bryan produced the drawings for the first illustrated version of Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1950). In 1962 Jean Karl, an editor at Atheneum, offered him a contract to produce the illustrations for Rabindranath Tagore’s Mood, For What Do You Wait?, a collection of poems. That book launched his career as an illustrator and author for children.

Bryan’s work for children is marked by three gravitational centers: African tales, African American spirituals, and Black American poetry. He sought to make this cultural production accessible to a broad audience unfamiliar with African and Black American creativity. His illustrated versions of African tales are based on his research in anthropological and linguistic accounts of oral storytelling which he then adapts in his own storytelling style. As a storyteller, he is particularly interested in the aurality of tales, drawing on the sonic techniques of poetry (rhythm, rhyme, syncopation, onomatopoeia) for his prose retellings. He believed that readers will better engage with a text if they can hear the “voice of the printed word” (Reading Rockets 2011). His illustrated tales include The Ox of the Wonderful Horns and Other African Folktales (1971); The Dancing Granny (1978), adapted as a stage play in 2017; Beat the Story-Drum, Pum-Pum (1987); Ashley Bryan’s African Tales, Uh Huh (1998); and Beautiful Blackbird (2003).

Bryan’s interest in African American spirituals was motivated by the fact that these ubiquitous songs are not credited as Black cultural production. Bryan noted that though songs like “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” are well known and sung around the world, they are often described or categorized as American traditional songs, thereby appropriating the contribution of Black Americans. By creating illustrated versions of these songs, including beautiful wood-cut illustrations of the music, he intended to make

them available to children as the legacy of the Black experience of slavery and religious faith. His illustrated collections of spirituals include Walk Together Children. Black American Spirituals, Vol. 1 (1974); I’m Going to Sing. Black American Spirituals, Vol. 2 (1982); All Night. All Day. A Child’s First Book of African-American Spirituals (1991); and Let It Shine. Three Favorite Spirituals (2007). A number of these collections have been reissued multiple times.

Bryan’s interest in Black American poetry resulted in picturebooks which illustrate poems by Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, and Paul Laurence Dunbar and illustrations for larger multi-author collections anthologized by others. Bryan’s lifelong career as a storyteller is also shaped by his love of the poetry of Black Americans. He began every storytelling performance, whether with children or adults, with a call-and-response rendition of Hughes’s “My People.” Bryan’s illustrated books of Black American poets include I Greet the Dawn. Poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1978); Ashley Bryan’s ABC of African American Poetry (1997); Sail Away. Poems by Langston Hughes (2015); and I am Loved by Nikki Giovanni (2018).

Other notable accomplishments include his illustrations for an edition of How God Fix Jonah by Lorenz Graham (2000) and Freedom Over Me (2016), imagined first-person free verse poems based on the Fairchild’s Appraisement of the Estate document dated July 5, 1828, which lists for sale eleven enslaved persons as well as livestock and cotton.

Bryan won numerous awards. He received the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Lifetime Achievement given by the American Library Association and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for Lifetime Achievement (known as the Children’s Literature Legacy Award since 2018) given by the Association of Library Service to Children. Three of Bryan’s books have received the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award: Beat the Story-Drum, Pum-Pum (1987); Beautiful Blackbird (2003); and Let It Shine: Three Favorite Spirituals (2007). Bryan was awarded Coretta Scott King Honor designations for five books: What a Morning!: The Christmas Story in Black Spirituals (1987); Ashley Bryan’s ABC of African American Poetry (1997); All Day, All Night: A Child’s First Book of African American Spirituals (1991); Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives and Dreams Brought Back to Life (2016); and Infinite Hope: A Black Artist’s Journey from World War II to Peace (2019).

Until just before his death in 2022, Bryan continued to participate in storytelling and making art, including toys, stained glass panels

made with sea glass, puppets made from beach detritus, paintings, illustration, and books. Bryan’s art has been featured in museums and galleries, and the Ashley Bryan Center (a digital space) seeks to further his educational goals and artistic legacy. His material archive is housed at The Kislak Center, University of Pennsylvania.

LUCILLE CLIFTON (1936–2010)

Lucille Clifton has the distinction of being recognized in both The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (though her entry is scant) and The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Her poetry appears in a wide range of anthologies and collections, indicating her range, versatility, and popularity. In biographical headnotes and essays, critics typically highlight aspects of Clifton’s writing for adults—economical language, affirmation of Black urban life, a focus on family history and relationships, optimism, and resilience in the face of adversity—that can be found, in equal measure, in her more than twenty books for children.

The year after Clifton published Good Times (1969), her first collection of poetry, she published the first in what would be an eight-book, critically acclaimed series for young readers revolving around the ordinary adventures of six-year-old Everett Anderson. In the 1970s, Clifton also produced fourteen picturebooks, giving Rudine Sims Bishop cause to call her “the predominant voice in African American picturebooks of that decade” (2007, 120). Young Adult writer Walter Dean Myers remembers the 1970s as a time when “things were looking up. I believed that my children and their contemporaries would not only escape the demeaning images I had experienced but would have strong, positive images as well” (1986, 50). Clifton’s publications for children provided cause for such optimism.

When Clifton began writing, she had six children under the age of ten. Their questions, as well as the lack of Black history in school curricula, motivated her to write books that instilled cultural pride in young Black readers. The Black BC’s, illustrated by Don Miller (1970), is an alphabet book and primer on Black history. All Us Come Cross the Water, illustrated by John Steptoe (1973), follows young Ujamaa as he researches his family history for a school assignment. Ujamaa’s great-grandmother, the family griot, tells him that her roots go back to 1855 Whydah in Dahomey (just as Clifton’s do). Ujamaa then visits the Panther Book Shop, where he gets a lesson in slavery

and naming from Tweezer. Both elders—Big Mama and Tweezer— contrast the ignorance and insensitivity of the Black school teacher, who calls Ujamaa “Jim.”

Clifton tackles serious issues in her books for young readers, often presenting the lives of children living in poverty. Good, Says Jerome (1973) features a dialogue between siblings: a young boy voices his fears about a range of issues, from monsters to death, and his older sister responds with reassurances and affirmations. The Times They Used to Be (1974) deals with menstruation, a father on a chain gang, and PTSD—a Vietnam vet jumps off a bridge and drowns. In Don’t You Remember? (1974), named a Coretta Scott King Honor book, a fifteen-year-old boy drops out of school to care for his four-year-old sister while their parents work. The younger sibling in My Brother Fine with Me (1975) runs away, leaving his older sister Johnetta, the narrator, to consider how much she actually cares about him. In these books, Clifton employs the Black vernacular, honoring the type of speech many Black children would hear at home and in their neighborhoods.

Clifton is perhaps best known for her Everett Anderson series. Some of the Days of Everett Anderson (1970) introduces readers to a sixyear-old boy who lives in an urban housing project. Over the course of the series, Clifton affirms Everett’s feelings and authenticates his quotidian experiences, including the joyful anticipation of celebrating Christmas in the city in Everett Anderson’s Christmas Coming (1971). She addresses the young boy’s longing for his father and his jealousy as his mother remarries and has another child. In Everett Anderson’s Goodbye, illustrated by Ann Grifalconi (1983), Clifton chronicles the five stages of grief as Everett struggles with his father’s death. Goodbye won the Coretta Scott King Award in 1984. In the last book in the series, One of the Problems of Everett Anderson (2001), Everett worries about his friend who may be a victim of child abuse: “A room can be lonely / when a boy not grown, / sees his new friend Greg / with a scar or bruise mark on his leg.”

In the most comprehensive survey of the Black children’s literary tradition to date, Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature, Bishop underscores the pivotal role Clifton played as one of a small group of Black poets writing specifically for young readers in the final decades of the twentieth century. Bishop posits that Clifton, along with Eloise Greenfield, “essentially defined contemporary African American children’s poetry” (2007, 95). She puts Clifton and Greenfield in company with Sonia Sanchez,

Nikki Giovanni, Tom Feelings, and Nikki Grimes (all of whom published in the 1970s) as well as Joyce Carol Thomas, Angela Johnson, Ashley Bryan, and Walter Dean Myers (all of whom published poems for children in the 1990s).

Bishop honors Clifton in the concluding section of Free Within Ourselves, taking for her epigraph lines from the poet’s memoir Generations (1976): “Things don’t fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept” (2007, 273). These “lines,” Bishop argues, constitute a rich tradition of Black children’s literature, defined by an overriding concern evident in all of Clifton’s work: authentication. In her entry for Clifton in Black Women in America, Darlene Clark Hine notes Clifton’s “almost palpable concern with writing and with books and literacy.” Hine underscores this theme in Clifton’s work in order to make a larger point: “Black children’s literature should be considered part and parcel of the larger African American literary canon, in which literature and literacy have always been treasure chests” (2005).

ALEXIS DE VEAUX (1948–)

A writer of fiction and poetry for adults and children, a playwright, essayist, and performance artist, Alexis De Veaux’s career as a children’s author features incessant experimentation and genre-bending and blending. Her work for children confronts racial and economic inequities and celebrates the strength and resilience of her characters. Born and raised in Harlem, De Veaux pursued various avenues of art and activism. Her identity as a writer was formed in Harlem in response to the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, her awareness of other Black women writers working in New York such as Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison, her experience of the masculinist ethos of the Black Arts Movement, and the Third World Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement. After graduating from high school, De Veaux worked in New York City for a number of organizations as a teacher of creative writing, including the New York Urban League, the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center, and Project Create, in addition to a stint as a community worker with the Bronx Office of Probations and the cultural coordinator of Black Expo for the Black Coalition of Greater New Haven, Connecticut. She engaged in artistic and feminist activism in the cofounding of the Coeur de l’Unicorne Gallery, the Flamboyant Ladies Theatre Company (1977–1984), and

the Gap Tooth Girlfriends Writing Workshop (1980–1984). She worked as a contributing editor and Editor-at-Large for Essence from 1978–1990, holding short teaching stints in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence, Vermont College, and Wabash. Several of her plays were staged during these decades. In 1992 she earned a PhD in American Studies from SUNY Buffalo.

De Veaux’s work for children illustrates her commitment to experimentation and independence. Her first book, the self-illustrated na-ni (1973), portrays a young girl’s dreams of the bicycle her mother will buy her with the welfare check due in the mail that day. When a junkie steals the check from their apartment mailbox, na-ni and her mother try but fail to track him down. Her mother’s comment, “a snake don’t care who he bite,” is followed by na-ni’s poetic response, written in her “special blue book”: after conveying her grief at the loss of her unfulfilled dreams, na-ni asks, “dont that man know / I am his sister he steal from?” (De Veaux 1973). The picturebook is radically experimental in both form and treatment of a child’s experience when compared to contemporary picturebooks: the use of almost abstract line-drawings of geometric shapes to represent the characters, the prose poem narrative, the blending of realistic features of the Harlem neighborhood with na-ni’s fantasies of riding her bike through the sky, the absence of any shame associated with receiving welfare, and the child’s resilience—all combine to create a moving and innovative book. na-ni received an Art Books for Children Award from the Brooklyn Museum.

Each of De Veaux’s children’s books experiments with techniques and challenges conventions regarding genre and content. Using the rhythms of jazz, De Veaux wrote a fictionalized biography of Billie Holiday for young readers, Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday (1980). In addition to the aural qualities of the prose poem, De Veaux used an unusual typeface and interspersed photographs and images of sheet music. De Veaux neither whitewashes nor condemns the complicated story of Holiday’s short life. She includes information about childhood sexual abuse, the singer’s struggles with drugs and alcohol, her prison stint for drug possession, and the racism that shaped Holiday’s career.

An Enchanted Hair Tale, illustrated by Cheryl Hanna (1987), shares with the previous books a poetic narrative voice. Though the book won a Coretta Scott King honor from the American Library Association, reviews of the book were mixed in part because of shifts in narrative voice which signal the movement from the realistic Harlem

neighborhood of the main character to the fantasy world just around the block from the character’s apartment. The book tackles the prejudice within the Black community against dreadlocks as a hairstyle, but the story enables the main character to recognize his hair as an element that links him to Africa.

DIANE (1933–) AND LEO (1933–2012) DILLON

The Dillons, an interracial couple, have produced more than sixty children’s books. Their thoroughly collaborative process, which they dubbed “The Third Artist,” has resulted in almost a dozen awards and accolades. The Dillons are also noteworthy for the wide variety of styles, techniques, and media they draw on to create pictures for various projects.

Diane, born in California, and Leo, born in New York City to Trinidadian immigrant parents, met at the Parsons School of Design where, according to their own accounts, they competed ferociously. After graduating in 1956, they married in 1957 and began their careers producing advertising art, album covers, and adult book covers primarily for the science fiction market, winning the Hugo Award for Best Professional Art in 1971. They turned their attention to children’s books after their son was born. According to Diane, the couple “surreptitiously colored the skin of characters in the picturebooks they bought him, recasting them as black, Hispanic and Asian” (Fox 2012, A27).

The Dillons’s career as illustrators of children’s books features beautifully designed images of Africans, West Indians, and Black Americans depicted in a warm palette. They are best known for their award-winning picturebooks Why Mosquitos Buzz in People’s Ears, written by Verna Aardema (1975) and based on a West African folktale, and Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions (1976), for which they won back-to-back Caldecott Medals. Leo Dillon was the first Black illustrator to receive the Caldecott Medal, and the Dillons are the only illustrators to win two consecutive medals. Ashanti to Zulu, written by Margaret Musgrove, established the Dillons as important illustrators of the Black experience. It features a very brief description of a cultural practice characteristic of one of the twenty-six featured African societies, accompanied by a large scale (12.5 x 10 inches) image that typically includes a man, a woman, a child, typical living quarters, an artifact, a local animal, and a glimpse of the landscape, though, as a note from the book indicates, all these

elements would not likely be seen together. Furthermore, each image includes typical modes of dress, decoration, facial features, and skin tones. The picturebook celebrates the abundant variety of life in Africa. The Dillons continued to underscore the variety of Black life by documenting the hairstyles, garments, jewelry, housing, and landscape typical of the Masai in the illustrations for Verna Aardema’s Masai folktale, Who’s in Rabbit’s House? (1977) and in their depictions of patterned textiles in Virginia Hamilton’s The Girl Who Spun Gold (2000), a West Indian version of Rumpelstiltskin.

In addition to their Caldecott Award-winning picturebooks, the Dillons illustrated several works by Virginia Hamilton, including the collections of folk tales The People Could Fly (2005) and Her Stories (1996), both of which garnered Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honors, and Many Thousand Gone (1993). Other works that have garnered Coretta Scott King accolades include Aïda (1990) with Leontyne Price; their self-written and -illustrated Rap A Tap Tap: Here’s Bojangles—Think of That (2002); and Jazz on a Saturday Night (2007). The Dillons illustrated books by other authors featured in this collection of Dream Keepers: Eloise Greenfield’s collection of poetry for children, Honey I Love, and Other Poems (1978), Sharon Bell Mathis’s The Hundred Penny Box (1975), and Lorenz Graham’s The Song of the Boat (1975).

MARI EVANS (1919–2017) Near the end of her life, Mari Evans sat for an interview in which she insisted she be read within the context of the Black Arts Movement and the struggle “over the power to define” while also insisting on a more complex understanding of the artistic diversity that characterized the post-1965 era of Black writing. Recalling her thwarted desire to be an FBI agent, Evans explains that racism is either shined and polished up, or it is just blatant, like the N-word over and over. It’s a system. It’s more than a word with a consonant in front of it—it’s a system, a national way of being that is bigger than just one person using an epithet. To write about living in this nation, one can’t help but write politically. That was what the Black Arts Movement addressed and that is what my work has continued to address. (Evans quoted in Matthews 2016, 552)

Evans was born in Toledo, Ohio. A self-described loner, she lost her mother at age seven. Shortly after the two had gone downtown, her mother saw a storm brewing. Lacking money for two fares, Mary

Jane Jacobs walked home after putting her daughter on the streetcar. She caught pneumonia and died soon after. William Reed Evans had a third-grade education and encouraged his daughter both in writing and at the piano. When a story his daughter had written in the fourth grade appeared in the school’s newspaper, he considered it a significant family event. Evans remembers reading Langston Hughes’s Weary Blues as a youngster, and she identifies Hughes, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin as writers whose work inspired her. Although Evans studied fashion design at the University of Toledo, she pursued a career as a jazz musician before moving to Indianapolis in 1947 and working for the Indiana Housing Authority. She became a published author while working as an assistant editor for a manufacturing firm and raising two children in an Indianapolis Housing project. Where Is All the Music? (1968), her first volume of poetry, marks the beginning of a writing career spanning more than forty years.

From 1973 to 2006, Evans published six children’s books and wrote a children’s musical. In an interview published in Crisis, Evans tells Herb Boyd that she gets the most reaction from her children’s books: “some say they are encouraged, inspired, that they learn a lot from what I have to say, and that gives me greater incentive and encouragement” (quoted in Boyd 2007, 34). Evans adapts existing children’s stories by using Black idiom. Singing Black: Nursery Rhymes for Children (1976), for example, is a revised and updated version of Mother Goose: “Sing a song of sixpence” becomes “Sing a song of brothers / Whistle all day long.” Other works include J.D. (stories), illustrated by Jerry Pinkney (1973); I Look at Me! (1974); Jim Flying High (fiction), illustrated by Ashley Bryan (1979); New World, a children’s musical (1984); and Dear Corinne, Tell Somebody! Love, Annie: A Book about Secrets (1999). In the latter work, Evans tackles the issue of child abuse as Annie and her mother discover Corinne’s secret and help the young girl break her silence. In I’m Late: The Story of LaNeese and Moonlight and Alisha Who Didn’t Have Anyone of Her Own (2006), Evans explores teen pregnancy and what can be tragic consequences of Black girls’ loneliness. Her work for children invites comparison to the work of June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, and Lucille Clifton.

Mari Evans’s life’s work has been to “speak truth to the people”: “We need to teach our students and young people to think outside of their world. We need to do like the mission statement of my church says—work to make all feel included and welcome because all have been marginalized at some point” (quoted in Matthews 2016, 560).

She has been on the faculty of numerous universities, including the State University of New York at Albany, Northwestern, Purdue University, Cornell, Spelman, and Indiana University.

TOM FEELINGS (1933–2003)

Tom Feelings illustrated more than twenty books for young readers, focusing on African heritage and Black American history, breaking ground as a Black illustrator and serving as a mentor to younger artists.

Feelings grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn and was interested in drawing and painting from childhood. He attended George Westinghouse Vocational High School where he studied art. He received a scholarship to attend the School of Visual Arts where his education was interrupted by his service in the Air Force, during which he served as a staff illustrator. After his term of service, he returned to the School of Visual Arts and completed his studies.

As was true for many Dream Keepers, Feelings chose to illustrate books for children based on the lack of books that celebrated the Black experience in all its diversity. His choice was solidified at the beginning of his career, when, as a freelancer, he sketched people in rural southern Black communities. He reports an affecting encounter he had with an eight-year-old girl: “I tried to explain to her that my drawings were of ‘pretty little Black children, like you.’ The girl replied, ‘Ain’t nothin’ Black pretty’” (Rockman 2000).

In 1964 when he determined that he could not support himself by freelancing, Feelings moved to Ghana and worked for the Ghana Government Publishing House for two years where he produced illustrations for the African Review and local newspapers. He described his time in Ghana as transformational, giving him a pride in his identity as part of the African diaspora and influencing his artistic technique. He returned to the US in 1966 at a time when Black illustrators were in demand. In the next few years, he illustrated a dozen books for children, including Julius Lester’s To Be A Slave (1969). From 1972 to 1974, Feelings headed the Guayanese Ministry of Education’s children’s book program. In that role he produced illustrations and trained illustrators. From 1989–1995, he taught book illustration at the University of South Carolina at Columbia.

Central to all of Feelings’s best work is the richness of African culture as the inheritance of Black America. Two books created in

collaboration with his first wife, Muriel Feelings, Moja Means One: Swahili Counting Book (1971) and Jambo Means Hello: Swahili Alphabet Book (1974), begin with an Author’s Note that includes a map of Africa that outlines the countries where Swahili is spoken. Both books offer a pronunciation guide to the Swahili word featured, and each word is illustrated with images that convey the work, crafts, commerce, social practices, play, and landscape of East Africa. The dedication to Moja Means One states, “To all Black children living in the Western Hemisphere, hoping you will one day speak the language—in Africa.” In The Soul Looks Back in Wonder (1983), a collection of poems by Black writers compiled and illustrated by Feelings, he connects Black Americans to their African heritage. The pictures feature a close-up illustration of an individual with a background that evokes the African landscape or artifacts. His collaborations with Nikki Grimes (Something on My Mind 1978) and Eloise Greenfield (Daydreamers 1981) express the dreams and reflections of urban Black American children and feature expressive and sensitive portraits of individual children.

The Middle Passage: White Ships, Black Cargo (1995), Feelings’s most ambitious and admired book, is also his most controversial. The sixty-four-page wordless picturebook tells the story of the brutality of that journey and the strength and resilience of the individuals who survived it. Two decades in the making and, according to Feelings, emotionally difficult to produce, the book captures the “opposing forces of joy and pain . . . characteristic of black life and culture in America” (Bishop 1996, 436). Given the subject matter and the lack of a mediating narrative voice, the book prompted controversy as to whether it should be considered a children’s book.

Feelings was awarded a Caldecott Honor for Moja Means One, becoming the first Black illustrator to win a Caldecott Honor, and again for Jambo Means Hello. He also earned the Coretta Scott King (CSK) Illustrator Award for Something on My Mind, Soul Looks Back in Wonder, and The MiddlePassage. He won a CSK Honor for Daydreamers.

In addition to his work as an illustrator, Feelings was also an important behind-the-scenes figure in the development of Black children’s literature. He initiated a group of likeminded New York City Black authors, illustrators, editors, and designers. This group became Black Creators for Children and met regularly. The group hosted book fairs and art shows for the Harlem community, networked, and “formulat[ed] ‘the criteria’ for writing and illustrating children’s books by, for, and about African Americans” (Ford and

Ford 2004, 70). Feelings’s significant influence and contribution to Black children’s literature is clearly evident in the next generation of creators.

NIKKI GIOVANNI (1943–)

Nikki Giovanni is represented in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature by three poems, including the autobiographical “Nikki-Rosa” (1968), which ends with the insistence that Black childhood is full of joy: “and I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me / because they never understand Black love is Black wealth and / they’ll / probably talk about my hard childhood and never quite understand that / all the while I was quite happy.”

Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. in Knoxville, Tennessee, Giovanni grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her father, Jones “Gus” Giovanni, was a probation officer; her mother, Yolande Cornelia Watson, was a social worker. Nikki spent summers with her grandparents in Appalachia. In her teen years, she convinced her parents to allow her to live with her grandparents and attend high school in Knoxville. Later in life, she divulged that her father physically abused her mother. Giovanni attributes her fierce commitment to self-determination to her grandmother, Emma Louvenia Watson. After being expelled from Fisk during her freshman year (for leaving campus without permission), Giovanni returned in 1964, taking creative writing classes taught by John O. Killens, editing the campus literary magazine, and graduating with a degree in history. In 1968, she moved to New York, where she taught at Rutgers’ Livingstone College and had a son, Thomas Watson Giovanni.

For nearly fifty years, Giovanni has been publishing books and producing sound recordings and video for young people. Two of her early poems became picturebooks in the 1990s: Knoxville, Tennessee, illustrated by Larry Johnson (1994) and The Genie in the Jar, a tribute to Nina Simone illustrated by Chris Raschka (1996). Much of her recent work for children focuses on history and historical figures, including On My Journey: Looking at African American History Through the Spirituals (2007); Rosa, a picturebook biography of Rosa Parks, illustrated by Bryan Collier (2005), with translations in Korean and Japanese (2005); and Lincoln and Douglass: An American Friendship, also illustrated by Bryan Collier (2008). Rosa won multiple awards: American Library Association (ALA) Notable Book (2006), Coretta Scott King Illustrator Medal (2006), Parents’ Choice Award, Caldecott

Honor (2006), and the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Award (2006). Lincoln and Douglass won a Carter G. Woodson Book Award (2009).

Giovanni’s collections of poetry for children, many illustrated by winners of the prestigious Caldecott, include Spin a Soft Black Song: Poems for Children, illustrated by Charles Bible (1971); Ego Tripping and Other Poems for Young People, illustrated by George Ford (1974); The Reasons I Like Chocolate: And Other Children’s Poems (Smithsonian Folkways Records 1976); Vacation Time: Poems for Children, illustrated by Marisabina Russo (1980); Grand Mothers: Poems, Reminiscences and Short Stories About the Keepers of our Traditions (1994); Grand Fathers: Reminiscences, Poems, Recipes and Photos of the Keepers of our Traditions (1999); Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking at the Harlem Renaissance Through Poems (1995); The Sun is So Quiet, illustrated by Ashley Bryan (1996); Paint Me Like I Am: Teen Poems (2003); Hip Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat (2008); and I Am Loved, illustrated by Ashley Bryan (2018).

Giovanni has been a lifelong advocate for children’s literature. She consistently challenges the notion that writing for children is less important or easier than other types of writing: “People think children books are easy. It’s a discipline as hard as poetry. You’re teaching to read and reaching to children” (quoted in Bonner 1984, 30). In a short autobiographical sketch for Obsidian III focused on childhood reading, Giovanni insists on a broad definition of literature: “I love children’s literature because it really isn’t children’s literature[;] it is folk literature. It is stories for people to carry to each other.” She implicitly argues for more diverse books for children: “My only regret about living in a visual era is that when the pictures no longer match our faces we feel excluded. In an oral age we drew our own pictures in our own minds and everyone looked like us” (Giovanni 2001, 46). As recently as 2021, Giovanni spoke out about the value of children’s reading, choosing as her topic for the 21st Annual Mary Frances Early Lecture—The Power of Children’s Literature and Spirituals. Giovanni told her audience at the University of Georgia: “I’m a big fan of children’s literature because it’s literature that begins for us to understand—for the children to understand—how important they are” (Giovanni 2021).

Giovanni’s work celebrates the sounds and rhythms of Black culture as well as Black children and Black childhood. She is the recipient of multiple NAACP Image awards, the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award, and the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding

Poetry. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of English at Virginia Tech.

LORENZ GRAHAM (1902–1989) Because Lorenz Graham had a wife and five children to support, he worked as a teacher, CCC educational camp advisor, social worker, probation officer, and public housing manager while pursuing a career as a writer for children. His first book, How God Fix Jonah (1946; individual stories published as picturebooks in the 1970s), was a collection of bible stories in the idiom and dialect of Liberia, where he taught at a mission school, Monrovia College, from 1924–1928. He continued to use his experience in Liberia for his second book, I, Momolu (1966), a realistic story about a young Liberian boy. His most celebrated works are his quartet of realistic novels about discrimination and racial prejudice in its many forms in the American South and North: South Town (1958), North Town (1965), Whose Town? (1969), and Return to South Town (1976). Graham’s body of work for children is groundbreaking in providing complex realistic characters facing racial discrimination in both the American rural South and urban North. He is also one of the first writers for children to portray contemporary African culture and idiom for younger readers.

Graham credits his time in Liberia for his decision to become a writer. In a presentation to the National Conference of Language Arts in the Elementary School, he explained that prior to travelling to Liberia, he “had accepted an image of African people which had been presented in the form of moving pictures and the books which I had read” (Graham 1973, 186). In an autobiographical sketch, he explained:

Popular writing had described savages, people who were at best stupid, lazy and amusing, at worst vicious, depraved and beastly. I concluded that the world needed books which described Africans honestly. Such books would make readers understand that different though they might be in custom and appearance, and in environment, Africans are people and they share with others around the world the same basic needs and drives and emotions, and the greatest of these is love. (Graham 1972, 108)

In How God Fix Jonah, Graham uses the spoken language of Liberians that he heard while teaching school in Monrovia. Borrowing from English, Portuguese, Spanish, and languages of the Mandingos, Krus, and Golahs, this contact language is conveyed with great respect and energy, rendering the stories from the bible as fascinating

and entertaining versions rather than the products of an exoticized or caricatured storyteller.

When Graham returned to the US, he recognized that writing popular literature could help dismantle the stereotypes of Blacks in the US as well. Later in his life, he noted, “There were precious few books which described black people as people” and explained this problem as an outcome of the universal resistance to accepting others: “We know it with the head; none would deny it, but most of us feel that we are people and the others are something else. We are people but they are foreigners, or they are Africans or they are communists, or they are Negroes or they are honkies. We willfully get away from acceptance of the fact within our full consciousness” (Graham 1973, 187). As a result, Graham takes care to individualize his characters, addressing both differences and similarities that cross racial differences: “Each character is unique. They are shown with different ideas, and with different ideals, and with differences of ability. They are from one another different in many ways but the differences are not merely that of skin.” By carefully individualizing his characters, Graham skillfully avoids blanket assimilationist and militant positions. His constant refrain, an idea so important to him that it was featured on his letterhead, is a quotation from his own character, David Williams: “I’ve learned that whatever happens you don’t just quit! You keep going forward, pushing, driving, you don’t quit” (1973, 187). While his emphasis on determination, struggle, and courage to reach goals might appear to be an acceptance or internalization of the status quo, in the novels, self-respect prevents the characters from tolerating the status quo that holds sway, even if their solutions are not aimed at systemic problems.

Graham’s insistence on the individuality of characters results in complex depictions of conflicts in his novels featuring David Williams (the Town novels). When David’s father is blackballed in South Town for refusing to accept wages less than the White car mechanics receive, the family moves North for greater economic and educational opportunity. When David enters an integrated school in North Town, he must learn to recognize that not all White people are prejudiced, and not all Black people are supportive friends. In Whose Town?, a story set in the aftermath of the Watts riots, Graham presents a range of responses available to the Black characters that answer the title question. David weighs the militant response offered by Reverend Moshombo, the non-violent response of his own minister, and the accommodationist response of his friends

and their families. David’s own involvement in an incident infused with racialized violence sets the stage for the riot that takes place in North Town. The focus on David’s personal involvement allows Graham to portray the pragmatic ramifications of each response. By focusing on David and his relationships, progress in racial and social justice is defined not as a task of political leaders but the work of otherwise unknown individuals.

Graham’s strategy—to underscore the power of individuals to effect change—is particularly notable given that prior narratives for African American children and teens consisted primarily of biographies of notable Black figures in American history. By addressing contemporary social issues rather than historical events, by including a broad range of Black experiences and perspectives, by portraying events with plausible realism through David’s experiences, and by a strict control of his own didactic impulses, Graham set the standard for honest and sympathetic realism. Despite his balanced and careful treatment of the issues of racism however, publishers were unwilling to produce a book that did not conform to the standard (racist) depictions of Black people. After twelve years and numerous rejections by publishers, South Town was published by Follett. Graham faced similar difficulties with North Town.

ELOISE GREENFIELD (1929–2021)

Eloise Greenfield’s motivation to write came from two distinct sources: the pleasure and play of language and a desire to accurately represent Black history and life experience. Pervading her body of work is a commitment to Black family relations.

Born Eloise Glynn Little, Greenfield lived only a few months in Parmalee, North Carolina, before her family moved to Washington, D.C., seeking self-determination and more economic opportunity. On her ninth birthday, her family moved into Langston Terrace, a low-rent housing project in northeast Washington D.C. named after John Mercer Langston (great uncle of Langston Hughes), which provided a vibrant community for the residents. After graduation, she attended Miner Teachers College for two years and then took a position as a clerical worker in the US Patent Office.

Greenfield turned to writing after her marriage to Robert Greenfield in 1950 and the birth of her children. Though she had attempted a writing career as a young woman, she knew little about the craft of writing. When her first stories were rejected, she assumed that

she had no talent. However, she began to read books about the craft and marketing of writing. She turned her attention to writing for children when she was unable to find books in which her own young children could see themselves. In 1971 she joined the Washington D.C. Black Writer’s Workshop, the purpose of which was to support and critique the work of the members. She later became the head of the Children’s Literature Division of that organization until it disbanded in 1975. Through connections Greenfield established within the workshop network, she published a biography of Rosa Parks for young readers (1973). That breakthrough led to other biographies, including Mary McLeod Bethune (1977) and Paul Robeson (1975) for the Crowell Biography Series.

Greenfield’s foray into biography was an expression of her commitment to recovering Black history for Black youth. As she explained, “I want to give children a true knowledge of Black heritage, including both the African and the American experiences. The distortions of Black history have been manifold and ceaseless. A true history must be the concern of every Black writer” (Greenfield 1975, 625). In addition to biographies, she wrote other works focused on history: The Great Migration: Journey to the North, illustrated by Jan Spivey Gilchrist (2011), that draws on her own family history; Childtime: A Three-Generation Memoir (1979), written in collaboration with her mother, Lessie Jones Little, and including written accounts by her maternal grandmother; and, most recently, a history told through poems, The Women Who Caught the Babies: A History of African-American Midwives (2019).

Families are central to Greenfield’s work. The families in her novels illustrate both the strong love she sees as characteristic of Black families as well as the problems and stresses that shape family relationships. In Sister (1974) Dorothea, the central character, copes with the sudden death of her father and experiences the various forms of grief of her mother and sister, but she manages to find support through a community organization. In Koya DeLaney and the Good Girl Blues (1992), Koya reluctantly shares her famous singing cousin with everyone in her school. In the picturebook She Come Bringing Me that Little Baby Girl, illustrated by John Steptoe (1974), Kevin, the narrator, is initially disappointed that his baby sister has disrupted his life but eventually recognizes the value of his new role as a big brother. Though these topics and situations are conventional in children’s literature, most treatments of these themes and incidents in the twentieth century did not feature Black children. Greenfield

presents such common events of children’s lives within the context of the Black experience—with settings in urban, suburban, and rural spaces and with a mix of family organizations: single parents, blended families, multi-generational families. Her work operates as an important counter narrative to the legacy of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1965).

Even before she attempted a career as a writer, Greenfield was playing with language. Music had a significant role in her life, and from her childhood, she enjoyed the sounds and rhythms of words. When her children were young, she began writing rhymes, and she declared as one of her goals in writing to evoke “word madness”—the pleasure of words—in her readers: “I want to be one of those who can choose and order words that children will want to celebrate. I want to make them shout and laugh and blink back tears and care about themselves” (Greenfield 1975). Greenfield produced several poetry collections including Honey, I Love, and Other Love Poems, enjoyed by a multi-generational audience, Night on Neighborhood Street (1991), and Nathaniel Talking (1988). Her poems are marked by influences of jazz, blues, and rap, and characterized by strong rhythms and clear, strong child voices. Her individual poems have been re-issued as picturebooks, and her work is frequently anthologized in collections of poems for children and in language arts textbooks.

Greenfield has won numerous awards. In addition to repeated “notable,” “outstanding” or “recommended” citations, she was awarded the Carter G. Woodson Book Award from the National Council for the Social Studies for Rosa Parks (1974), the Council on Interracial Books for Children Award for her body of work (1977), the Coretta Scott King Author Award for Africa Dream (2008) and for The Great Migration: Journey to the North (2012), and the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement (2018).

ROSA GUY (1922–2012)

Rosa Guy turned the difficult circumstances of her young life into novels for young adults. She was born Rosa Cuthbert in Trinidad, but when she was still quite young her parents immigrated to New York City, leaving Rosa and her older sister Ameze in the care of relatives. When Rosa was about eight years old, she and her sister joined their parents in Harlem. Shortly after their arrival, their mother died. Their father sent them to live in the Bronx with cousins who were followers of Marcus Garvey. In this household, Rosa

was first exposed to political thought, and she credits that initiation for her political activism as an adult. The sisters’ stay in that household was brief. They returned to live with their father after he remarried. However, the marriage was brief and Rosa’s father subsequently died. Rosa and her sister were shuffled through a number of foster homes and institutions. Ameze fell ill when Rosa was fourteen. In order to care for her sister, she left school (an experience she did not enjoy due to persistent bullying) and worked in a brassiere factory in the Bronx. Guy drew upon these experiences when she turned to writing for young adults in the 1960s.

At the age of sixteen, Rosa married Warner Guy and continued to work in the brassiere factory while Guy was away on military service. Through a co-worker, she was introduced to American Negro Theatre (ANT) and began to take acting lessons in hope of becoming an actress. However, when her husband returned from military service, they moved to Connecticut where she was fully occupied by her roles as wife and mother. When her marriage dissolved in 1950, Guy returned to New York City and actively pursued her artistic ambitions. By this point ANT had dissolved and Guy became active in another organization that had arisen to fill the gap left by ANT— Committee for the Negro in the Arts.

In 1951 through her relationships within the Committee, Guy and others founded Harlem Writers Guild (HWG), a support group and critical forum for writers. HWG provided Guy with the education she needed to become a writer, particularly since her own formal education had been curtailed. HWG also integrated her into the civil rights movement in New York City. Though Guy was writing during the time of the Black Arts Movement and agreed with its principles, she was not a member of its inner circle of writers.

In 1968 Guy traveled the South, compiling essays by and interviews with young people who had witnessed violence related to the civil rights struggle. The result, Children of Longing (1970), allowed Guy’s activism to coalesce with her writing. It also turned her attention to writing for young people. Her Friends trilogy—Friends (1973), Ruby (1976), and Edith Jackson (1978)—established her as a significant voice in young adult fiction. The trilogy follows the relationships of a small group of young high school girls united in the face of family problems, poverty, and the difficulties of living in a deteriorating Harlem during the 1970s. Her portrayal of a lesbian relationship in Ruby is thought to be the first in YA literature. Her second series—The Disappearance (1979) and New Guys Around the Block (1983)—focuses

on Imamu Jones, a sixteen-year-old on probation who briefly joins a middle-class family where he discovers that the problems he was trying to escape from in Harlem are similar to the problems, albeit hidden, on the streets of White neighborhoods in Brooklyn. In the second volume, he returns to his alcoholic mother and home in Harlem.

Guy’s novels for young people are set in 1970s Harlem. Her descriptions are gritty, documenting the deterioration of buildings and neighborhoods, the presence of drug addiction and alcoholism, and the pervasive effects of poverty. In the midst of this difficult setting, Guy offers the perspective of the outsider—the West Indian immigrant who is ostracized by residents of Harlem (Ruby and Phyllisia Cathey from the Friends trilogy), the orphan who is unable to find a family or place (Edith Jackson), or the child who faces discrimination because of poverty (Edith Jackson, Imamu Jones). Her characters are not one-dimensional, simple figures that allow her to depict social problems. Rather, each character is complex, often flawed and initially unlikeable. At the same time, each is deeply reflective, and Guy’s decision to focus on the interior lives of her characters evokes readers’ sympathy. Despite the difficulties the characters face, they have stamina and resilience and by the ends of the novels, find that their experiences provide them with unique strengths and purposes that lend them agency. In addition to complex characters and an unwavering focus on the realistic lives of young people living in Harlem, Guy’s novels feature a lively play of spoken language—the West Indian dialect of some characters balanced against the Black English of native Harlemites.

Guy’s contribution to young adult writing has been recognized with a number of awards. The Friends trilogy won three American Library Association citations as Best Books of the Year for Young Adults, and Friends was selected for the School Library Journal’s “Best of the Best 1966–1976” list as well as named a New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year in 1976. The Disappearance was named Outstanding Book of the Year by the New York Times in 1979. Its sequel, New Guys Around the Block, won a Parents’ Choice Award in 1983.

VIRGINIA HAMILTON (1934–2002) Over the course of her thirty-five-year career, Virginia Hamilton published a body of work which she called “liberation literature” about individuals, some famous and some ordinary, who pursue

their freedom, a pursuit which often results in characters’ embracing their identity and agency to survive a cultural or social environment which seeks to diminish them.

Hamilton was born and raised in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a small rural community between Dayton and Springfield. After college, she spent some time in New York City where she worked as a night club singer while also trying to write. There she met her husband, Arnold Adoff, and they started a family. When her children were young, Hamilton and Adoff returned to Yellow Springs to live on the property that has been in her family for five generations. Hamilton readily identified herself as a rural writer. Most of her novels take place in rural settings, thereby distinguishing her work from the majority of novels about Black children of the 1960s and 1970s which depicted urban life.

Hamilton’s commitment to grounding her readers in Black heritage is a central aspect of her aesthetic, combining her respect for her family background, her commitment to her readers, and her position as a Black writer vis-à-vis the American literary tradition. She delineates these relationships in her 1981 essay “Changing Woman, Working”: “My fictions for children, young people, descend directly from the progress of black adults and their children across the American hopescape. Specifically, they derive from my eccentric family” (Hamilton 2010, 104). In her descriptions of her family background, beginning with her maternal grandfather’s account of his escape from slavery in Virginia and including the tall tales and embroidered accounts of events in the lives of her aunts, uncles, and cousins, Hamilton gained a strong sense of identity and empowerment. Her writing seeks to replicate that sense of pride and history for younger readers:

I am convinced that it is important to reveal that the life of the darker peoples is and always has been different in a significant respect from the life of the majority. It has been made eccentric by slavery, escape, fear of capture, by discrimination and constant despair. But it has held tight within it happiness, a subtle humor, a fierce pride in leadership and progress, love of life and family, and a longing for peace and freedom. Nevertheless, there is an uneasy, ideological difference with the American majority basic to black thought. (Hamilton 2010, 104–5) The difference Hamilton identifies has further implications for the role of Black storytelling and writing in American culture. Hamilton

persistently refused the term “minority literature,” arguing that such terminology diminished the value of non-European cultural traditions. Instead, she argued that American literature should exist as the confluence of many parallel cultures, with European cultural background as only one of the tributaries.

Hamilton’s commitment to Black heritage takes many forms. She draws upon folk practices and beliefs, folk tales, and historical accounts of Black individuals and deeply embeds them in her novels. Her first novel, Zeely (1967), depicts a young girl’s fascination with a farm laborer who looks like the African queen she has seen in an issue of National Geographic. She weaves myth, paranormal or supernatural elements such as ghosts and conjure, in novels that are otherwise considered “naturalistic”: The House of Dies Drear (1968), The Mystery of Drear House (1987), The Planet of Junior Brown (1971), M. C. Higgins, the Great (1974), and Arilla Sun Down (1976).

Hamilton also believed that Black folk tales should be reinvigorated for a contemporary audience so as to serve as metaphors for contemporary struggles (The People Could Fly, 1985). She published compilations of plantation era folktales for younger readers, collaborated with important illustrators for retellings of individual folktales in picturebook formats, and created contemporary trickster tales that feature her character Jahdu: Time-Ago Tales of Jahdu, illustrated by Nonny Hogrogian (1969); Time-Ago Lost: More Tales of Jahdu, illustrated by Ray Prather (1973); Jahdu, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney (1980); and The All Jahdu Storybook, illustrated by Barry Moser (1991). As her career progressed, Hamilton became especially attentive to the fact that folk heroes are mostly male. She sought to remedy that imbalance, particularly with her fantasy, The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl (1986) and her collection Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales (1995). The first writer to feature African American children in science fiction and fantasy novels, Hamilton’s science fiction trilogy—Justice and Her Brothers (1978), Dustland (1980), and The Gathering (1980)—features siblings who use their telepathic powers to travel through space to a distant planet.

Arguably the most respected and admired writer of her generation, Hamilton has a slew of awards. She was the first Black writer to win the National Book Award for Young People and the Newbery Medal in 1975 for M. C. Higgins, the Great. She subsequently was awarded three Newbery Honor designations, four Coretta Scott King Author Awards, and three Coretta Scott King Honors. She was the first children’s author to be named a MacArthur Fellow (1995).

She has won several lifetime achievement awards including, the Regina Medal in 1991; the Hans Christian Anderson Medal, an international award, in 1992; and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award (known as the Children’s Literature Legacy Award since 2018) in 1995. She has held positions as a distinguished visiting professor at three universities and four other universities conferred honorary degrees upon her. No other writer for children has been so honored.

JUNE JORDAN (1936–2002) In a short autobiographical essay written for Fourth Book of Junior Authors & Illustrators, June Jordan describes herself as a cross-writer, someone who writes for children and also for adults. Her explanation for why she has chosen a dual audience privileges the needs of young people: Children have always seemed to me the most vulnerable, willing and beautiful of all people. And so I have persistently undertaken the writing of poetry and stories and even history that could be accessible and helpful to these most beautiful, open lives, to the best of my understanding and capacity. But, clearly, the power of good and evil conduct and consequences rests with the grown-up folk of the world. And so it has seemed necessary, in the continuing spirit of my wish to serve children, to undertake poems and stories and essays and whatever else might reach and move my peers, for the sake of the younger ones among us. (deMontreville and Hill 1978b)

Jordan tells her young readers that she is “first and essentially” a poet, locating her “obsessive dependency on and interest in words— as a means of creating a desirable, wished-for reality” in a Harlem childhood where her mother, Mildred, took her to the Universal Truth Center on Sundays, a place that reveled in and celebrated words. She shares that at age twelve, she skipped two grades in school and became the only Black student (out of 1500) at Midwood High before transferring to Northfield School for Girls, a Christian preparatory school in Massachusetts. In 1953, while enrolled at Barnard College, Jordan met Michael Meyer, a White student at Columbia. They married in 1955, when interracial marriage was illegal in forty-three states, and in 1958, the couple had a son, Christopher. Jordan tells her readers that although her marriage ended, the couple parted amicably and took pride in parenting Christopher. In her memoir Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood (2000), Jordan divulges painful details about her younger years. Her father physically abused

her. A postal worker with Chinese and West Indian heritage, Granville Ivanhoe also referred to his precocious daughter as “he” and made derogatory remarks about the darkness of young June and her mother Mildred’s skin. Jordan’s mother would later die by suicide. In “A Feminist Survivor with the Eyes of a Child,” her review of Soldier for The New York Times, Felicia R. Lee calls attention to Jordan’s choice to write the memoir “with the consciousness of a child, without the filter of adult perceptions and judgements.” After noting the writer’s accomplishments as a poet and essayist, Lee declares that Jordan “has now ventured into the territory of childhood”—an odd pronouncement that only makes sense if we ignore Jordan’s works for children, or we assess her only with regard to her works for adults (Lee 2000).

Jordan began her writing career in the 1960s, publishing under the name June Meyer. Her poems and stories appeared in Esquire, The Nation, Partisan Review, Essence, The Village Voice, and The New York Times Magazine. She wrote speeches for James Farmer, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), taking her young son with her on a Freedom Ride. She worked in city planning, for youth social programs, and as a film assistant. In 1967 she began teaching Black and Puerto Rican youth as part of a Teachers and Writers Collaborative. She would spend a lifetime running workshops in creative writing for both children and adults.

In 1969 Jordan published Who Look at Me, poetry for young readers. An American Library Association (ALA) Notable Book, Who finished a project Langston Hughes left unfinished at his death. Katharine Capshaw calls attention to Jordan’s use of photography in Who, heralding the work as “a masterpiece of children’s history” (2014, 157). In Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature, Rudine Sims Bishop presents Who as a precursor to Tom Feelings’s poetry and visual art. The poems accompany twenty-seven paintings by Black and White artists, providing a brief history of Black life. Bishop compares Jordan’s work to Walter Dean Myers’ Brown Angels (1993) and Nikki Grimes’ It’s Raining Laughter (1997), two examples of poetry responding to visual art in the post-Black Arts Movement era.

In 1970, Jordan edited two anthologies: The Voice of the Children, a collection of her students’ writing, and Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry, another ALA Notable book. She also spent time in Rome after winning a prestigious award, the Prix de Rome in Environmental Design, a subject that informs His Own Where, her first Young

Adult novel. In Civil Wars, a collection of essays, Jordan explains that she wrote the novel “as a means of familiarizing kids with activist principles of urban redesign or, in other words, activist habits of response to environment. I thought to present these ideas within the guise of a Black love story, written entirely in Black English—in these ways I might hope to interest teenagers in reading it” (1981, 70). Set in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant where Jordan grew up, His Own Where was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of The New York Times’ Outstanding Young Adult Novels of 1971. Bishop calls Where an “urban novel,” putting it in conversation with Rosa Guy’s The Friends (1973) and Alice Childress’s A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich (1973). The Feminist Press reissued His Own Where in 2010.

In 1972, Jordan published her second YA novel, Dry Victories. In Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks, Capshaw calls the novel “a brilliant and courageous pastiche of narrative and visual forms,” discussing it in the context of Black Arts Movement visual art (2014, 194). During this period, Jordan also published two picturebooks: New Life: New Room (1975), an ALA Notable Children’s Book, and Kimako’s Story (1981).

Jordan maintained a lifelong commitment to teaching, taking positions at Sarah Lawrence, Yale, and City College of New York before earning tenure at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1989 and launched the Poetry for the People project. She also started writing a political column for the Progressive. Jordan’s first column, “Finding the Way Home,” demonstrates how her concerns about children inform her thinking. She begins the essay describing Lisa Steinberg, a six-yearold victim of child abuse. Jordan connects Lisa’s right to “sanctuary on this planet” to the rights of Palestinians: “I believe that the issue of a home for Lisa Steinberg and the issue of a home for the Palestinian people is one and the same. The question is whether non-Europeans, and whether children, everywhere, possess a human right to sanctuary on this planet” (2014, 15).

Jordan is represented in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature by five of her poems, including the widely anthologized “Poem About my Rights” (about her rape) and one essay, “A New Politics of Sexuality.” In the latter, Jordan deconstructs Dr. Benjamin Spocks’s advice to new mothers regarding “not wearing miniskirts or provocative clothing, especially if your child happens to be a boy.” Despite her lifelong commitment to children’s education and

literature, Jordan elicits only two sentences in The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, which mentions Who Look at Me (1969) and Their Own Where (1971).

JULIUS LESTER (1939–2018)

Julius Lester had a rich and complicated career. After growing up in Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Fisk University in 1960. He subsequently moved to New York City where he became an activist in the civil rights movement. He worked as a musician, playing at civil rights rallies in the South (with Pete Seeger), and he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), eventually heading up its photography division. Under SNCC’s auspices, Lester went to North Vietnam to document the effects of the US bombing missions. In 1982 Lester converted to Judaism, a decision that shaped his career as a writer and as a public intellectual. As noted below, Lester regularly published in Jewish periodicals and chose Jewish folktales and subjects for his children’s books.

From 1968 to 1975 Lester worked as a television and radio show host and producer in New York City. In that role he did not avoid controversy. As part of an ongoing dispute between the United Federation of Teachers and the Black residents of Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn, he allowed a Black teacher to read on his show a poem that included anti-Semitic rhetoric. In an interview that appeared in American Jewish Life Magazine in 2007, Lester commented about the incident, comparing it to his subsequent critique of Andrew Young in 1979 when Young secretly met with members of the Palestine Liberation Organization: “in 1969 I thought Jews were being racist and said so. In 1979 I thought blacks were being racist and said so. In my mind these controversies were never about black-Jewish relations; they were about being true to myself and speaking out against racism” (quoted in Pilcher 2007).

Lester’s work in broadcast media coincided with the beginning of his teaching career. In 1968 he began teaching classes in Afro-American Studies at what became the New School for Social Research. In 1971 he joined the faculty at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, teaching in African American Studies and later in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. He maintained a media presence by producing book reviews and essays for The New York Times Book Review, New Republic, Cineaste, Nation, National Review, and various Jewish magazines.

Lester’s writing career began with books for adults, one of which has the wonderfully provocative title Look Out Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! (1968). His direct and unadorned writing style was brought to the attention of Phyllis Fogelman, the editor of the juvenile department at Dial and an important figure in children’s publishing, who thought it would work well in a children’s book. His first children’s book, To Be a Slave (1969), weaves together first-person accounts of enslavement and resistance, concluding with emancipation. Lester broke new ground by not only introducing documentary records of enslavement into childhood reading, but also highlighting the range of responses of enslaved persons. Lester includes various accounts of militant and/or psychological resistance, explaining how those enslaved subtly resisted oppression. In addition to accounts of resistance, Lester includes accounts of enslaved persons’ internalizing the ideology of White supremacy. As a whole, the volume balances the horror of enslavement with the admirable strategies enslaved Blacks employed to defend themselves. The volume earned a Newbery Honor recognition.

Lester’s second book, Black Folktales (1969), retells twelve tales from the African and Black American folk traditions. Dedicated to Zora Neale Hurston and H. Rap Brown, Lester makes clear in his Foreword the audience he seeks for this collection: “The stories in this book are told in the cities and villages of Africa and on the street corners, stoops, porches, in bars, barber shops, and wherever else in America black people gather” (1969, vii–viii). He is best known for his collaboration with highly respected Black illustrator Jerry Pinkney to produce a four-volume collection of the Uncle Remus tales. Controversy followed him here as well: in a New York Times review June Jordan considered the content—the stories themselves— unworthy of the abilities of the author and the illustrator.

Lester’s other work for children documents Black culture and history in the US and adapts African and Jewish folktales often in collaboration with well-respected illustrators. From the beginning of his writing career, Lester identified folktales as central to identity formation: “Folktales are stories that give people a way of communicating with each other about each other—their fears, their hopes, their dreams, their fantasies, giving their explanations of why the world is the way it is. It is in stories like these that a child learns who his parents are and who he will become” (1969, vii). His explicitly Black contemporary storytelling idiom signals the significance of the Black experience and provides a Black consciousness of history

and culture. In addition to the Newbery honor designation for To Be a Slave, Lester was a National Book Award finalist for Long Journey Home: Stories from Black History (1972), won a Coretta Scott King Author Award for Day of Tears (2005) and Coretta Scott King honors for This Strange New Feeling (1982) and Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit (1987).

SHARON BELL MATHIS (1937—) Sharon Bell Mathis asserts that she writes to salute Black children, that they are her audience: “Black children will leave my books with a feeling that I know they live” (quoted in Conmire 1990, 132).

Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Mathis lived at multiple addresses in New York City until she graduated from St. Michael’s Academy. She graduated from Morgan State College in Baltimore, and for much of her adult life she has lived in the greater Washington D.C. area. In addition to writing, she taught school and served as a school librarian. She credits her mother, in particular, for providing a home life that afforded her time, space, and support for reading and writing.

Mathis established her reputation as a children’s author in the 1970s. She served as the initial director of the Children’s Literature division of the D.C. Black Writers Workshop when the organization was founded by Annie R. Crittenden. She also edited a column in Ebony, Jr. Mathis struggled with writer’s block throughout the 1980s and published again for children in the 1990s.

Mathis’s work has much in common with the gritty realism that characterized young adult fiction of the 1970s. Her most acclaimed YA novel, Teacup Full of Roses (1972), depicts the struggles of a family whose eldest son has succumbed to heroin addiction. Told from the perspective of the middle child who has left school to help support the family, the novel portrays both inter-generational family dynamics and a complex street culture comprised of support, protection, gang affiliations, and criminal activity. Mathis’s stories for younger readers depict children in urban settings facing hardships but managing to overcome them with the support of family and the community. Her early biography for children, Ray Charles, illustrated by George Ford (1973), may have established this pattern. In the biography, Mathis relates the causes of Charles’s loss of vision but emphasizes his remarkable talent and fortitude to become successful. Similarly, in Listen for the Fig Tree (1974), Muffin, the central

character, is blind, but her blindness is not the focus of her difficulties. Muffin’s problems arise from her mother’s grief at the loss of her husband, a taxi driver who was beaten and then allowed to bleed out by the police as they investigated the crime. In addition to this reference to police brutality, described as racist by the mother and never contradicted by any other character, this book includes a depiction of a diverse Black community that supports Muffin and her mother, including a gay Black bar owner, a store front preacher, and neighbors in the apartment building. The book includes an important scene at the first night celebration of Kwanza, possibly the first such scene in a YA novel.

Mathis also writes stories which depict children aware of injustice and working to correct it. In The Hundred Penny Box, illustrated by Diane and Leo Dillon (1975), Michael, the young protagonist, understands the importance of hundred-year-old Aunt Dew’s penny box, and resists his mother’s attempts to replace it with something smaller and more convenient. The book depicts both a respect for elders and their stories and the frustrations of caring for elders. In The Sidewalk Story, illustrated by Leo Carty (1971), Lilly Etta refuses to acquiesce to the eviction of her best friend’s family. Her mother, while sad, does not see any recourse, and the neighbors’ only action is a series of ineffective insults directed at the marshal and those hired to remove the family’s belongings. Lilly Etta’s efforts, while not completely successful, do prompt a gathering of support that repairs the situation: the single mother of the family of seven children is offered a job, a nursery school offers child-care at an affordable rate, and a larger, more affordable apartment is offered to the family.

Teacup Full of Roses received several accolades, including a New York Times Best Books of the Year. Mathis’s biography of Ray Charles won the Coretta Scott King Award, and The Hundred Penny Box was designated a Newbery Honor.

TONI MORRISON (1931–2019) Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, Toni Morrison is the most celebrated writer in the African American literary tradition. Her impressive oeuvre includes nine children’s picturebooks; Dreaming Emmett, a play about the fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago lynched in Mississippi in 1955; and a civil rights photobook commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education,

the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision declaring segregation in schools unconstitutional.

Morrison is the subject of several books written for young readers: Barbara Kramer’s Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize-winning Author (African American Biographies series 1996); Jean F. Blashfield’s Toni Morrison (Women of Achievement series 2000); Douglas Century’s Toni Morrison (Black Americans of Achievement series 2001); James Haskins’s Toni Morrison: The Magic of Words (Gateway Biography series 2001); and Richard Andersen’s Toni Morrison (Writers and Their Works series 2006). Heralded for her literary achievements, the focus of countless scholarly books, dissertations, and articles, Morrison has only recently been recognized as contributing to the US children’s literary tradition. In her obituary for Morrison published in The New York Times, Margalit Fox suggests the appropriate approach to honoring Morrison’s body of work: “Her narratives mingle the voices of men, women, children and even ghosts in layered polyphony” (2019).

Morrison began her writing life as an editor for Random House, promoting Black writers such as June Jordan as part of her concerted effort to establish a canon of Black work. In the documentary All the Pieces I Am (2019), Morrison distinguishes between work written by Blacks for a White audience, such as Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative, and work written by Blacks for Blacks. Morrison’s own writing focuses on Black characters and communities, on the rich, expressive culture of a people under assault in a racist country unaware of its history and mostly apathetic, if not openly hostile, toward its Black citizens.

The Bluest Eye (1970), Morrison’s first novel, engages directly with the Dick and Jane basal reader, a popular primer that taught generations of American children to read while advancing the ideology of White supremacy. This ideology, which includes standards of beauty, proves lethal to the novel’s adolescent protagonist, fourteenyearold Pecola Breedlove. Two of Morrison’s other early novels— Sula (1974) and Beloved (1987), for which Morrison won the Pulitzer prize—routinely appear on required or optional reading lists for secondary education students.

Beginning in 1999, Morrison collaborated with her son Slade to produce nine picturebooks: The Big Box, illustrated by Giselle Potter (1999); The Book of Mean People, illustrated by Pascal Lemaitre (2002); The Lion or the Mouse?, The Ant or the Grasshopper? and Poppy or the Snake?—three books in the Who Got Game? series, illustrated by Pascal Lemaitre (2003); Peeny Butter Fudge, illustrated by Joe Cepeda

(2009); The Tortoise or the Hare?, illustrated by Joe Cepeda (2010); Little Cloud and Lady Wind, illustrated by Sean Qualls (2010); and Please Louise, illustrated by Shadra Strickland (2013). Morrison’s picturebooks accomplish her goal of passing on the stories and life lessons she heard growing up in Lorain, Ohio. The books in the Who Got Game? series retell Aesop’s Fables in a contemporary, hip-hop style that both instructs and delights.

A masterful storyteller, in 2004 Morrison took up the challenge of writing historical fiction for young people, producing Remember: The Journey to School Integration. While the book’s unique blend of archival photographs and fictional narration frustrated reviewers, Morrison’s commemoration of Brown vs. Board won the coveted Coretta Scott King Award. In her book-length study, Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks (2014), Katharine Capshaw discusses Remember alongside photobooks by Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Walter Dean Myers, Carole Boston Weatherford, and others.

Reviewers of Morrison’s children’s books have typically approached her as a critically acclaimed novelist and Black intellectual who, after establishing a reputation for her adult fiction, turned to children’s literature. This view dismisses Morrison’s deep investment in Black childhood and adolescence and, ironically, denies (or at least obscures) what Morrison would call “all the pieces I am.”

WALTER MOSLEY (1952–)

In 2020 Walter Mosley became the first Black man to win the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (DCAL), an award presented by the National Book Foundation and established in 1988. Previous DCAL recipients who have published work for young readers include Gwendolyn Brooks, Judy Blume, and Toni Morrison.

Mosley grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, the son of working-class parents. Ella Slatkin, his Jewish Russian immigrant mother, worked as a personnel clerk. His Black father LeRoy Mosley came from Louisiana and worked as a custodian. Denied a marriage license in 1951, Ella and LeRoy married several years after Walter’s birth. Mosley attended Victory Baptist Day School, a Black private elementary school. After graduating from Alexander Hamilton High School, Mosley enrolled and was eventually expelled from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, for poor attendance and

substandard work. In 1977, he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Johnson State College in Vermont. He completed some post-graduate work in political science at the University of Minnesota, moved to Boston and then New York, where he worked as a computer programmer for IBM and Mobil Oil. In 1985, Mosley enrolled in City University of New York’s (CUNY) writing program. Five years later, he became a published author.

Mosley’s reputation rests primarily on his crime fiction. Most readers know him for his mystery series featuring detective Easy Rawlins and for The Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), the first publication in the series, made into a major motion picture in 1995 starring Denzel Washington as Rawlins. While his detective series puts him in the tradition of Edgar Allen Poe, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, Mosley identifies Langston Hughes as his “paradigm,” a Black man who loved all Black people and loved writing about them. Mosley particularly loves writing about Black men “and the way we deal with life in America, the way that we understand, the way that we pass through things” (Sherman 1995, 34). Mosley also credits Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, which he read while working for Mobil Oil, for reigniting his interest in writing and giving him an example of a narrative voice he recognized as his own.

When Mosely finished his first novel, written while he worked for Mobil Oil, a slew of editors told him the book was well done but not commercially viable. He remembers being told that “White people don’t read about black people, black women don’t like black men, and black men don’t read” (Werbe 2000, 33). In 1997, after having established himself as a commercial success, Mosley returned to this early work, a coming-of-age prequel to the Easy Rawlins series that explores literacy, fathers and sons, guilt, and sin. He decided to publish Gone Fishin’ with Black Classic Press (BCP), a small publishing house in Baltimore (W. W. Norton published his prior work). The following year, he established The Publishing Certificate Program with the City University of New York to increase diversity in publishing. Mosley’s efforts reflect his understanding of the racism of a White-dominated publishing world.

While Mosley has enjoyed commercial success as a genre writer, he considers genre to be an extremely limiting way to describe and talk about books. Upon the publication of his tenth and final novel in the Easy Rawlins series, Mosley sounded a note that reverberates throughout the interviews he gives about his work: “One of the issues in America and in the modern world in general is that people

feel they have to specialize. I think a fuller person is going to want to do all different kinds of work” (quoted in Hahn 2007). A prolific writer, including for television and film, Mosley has written mysteries, science fiction, erotica, short stories, plays, young adult fiction, and nonfiction. In 2005 he collaborated with Stan Lee on Fantastic Four for Marvel Comics.

In 2005 Mosley published 47 with Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. He describes the work as “a young adult novel about slaves in the 1830s, about a young boy who is chosen by an extraterrestrial intelligence for a specific task” (quoted in Bancroft 2004). Mosley intended the book to spark interest in history among Black kids who do not want to read stories about slavery that portray Blacks as victims. Reviewers highlighted how Mosley blends various genres, his unique slave narrative containing elements of African American folklore, history, science fiction, and fantasy. Ossie Davis narrates 47 for Listening Library Audio. Several of Mosley’s books are available as audiobooks and marketed to high school students and adults. Reviews typically contain advisory warnings about explicit, strong or “earthy” language, racial slurs, and sexual encounters.

Since 1979, Mosley has lived in Greenwich Village in New York City. He has a wide range of interests, including pottery and comic books.

WALTER DEAN MYERS (1937–2014)

Walter Milton Myers was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and was raised in Harlem. His mother died when he was three years old and his father, George Myers, with eight children to raise on his own, agreed that Florence and Herbert Dean would raise Walter as well as his two halfsiblings (children of Florence and George, from a previous marriage). Though this adoption was never formalized, Walter considered the Deans his primary family (even after George Myers moved his new wife and children to a home around the corner from the Deans’s home in Harlem) and honored the care and raising the Deans provided by adopting their name as part of his pen name. Florence Dean used romance magazines to teach Walter to read before he entered school. This early exposure to reading signaled Myers’s sensitivity to language and began his obsession with reading and writing. However, Myers also struggled with a speech difficulty which made him the target of bullies both on the street and at school. Myers responded to the taunts of bullies by fighting

and repeatedly was in trouble for poor conduct at school. Nonetheless, Myers was recognized as a bright child and participated in an experimental school program condensing seventh and eighth grades into one academic year and was admitted to the selective Stuyvesant High School. His behavior problems at school continued, and he eventually stopped attending. In his memoir, Bad Boy (2001), he describes his isolation from his peers due to his speech difficulties, his interest in literature and writing in contrast to the heavy focus on science in Stuyvesant’s curriculum, and his family’s scant financial resources which prevented him from attending college.

Myers’s path to a writing career took several turns. While a student, Myers’s program of reading included popular literature he found on his own as well as British literary masterpieces introduced to him at school. Myers wrote continuously as a student, imitating Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. When he returned from service in the Army, he took a series of low-wage jobs until he determined that he wanted more for himself. He began to write daily, sending his poems and short stories to literary magazines with minimal success. Only after discovering James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” did he recognize that his own Black urban experience was worthy subject matter. He discovered other Black writers and joined the Harlem Writers Guild.

Myers turned his attention almost exclusively to writing for young readers when he won a contest sponsored by the Council on Interracial Books for Children in 1968 for his picturebook manuscript, Where Does the Day Go? (1969). Over the course of his career, Myers wrote over a hundred books for young readers, including picturebooks, novels, short stories, poetry, adventure, historical fiction, biography, and history. He is best known for his young adult fiction which is infused with the theme of personal responsibility. His novels are most often set in Harlem, not the robust Harlem of his youth but the post-1960s Harlem of economically fragile families, drugs, abandoned buildings, gangs, and strong church communities.

Myers emphasized the role of Black heritage and tradition as the foundation of Black identity in his nonfiction. He wrote biographies of both famous and less familiar Black figures, such as Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass, Toussaint L’Overture, Ida B. Wells, Harlem Hellfighters, and Biddy Owens of the Negro Baseball League. His account of the Black freedom struggle, Now is Your Time (1991), and the photo albums, One More River to Cross (1995)

and Brown Angels: An Album of Pictures and Verse (1993), inform readers of the recent past.

In his YA novels Myers is concerned with the immediate present, capturing the dilemmas experienced by children, mostly boys, in their teen years when they are seeking to establish an individual identity. Myers’s novels serve as a mirror to his contemporary readers. In Scorpions (1989), the main character, Jamal, deals with a host of complicated circumstances: his older brother is incarcerated, his single mother struggles to find the money to finance legal fees for an appeal, and he is offered a coercive “invitation” to join a gang to earn that money quickly. Scorpions captures the issues, setting, and circumstances of its time period and allows readers to live briefly in Jamal’s shoes. In contrast, Monster (1999) offers readers a character, Steve, who goes to a selective high school where he participates in an afterschool film club. But he also has relationships on the street that involve him in a burglary which results in a murder. Steve’s experience making movies prompts him to write a screenplay of his trial which contrasts with the more personal journal he is keeping. Though the novels acknowledge the racism the characters face, Myers’s focus on the interior life and choices of the characters shifts attention away from the role that race plays in their identity. This focus on personal responsibility and the secondary emphasis on race may account for Myers’s widespread appeal among White readers. Myers had a ground-breaking role within children’s literature by including depictions of incarceration in Monster and Lockdown (2010) and unglamorous war experiences in Patrol: An American Soldier in Vietnam (2002), Fallen Angels (1988), and Sunrise Over Fallujah (2008).

Myers received many accolades over the course of his lifetime from different organizations and publications: Library of Congress National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature (2012–2014); Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for lifetime achievement (inaugural prize, 2010); the Coretta Scott King Author Award (for Fallen Angels) and an additional ten honor designations; the Michael J. Printz Award from the American Library Association for Monster (the inaugural award); two Newbery honor designations for Scorpions and Somewhere in the Darkness (1992); two honor designations and a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People; many “Best Book” designations by organizations such as the American Library Association, Parent’s Choice, the NAACP, specific libraries such as the New York Public Library, teaching organizations, and publications such as The Horn Book Magazine and Kirkus.

ANN PETRY (1908–1997)

Since its publication in 1955, Ann Petry’s Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad has been reissued multiple times. An American Library Association’s (ALA) Notable Book Award-winner, Harriet has been translated into Dutch and Japanese. Oxford University Press published a recorded version in 2006. In 2018, Jason Reynolds wrote the foreword for the Amistad (HarperCollins) edition, Harper and Hachette both producing audio versions. Named the National Ambassador for Young People’s literature in 2020, Reynolds’s investment in Petry’s work models a type of critical crossover that expands the canons of both US children’s literature and African American literature.

Petry grew up in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, where her family lived above her father’s pharmacy. The only Black student in her class, Petry experienced harassment as well as low expectations on the part of White teachers. She graduated from the College of Pharmacy of the University of Connecticut and worked for nine years in that profession before marriage took her to Harlem in 1938. She worked as a reporter, publishing her first short story in Baltimore’s Afro-American. A member of the American Negro Theater (ANT), Petry also wrote children’s plays and appeared in amateur productions. In 1942 Crisis published her second story, “On Saturday Night the Sirens Sound,” about children left home by themselves (Petry calls them “doorkey kids”). Impressed by this story, an editor at Houghton Mifflin asked Petry if she had plans for a novel.

A literary fellowship in 1945 allowed Petry to complete what would become her best-known work. Too often compared to Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), Petry’s The Street (1946) stands on its own as a searing critique of what the author would call environmental factors (race, gender, class) limiting an individual’s possibilities. The protagonist is a single mother of an eight-year-old boy, Bub, whom she must leave alone in their drab apartment while searching for work. The novel’s shocking ending asks readers to consider why, despite embodying the can-do attitude of the post-World War II era, Lutie Johnson does not succeed in her pursuit of the American dream.

The tragic climax also leaves us to consider the fate of young Bub and the ways in which environmental factors (including policy decisions) define and delimit an urban Black childhood. In an interview with The New York Times upon the reissue of The Street,

an eighty-four-year-old Petry remembers working as a teacher in Harlem: “I worked at P.S. 10 on St. Nicholas and 116th Street in an after-school program for door-key kids [ . . . ] Although I had been aware of Harlem, this was [my] first realization of the impact of that kind of hard life on kids. I lived my whole life without paying any attention. It wasn’t my life. But once I became aware, I couldn’t see anything but” (quoted in Fein 1992).

In addition to writing two more novels marketed to adults as well as short fiction collected in Miss Muriel and Other Stories (1971) and featuring adolescent narrators, Petry published four works marketed to children: The Drugstore Cat (1949); Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad (1955); Tituba of Salem Village (1964); and Legends of the Saints (1970). Unlike many Black writers known primarily, if not exclusively, for their work marketed to adults, Petry receives recognition in The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. Her brief entry mentions only Tituba of Salem Village, noting its focus on a Barbadian slave accused in the seventeenth-century Salem Massachusetts witch trials. In an autobiographical sketch written for Third Book of Junior Authors, Petry expressed displeasure in the demand for historical accuracy in books such as Tituba: “It seems to me that the necessity for accuracy of details, the constant checking of the facts, serves as a kind of cage which holds the imagination captive” (1972).

JERRY PINKNEY (1939–2021) When a youngster, Jerry Pinkney did not know that anyone, especially a Black person, could make a living by creating art. He grew up in the Black Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia in a working-class family. He had difficulty in school (diagnosed as dyslexic as an adult), but drawing came naturally to him. He recognized that his skill made him exceptional, which gave him self-confidence.

At the age of twelve Pinkney was employed at a newsstand at a busy intersection in Philadelphia and would sketch in his free moments. A regular customer, John Liney, who was at that time creating the Henry comic strip, saw his work and invited him to his studio. Pinkney went on to enroll in the commercial art program at the Dobbins Vocational [High] School in Philadelphia. When his teacher encouraged a number of White students to apply for scholarships to the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, Pinkney independently requested scholarship applications for himself and the two other Black students in his class. He and one of his Black

classmates were two of the three scholarship winners that year. Pinkney attended the College of Art for two and a half years but left school when his wife, Gloria Jean, became pregnant with their first child. He was employed by a series of commercial art firms and studios before turning his attention to illustrating children’s books.

Between 1964 (when he illustrated his first book, The Adventures of Spider: West African Folk Tales) and 2018, Pinkney illustrated over a hundred books for children on subjects such as folk tales from African, Native American, and European traditions; Aesop’s fables; contemporary stories; historical fiction; biographies of significant Black figures; bible stories; and nursery rhymes for very young children. He collaborated with some of the notable Black authors of his generation, including Julius Lester, Marilyn Nelson, and Patricia McKissack, and he illustrated texts written by Mildred Taylor, Robert San Souci, Eloise Greenfield, and Virginia Hamilton, among others.

Pinkney’s work is characterized by energetic lines and vibrant watercolor—especially necessary for the feeling of immediacy that he strives for in his pictures—as well as exceptional page design. His goal in creating illustrations “has always been to awaken the emotional palette—to make viewers laugh, cry, ponder, and, most of all, feel compassion” (Pinkney 2016, 33). His pictures are lauded for realistic depictions of anthropomorphized animals, detailed and vibrant natural scenes, and attractive portraits of Black people. His depictions of Black characters are based on his use of live models, often his own family members. His collaboration with Julius Lester to retell the Little Black Sambo story in Sam and the Tigers (1996) replaced stereotypes and caricatures with attractive and joyful representations of the characters.

In addition to illustrating children’s books, Pinkney provided illustrations for reprints of over a dozen classic adult novels. He was commissioned to produce paintings by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the White House, the US National Park Service, the African Burial Ground Interpretive Center in Manhattan, the US Postal Service (Black Heritage series of postal stamps), the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center (Ohio), and National Geographic. From 2008 to 2009, he served on the National Endowment for the Arts. His artwork has been featured in more than thirty oneman shows in museums and other cultural venues.

Pinkney’s contributions to children’s literature have been recognized with many accolades. He received multiple lifetime achievement awards, including The Laura Ingalls Wilder Award (known

as the Children’s Literature Legacy Award since 2018) given by the American Library Association, Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement, also awarded by American Library Association, and the Society of Illustrator’s Hall of Fame. He earned ten Coretta Scott King Illustrator Awards (or honor designations): Count on Your Fingers African Style (by Claudia Zaslavsky, 1981, honor); The Patchwork Quilt (by Valerie Flournoy, 1986); Half a Moon and One Whole Star (by Crescent Dragonwagon, 1987); Mirandy and Brother Wind (by Patricia McKissack, 1989); The Talking Eggs (by Robert San Souci, 1990, honor); Minty: A Story of Young Harriet Tubman (by Alan Schroeder, 1997); Goin’ Someplace Special (by Patricia McKissack, 2002); God Bless the Child (by Billie Holiday, 2005, honor); The Moon Over Star (by Dianna Hutts Aston, 2009, honor); and In Plain Sight (by Richard Jackson, 2017, honor). Pinkney’s Caldecott awards include Mirandy and Brother Wind (by Patricia McKissack, 1988, honor); The Talking Eggs (by Robert San Souci, 1989, honor); John Henry (by Julius Lester, 1995, honor), The Ugly Duckling (by Hans Christian Anderson, 2000, honor); Noah’s Ark (2003, honor); and The Lion and the Mouse (2010). He has been awarded many medals from the Society of Illustrators and has received numerous “Best Book” accolades from publications such as the Boston Globe and The New York Times.

SONIA SANCHEZ (1934–)

In Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature, Rudine Sims Bishop honors Sonia Sanchez in her chapter on African American Poetry for children, noting that the genre “took a more serious turn” in the late 1960s when its “dominant impulse” became affirming “the worth and beauty of Black children and their lives” (Bishop 2007, 95). Bishop puts Sanchez in company with Nikki Giovanni and Tom Feelings, writers that produced a small but significant amount of poetry for young Black readers in the post-1965 era.

Born Wilsonia Benita Driver in Birmingham, Alabama, Sanchez moved to Harlem at the age of nine. Wilson L. Driver, her father, was a musician and teacher. Lena Jones Driver, her mother, died when she was a baby. When her beloved grandmother died five years later, Sanchez began writing poetry, an activity she relates to the development of a stutter. She remembers going to the library on 145th Street every day and having a Black librarian hand her anthologies

of Black poetry, including a collection by Langston Hughes. After graduating from Hunter College in 1955 with a degree in political science, Sanchez began working for Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). She married and divorced Albert Sanchez, a Puerto Rican poet, before marrying and divorcing Eldridge Cleaver, with whom she has three children. Cleaver and Sanchez, together with Haki R. Madhubuti and Nikki Giovanni, comprise the “Broadside Quartet,” the four poets publishing their work with Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press, an independent Detroit-based Black publishing company. Sanchez’s poetry collection It’s a New Day: For Young Brothas and Sistuhs (1971) captures not only the political mission and “revolutionary rhetoric” of the Black Arts Movement but also the investment of BAM writers in children.

Sanchez has published verse, drama, essays, and children’s books. She credits her experience working for Muhammed Speaks, the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, for her start in the world of children’s books. As director of Culture, she wrote a women’s page and a children’s page, telling Susan Kelly, “That’s how I started writing children’s stories” (Kelly 2000, 684). In addition to It’s a New Day, her work marketed specifically to young readers includes The Adventures of Fat Head, Small Head and Square Head (1973); A Sound Investment: Short Stories for Young Readers (1980); and Homegirls and Handgrenades (1984), the latter collection winning an American Book Award. In Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995), Sanchez tackles issues of racism, sexism, sex, rape, and drug addiction. Her works celebrate the Black vernacular, Black music, and Black pride.

Sanchez’s work can be found in a wide range of anthologies, a clear indication of her range and broad appeal. My Black Me: A Beginning Book of Black Poetry (1974) contains fifty poems by twenty-six poets, including Sanchez, Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, and Nikki Giovanni. Republished in 1994, My Black Me was named a Best Book by Children’s Catalog in 2001. Other anthologies with selections by Sanchez include Listen Children: An Anthology of Black Literature (1982); Make a Joyful Sound: Poems for Children by African-American Poets (1996); In Daddy’s Arms I Am Tall: African Americans Celebrating Fathers (1997); I Am the Darker Brother: An Anthology of Modern Poems by African Americans (1997); Catch the Fire!!!: A Cross-Generational Anthology of Contemporary African-American Poetry (1998); The Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children’s Poems (1999); and Poetry From the Masters: The Black Arts Movement: An Introduction to African-American Poets (2009).

Sanchez has enjoyed a long and distinguished career in academia. At San Francisco State, from 1967–1969, she helped establish the first Black Studies program. In 1969, while a single mother, she taught the first course in African American Women’s Literature at the University of Pittsburgh. She taught briefly at Manhattan Community College and then for three years, she spearheaded the African American Studies program at Amherst. In 1977 she accepted a position at Temple University, from which she retired in 1999. In retirement, she took up residency at Columbia. From 2012–2014, Sanchez served as Philadelphia’s poet laureate. In 2018, she received the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award.

JOHN STEPTOE (1950–1989) John Steptoe was born and raised in a working-class family in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of New York City. He attended the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan which he left just three months shy of graduation in an effort to free himself from the emphasis on commercial art that he saw as the central concern of the curriculum and to provide more time to develop his skills as a painter. Though Steptoe never publicly identified with the Black Arts Movement, his work reflects the Black aesthetic of the era. In the Life magazine reprint of his first picturebook, Stevie (1969), the nineteen-year-old Steptoe comments:

I have been taught Western ideas of what a painter is, what painting is, and that stifles me because I am not a Western man. I have never felt I was a citizen of the U.S.A.—this country doesn’t speak to me. To be a black man in this society means finding out who I am. So I have got to stay on my own, get out from under the induced values and discover who I am at the base. One thing I know: at the base there is blackness. (Steptoe 1969, 59) In addition to his art training in high school, he participated in an afternoon art program sponsored by Harlem Youth Opportunity and attended an eight-week summer program for minority artists at Vermont Academy.

Before Steptoe left school, one of his teachers encouraged him to take his portfolio to Harper & Row to seek employment as an illustrator. Ursula Nordstrom, the publisher’s influential children’s book editor, encouraged him to write and illustrate his own work. Two years later Steptoe published Stevie, his first book, and the first picturebook for very young readers told from a distinctly Black

perspective. Just prior to its appearance in bookstores, the book appeared in its entirety in Life magazine (August 1969), a highly unusual event. Some reviewers noted that its appearance in Life signaled a new development in children’s books. Another signal that Stevie was a “new” kind of book was inclusion of the story on Sesame Street: the entire book was read by the character Gordon. Later in life, Steptoe implied that political motivations may have also been at work: “at that particular point society was very anxious to say to black folks, we’re doing something” (quoted in Natov and DeLuca 1987, 123).

Many of the books that Steptoe produced in the next ten years were distinctive: he was the first to use the language and perspectives of working-class Black children in a picturebook. By using Black children as the narrators of his stories, he made visible children who had been absent from children’s books. In comments included in Life’s reprint of Stevie, Steptoe remarks, “The story, the language, is not directed at white children. I wanted it to be something black children could read without translating the language, something real which would relate to what a black child would know” (Steptoe 1969, 59). His books following Stevie, including Uptown (1970) and Train Ride (1971), document the experience of urban Black children as they dream about their futures or expand their horizons, narratives that reflect the political situation at the time.

Steptoe provided intimate and frank representations of family relationships that countered prevailing ideas about dysfunctional families. Though sibling rivalry is conveyed in Stevie and She Come Bringing Me that Little Baby Girl, written by Eloise Greenfield (1984), the illustrations feature cohesive and warm family relationships. He developed My Special Best Words (1974), Daddy Is a Monster . . . Sometimes (1980), and Baby Says (1988) based on his experiences as a single father raising his son and daughter. Later in his career Steptoe expanded his material beyond family relationships and his own neighborhood, illustrating Rosa Guy’s adaptation of Birago Diop’s Mother Crocodile=Maman Caiman (1981), writing his own adaptation of a Native American tale in The Story of the Jumping Mouse (1984) and of an East African tale in Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters (1987).

Steptoe’s artistic style developed over the two decades in which he worked. His early books depict characters in bold color with heavy black outline which lends a sculptural presence to the figures. As he experimented with different media and styles, his palette grew more delicate and his style more painterly. His pictures for The Story

of Jumping Mouse were done with pencil in black and white, and the pictures in Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters are lush, full color images in a naturalistic style.

Despite the brevity of his career, Steptoe earned major awards: a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for Stevie, the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award for Mother Crocodile and Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters, a Caldecott Honor for The Story of Jumping Mouse and Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters, and a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Illustration for Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters.

ALICE WALKER (1944–)

Alice Walker has always had an interest in childhood, and especially Black girlhood. Her first publication, written while she was a student at Sarah Lawrence, appeared in The Best Stories by Negro Writers (1967), edited by Langston Hughes. In 1988, her story became a picturebook, illustrated by Catherine Deeter. To Hell With Dying tells the story of Mr. Sweet and a sister and brother with the power to bring him back from the brink of death. It begins, “Mr. Sweet was a diabetic and an alcoholic and a guitar player and lived down the road from us on a neglected cotton farm.” At the end, the sister has returned from college upon the news that Mr. Sweet is, once again, dying. But this time, the young woman’s kisses do not revive him, and she must say good-bye. The final page pictures sister, who resembles a late 1960s Alice Walker, holding what Mr. Sweet has left her—a guitar.

Walker’s work for children emphasizes empathy and an ethics of care. Finding the Green Stone, illustrated by Catherine Deeter (1991), features another brother and sister, but in this story, Walker focuses on the boy. Johnny speaks and behaves in a negative and hurtful way that dims his light, separating him from his family and community, all of whom have possession of their green stones. Walker dedicated this book “to all children / everywhere / & / to the eternal / child / within myself / & you.” Walker’s eternal child seeks connection to others and to the natural world. In 2006 Walker published There is a Flower at the End of My Nose and in 2007, Why War is Never a Good Idea, both picturebooks illustrated by Stefano Vitale. The latter is based on Walker’s poem of the same title, written in the aftermath of 9/11 and published in 2003. Recently, Tra Publishing, a subsidiary of Simon and Schuster with a focus on design and an ethics

of environmental sustainability, produced one of Walker’s poems as a picturebook: Sweet People Are Everywhere (2021) features art by Quim Torres.

Reviewers of children’s books have been hard on Walker. When HarperCollins reprinted Walker’s biography of Hughes in 2002— Langston Hughes, American Poet, illustrated by Catherine Deeter (1974)—Kirkus described the text as “lackluster,” positing that “Walker has simply succumbed to the ‘dumbing-down’ syndrome that afflicts so many writers for adults when they turn their pens to children’s books.” The reviewer concludes that Hughes “deserves better than this” (2001). While praising the illustrations in Finding the Green Stone, a book for “all ages,” Publishers Weekly calls it “a strange story” with “a forced message” and a writing style “stiff and didactic”; the reviewer finds particular fault with Walker’s dialogue, a strange criticism considering Walker grew up among the people who populate her fictional world (1991). The bulk of the Publishers Weekly review of War is Never a Good Idea focuses on the stunning artwork of Stefano Vitale while undermining the power of Walker’s text by predicting it will make kids more aware of their own helplessness. Having established herself as a successful novelist for adults, Walker seems to be faulted for having trust in her young readers’ abilities to tackle difficult subjects.

Walker’s best-known work won the Pulitzer prize and has been made into an Oscar-nominated film and a Tony Award-winning musical. The Color Purple (1982) begins with Celie, a fourteen-yearold girl in the rural south, writing to God because the man she believes to be her father warns her against telling anyone that he has raped her. Walker’s bildungsroman ends with Celie meeting her adult children and her daughter-in-law Tashi. A member of the Olinka tribe, Tashi reappears in Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992). That novel’s focus on female genital mutilation brought Walker back into the critical crosshairs of scholars who charged her with cultural insensitivity, with writing about African girlhood with a Western bias.

Walker’s contribution to the US children’s literary tradition includes criticism as well as primary texts. She grew up in Eatonton, Georgia—the same rural community that produced, and memorialized with a museum, Joel Chandler Harris. In a 1981 speech, “The Dummy in the Window: Joel Chandler Harris and the Invention of Uncle Remus,” Walker denounces Harris for cultural theft and distortion. Exploring Harris’s work within the context of a children’s literary tradition dominated by White authors, who write

predominantly for and about White children, raises provocative questions about author/readership, cultural authenticity, constructions of race, and the ways in which White supremacy reconstitutes itself.

SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS (1944–1999)

In her personal tribute to Sherley Anne Williams, published in Callaloo, Mae Gwendolyn Henderson links the writer to her muse, Bessie Smith, arguing that our literary inheritance is richer thanks to Williams’s fiction and poetry, work Henderson describes as “sacramental expressions of a secular blues ethic and aesthetic” (1999, 764). That inheritance includes two works marketed to children: Working Cotton (1992) and Girls Together (1999).

In Working Cotton, Williams draws from her own experience growing up in the San Joaquin Valley, the daughter of migrant workers. The text is based on two selections in Williams’ Peacock Poems (1975). Shelan, the Black girl who tells the story, is a migrant worker who picks cotton with her family. Shelan’s description of a day-inthe-life of a child laborer draws attention to the family’s strength, especially the father’s, without romanticizing the difficulties of a migrant life: “It’s a long time to night.” Reviewers praised Williams’s lyrical language and Carole M. Byard’s acrylic impressionist paintings. Working Cotton was named a Caldecott Honor Book, a Coretta Scott King Honor Book, and an American Library Association (ALA) Notable Book.

Williams dedicated her second picturebook to “my sister, Ruby Louise: we were girls together.” The narrator, Ruise’s sister, tells a story about leaving their house early in the morning to meet up with three other girls: “Hattie Jean, ViLee, and Lois live down the Project from Ruise and me. We almost like stairsteps.” After playing “dress-up” at Hattie Jean’s and taking turns on the two bicycles between the five of them, the girls decide to leave their neighborhood so they can climb trees. Williams describes their journey in language that exemplifies the blues aesthetic identified by Henderson: “We leave out the Project, all us girls together. Hey, hey, we say, and link arms when we walk.” The urban landscape (a vacant lot, a truck company, abandoned buildings, a dance club) gives way to suburbia: “It all look like a picture to me—gingerbread houses, grass green as crayon and so thick it about cover up your feet when you step on it, all these trees a fairy-tale forest.” The narrator is curious

about this world: “Seem like it could be some story behind even a plain brown door” (Williams 1999).

In her review of Girls Together for Booklist, Hazel Rochman compares the book’s “simplicity” to Ezra Jack Keats’ Snowy Day. The vibrant illustrations by Synthia Saint James suggest perhaps a more appropriate comparison to John Steptoe’s Stevie (1969) and Jacob Lawrence’s The Great Migration: An American Story (1995)—both critically-acclaimed picturebooks by Black artists. The setting of Girls Together, a California housing project, and its language—“The flower tree she call magnolia, blossoms big and white on shiny dark-green leave”—as well as the book’s exploration of gender, play, and place should also prompt comparisons to James Baldwin’s Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood, set in Harlem. Both Little Man and Girls Together foreground color, with each “black” character a different shade of brown, Williams describing Lois as “so dark she look black, her face as pretty as any doll’s.” Lois must stay inside until her parents return home, so the five girls bring a magnolia flower back to her. The final page of Girls Together features Lois in glorious profile, posed like a “movie star,” as the other girls had done: “Lois look real pretty in a white flower hair barrette.”

The entry for Williams in The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature emphasizes her participation in the Black folk tradition of call-and-response. Mildred R. Mickle, the writer of this brief sketch, gives equal attention to Williams’s accomplishments in criticism (literary history), poetry, fiction, and children’s literature. Mickle presents Working Cotton as a continuation of Williams’s commitment to folk traditions and history, arguing that the picturebook “addresses perhaps the most important aspect that gives the folk community life and meaning: the children” (Mickle 2001, 440). Taking Williams’s commitment to folk traditions seriously means working together, across two fields of study, to give her picturebooks about Black childhood a richer context and thus a wider audience.

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AFTERWORD: WRITING BLACK CHILDREN, WRITING “BLACK ALIVENESS”

NICOLE KING

Given how frequently I reach for the Norton Anthology of African American Literature in my university teaching, it is shocking and a bit embarrassing to learn that it includes “not one author or illustrator who produced work exclusively for young readers” as Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek, the editors of this special issue, discuss in their introduction. My scholarly interest in the representation of Black children in modern African American literature written for adults has drawn me into the adjacent worlds of children’s literature and the scholarship of age. In this Afterword, I attempt a response to Donovan and Dubek’s call to traverse the boundaries, the “apartheid,” that keeps many scholars of African American literature oblivious to the rich conceptual and discursive terrain comprised by children’s and YA fiction by Black American writers. Specifically, I offer a brief intertextual reading of Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976) and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). If, as Robin Bernstein (2017) argues, “It’s time to create language that values justice over innocence” when considering how Black children are seen by adults, then Taylor’s text offers a brilliant blueprint for how we can begin to do this work as literary scholars too.

In early 2022, in the lead up to the London stage premiere of Mockingbird, the production team asked me comment on Mockingbird’s

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enduring legacy and popularity. Although the key characters Scout and Atticus Finch were familiar to me, many details of the story and its construction presented themselves anew. For instance, I was surprised at how engaging I found Scout as a narrator, and I felt sure I would have loved her in my own childhood, proto-feminist that she is. Reading as an academic, however, other attributes came to the fore that I would surely not have been aware of as a child reader. Scout’s mix of self-belief and vulnerability, for example, called to mind Toni Cade Bambara’s portraits of young Black girls in her collection of short stories, Gorilla, My Love (1972). More than anything, however, I was struck by Lee’s nuanced representations of Whiteness. Notwithstanding Scout’s narration, Mockingbird is a veritable festival of White maleness: Lee’s varied depictions of White masculinity function as the through line of the plot and standpoint of the text. In this respect, and in reading recent scholarship on Mockingbird, I quickly grasped its profound popularity within the dominant Anglophone cultures of the US and the UK.1 Finally, and most relevantly for this Afterword, I was gripped but not surprised by the thinness of Mockingbird’s portrayal of Black life. Not only is Black life peripheral to the plot and the world of Lee’s small town in Alabama, it is presented in the faintest of outlines, without any Black children to speak of. As Jennifer Murray points out, Black life is “geographically distanced” as well as thematically marginal in the text (2010, 86). To write Black children is to write what Kevin Quashie calls “black aliveness,” a means to evoke complex worlds of being. Evoking complex worlds of Black being is not Lee’s project in Mockingbird. Rather, it is a text that centers both childhood and Whiteness, refuses to see Black children, and infantilizes Black adults. Yet, Lee’s text is beloved: it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the 1962 film won three Oscars, and it consistently reaches new generations because it is widely taught around the world. Most recently, the London stage version, like its Broadway predecessor that opened in 2018, is attracting sell-out audiences. The incredible popularity of the story—then and now—suggests a White investment in stories that marginalize Blacks yet present themselves as racially liberal if not overtly anti-racist. There is excellent scholarship on To Kill a Mockingbird that draws out its particular ideal of White American liberalism (Jay 2015), compounded by its structural weaknesses and narrative complexities (Chura 2000), and the ways in which its various internal contradictions have been misread (Murray 2010). Rather than

displacing the text’s enduring fan base however, this academic discourse exists in parallel with it.

Mockingbird’s key plot points are Scout’s adventures with her brother, Jem, and friend Dill, their fascination with their reclusive neighbor Boo Radley, and their father’s involvement in a sensational trial in which a Black man, Tom Robinson, is falsely accused and then convicted of raping a White woman, Mayella Ewell. Scout’s father, Atticus, serves as Tom Robinson’s lawyer, making him abhorrent to many of the White citizens of the town and a hero to the town’s Black citizens. Tom Robinson’s characterization and the related oblique discussion of his children was of most interest to me. Twenty-five years old, married, and a father of three, Mr. Robinson is a “boy” to his White employer. Although fatherhood is a central theme in the text, Robinson’s own children are illegible: they do not appear and they are not named. Rather, when Scout inquires about them and their mother the narrative assumes a detached anthropological tone to offer its most extensive though decidedly generic commentary on Black children: “It was customary for field Negroes with tiny children to deposit them in whatever shade there was while their parents worked—usually the babies sat in the shade between two rows of cotton. Those unable to sit were strapped papoose-style on their mother’s backs, or resided in extra cotton bags” (Lee 2010, 134). In this description of sharecropping, Black babies merge with their parents, “strapped to their backs,” or with the commodities that their parents harvest, “sat between two rows of cotton” or “resided in extra cotton bags.” Black babies in this scene—a scene all the more significant for its matter-of-factness—are less human than thing. Bernstein (2011) links the cultural embeddedness of the idea of Black children as “things” to the portrayal of Topsy and Eva in the nineteenth-century bestseller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe:

In many cases, angelic white children were contrasted with pickanninies so grotesque as to suggest that only white children were children. This is the flip side of the well-known libel of the “childlike Negro”: the equally libellous, equally damaging, but heretofore underanalyzed exclusion of black youth from the category of childhood. Topsy was written within Stowe’s argument that black children are innocent, but her reconstructed progeny defined back children out of innocence and therefore out of childhood itself. (Bernstein 2011, 16)

Mockingbird demonstrates Bernstein’s thesis exactly, whereby Scout’s innocence of the ways of the world is a driving force of the narrative alongside Tom Robinson’s abject dependency upon Atticus to navigate the racist justice system.

Published sixteen years after Mockingbird, Roll of Thunder is less well known but fortunately remains in print and available for successive generations of readers to encounter. Much connects these two texts in both form and theme. Both texts trace the contours of a local community across friendships, conflicts, and crises. Both texts are set in small American southern towns during the 1930s. Both use retrospective narrators who reflect on happy girlhoods and the events that initiated the end of their own and their brothers’ innocence. Both narrators have a strong sense of self and revere their fathers, who themselves earn sustained respect in their community. To varying degrees, both texts are attentive to White racism and antiblack violence and each text, albeit in starkly different registers, makes apparent (White) nostalgia for the era of chattel slavery. Yet Roll of Thunder offers a formidable contrast to Mockingbird by placing an African American family, the Logans, at its center and telling their story of connection to the land, to justice, and to resistance. Roll of Thunder transpires across a particularly significant year for narrator Cassie and her family, a year in which adults as well as children demonstrate and enact modes of active living and learning, rather than just survival, in spite of White racism, aggression, and violence. Unlike the rest of their Black neighbors who are sharecroppers, the Logans own two hundred acres and farm their own land. Their economic independence, and Cassie’s mother’s job as a teacher who promotes intellectual independence in her students, makes the Logans targets of White ire, not least of which is a desire to divest them of their farmland. Where Mockingbird embeds narratives of White humanity as complex and capable of redemption, Roll of Thunder centers the multiplicity and complexity of Black aliveness (Quashie 2021). Roll of Thunder achieves this, in part, through fulsome representations of Black childhood that include stages of innocence, acquired maturity, and radical agency. Black children in Roll of Thunder learn to assert their own power. We can read Roll of Thunder as a refusal of and a rewriting of the consistent attempts to deny Black maturity and Black childhood. Extending Quashie’s tracing of Black aliveness through an aesthetic and affective examination of Black American verse, I see Roll of Thunder as a novel that represents

and theorizes Black aliveness in its particular blend of first-person narration, storytelling, and setting. As Kelly McDowell emphasizes, in Roll of Thunder, “enabling child agency becomes a necessary part of resistance” (2002, 224).

Roll of Thunder offers a counternarrative to the liberal racial discourse through which US culture (still) imagines the abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights era. Rather than parroting narratives about the brotherhood of man, Roll of Thunder is profoundly skeptical of the viability of interracial friendships due to the inequality embedded in concepts of racial difference and specifically in White power’s unwavering commitment to itself.2 In a pivotal scene, Roll of Thunder elaborates the hazards and limits of interracial friendship by showing them to be a function of the relentless drive of Whiteness and White power. Cassie’s father directly and frankly advises Cassie’s older brother, Stacey, to be wary of the friendship offered by a White schoolmate, Jeremy Simms. Although Jeremy’s siblings and parents are actively dangerous and racist, Jeremy’s character is developed and nuanced to the degree that the reader understands why Stacey would desire his friendship. However, Mr. Logan presents this argument:

Far as I’m concerned, friendship between black and white don’t mean that much ’cause it usually ain’t on an equal basis. Right now you and Jeremy might get along fine, but in a few years he’ll think of himself as a man but you’ll probably still be a boy to him. And if he feels that way, he’ll turn on you in a minute. . . . Maybe one day whites and blacks can be real friends, but right now the country ain’t built that way. (Taylor 1997, 157–58)

While not denying the possibility of interracial friendship, Mr. Logan presents a pragmatic view based on history. That Jeremy might turn on Stacey “in a minute” is a factor to consider in their one-to-one relationship and also alludes to the collapse of post-Civil War Reconstruction reforms that another character, Mr. Morrison, recounts when discussing the obliteration of his family by “Night riders” one Christmas: “Reconstruction was just about over then, and them Northern soldiers was tired of being in the South and they didn’t hardly care about no black folks in no shantytown. And them Southern whites, they was tired of the Northern soldiers and free Negroes, and they was trying to turn things back ’round to how they used to be” (Taylor 1997, 147–48). As this passage shows, Roll of Thunder excels in its own consideration of history—it reiterates

how important it is for Black people (young and old) to have a sense of history, and in its plot line, the novel delivers an often obscured history to its readers. By focusing on a year in the life of the Logans, it also offers a counter history to (White) America’s self-narrative of progress. The “right now” of Mr. Logan’s advice to Stacey invites, I believe, a broad consideration of historical time, up to and including the 1970s context of writing and publication: the post-Civil War and Reconstruction era, the Great Depression, and the modern Civil Rights movement. A critical interrogation of these periods of history, Roll of Thunder suggests, can be achieved by decentering White masculinity as the narrative spine for understanding Americanness and replacing it with empowered, differentiated Black points of view. As Quashie writes, “We can’t will the violent reality away, nor can we not incorporate its impact. We have to live in the world and also live in the world of imagine” (2021, 146–47). Key scenes in Roll of Thunder do just that.

As a final example, I turn to a scene that, like Mockingbird’s aside about Black babies, is powerful not just because of what is represented but because the scene is subordinate to the main narrative action. Mr. Granger, one of the most powerful and wealthiest of White plantation owners in the community, insults Cassie’s Uncle Hammer, who lives and works in the North and makes a point of dressing well and driving a nice car. Granger remarks, “You right citified, ain’t you? Course you always did think you was too good to work in the field like other folks.” Uncle Hammer’s retort is emblematic of how Taylor’s characters know and assert their worth as humans: “Naw, that ain’t it . . . I just ain’t never figured fifty cents a day was worth a child’s time, let alone a man’s wages” (Taylor 1997, 166). Uncle Hammer’s deft linguistic sparring reveals a self-awareness that formal education, local and national politics, and everyday encounters are designed to erode and undermine. Furthermore, in his response Uncle Hammer pointedly asserts and distinguishes between childhood and adulthood, even though Granger does not. Uncle Hammer differentiates the work that adults and children might do in order to earn a wage. He implies that he is paid according to the worth of his skills, and that such skills are commensurate with his status as an adult. Slavery, as Hortense J. Spillers (2000) delineates so eloquently, seeks to “forcefully homogenize” Blackness when it comes to age and labor. Indeed, Cassie’s narrative voice explains how that ideology persists in the sharecropping, de facto plantocracy of their Mississippi town: “Everyone knew that fifty cents was the top price

paid to any day labourer, man, woman, or child, hired to work in the Granger fields” (Taylor 1997, 167). Uncle Hammer’s words cut across that collective knowledge—“everyone knew”—of the status quo designed to diminish and restrict his, and indeed any Black person’s, aspirations. His words and powerful sense of self have a counteracting power that neutralizes Granger’s attempt to delimit and belittle his existence. As Hyun-Joo Yoo asserts, “In Roll of Thunder, the black people are portrayed not as totally knowable and controllable, but as the subversive disrupters who can destabilize the hierarchal binaries needed to maintain white power and authority” (2018, 339). Moreover, Uncle Hammer’s disruptive claim on space and being is posed to the children in the text and to the readers of the text as a viable stance to take. As witness to this exchange, Cassie builds and fortifies her knowledge, her epistemological and ontological frameworks of self, and her repertoire of how to be alive. Uncle Hammer’s clarity about his identity and self-worth is replicated across the characterizations of Black adults in this text.3 Knowing and asserting one’s self-worth is repeatedly taught to the children, and is the key pedagogical imperative conveyed to Cassie and her brothers.

Reading Roll of Thunder was a joy and a revelation. When I teach it next year, I will take the opportunity to contextualize it within other significant contemporaneous literary and cultural considerations of American history that assert the central humanity of Black children, Black families, and Black generations. Possibilities that immediately come to mind are the broadcast sensation that was Alex Haley’s Roots (1977), novels such as Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975), Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), and Albert Murray’s Train Whistle Guitar (1974). To these I would add Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970), Rosa Guy’s The Friends (1973), and Walter Dean Myers’ Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff (1975). For, like Roll of Thunder, collectively these African American texts for adults and for children boldly “make the world anew” as Langston Hughes writes in his poem “To You.” They also push back against what Habiba Ibrahim identifies as “the historical process of alienating black subjects from their own age,” noting that this “continues to be felt throughout the twentieth century and into the present” (2021, 4). Cassie begins to practice a way of living that she learns explicitly from her father. Woven throughout the text, this modus operandi is enacted by different characters, including Cassie’s brother, Stacey, her mother, and her uncle. In her father’s words, it is both an empirical philosophy, drawing on his own experience, and theoretical

proposition as it suggests the power that Cassie has to shape her place in the world: There are things you can’t back down on, things you gotta take a stand on. But it’s up to you to decide what them things are. You have to demand respect in this world, ain’t nobody just gonna hand it to you. How you carry yourself, what you stand for—that’s how you gain respect. But, little one, ain’t nobody’s respect worth more than your own. You understand that? (Taylor 1997, 176)

Mockingbird, unsurprisingly, reserves the full embodiment of a similar philosophy for its adult White male savior character, Atticus Finch, and, to a lesser extent, Boo Radley, who saves Jem (Scout’s older brother) in the final scene of the novel.

In Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (2021), Quashie responds to Lucille Clifton’s 1991 poem “reply” in a way that connects to the essential differences I have briefly sketched between Roll of Thunder and Mockingbird. Taylor’s novel presents and contests the violent erasure and marginalization of Black life, for children and adults, whilst Lee’s novel uses similar circumstances of Black erasure and marginalization to bolster White identities. Quashie’s reading of Clifton’s poem models an inclusive practice for the self-recognition of Blackness that resonates with Mr. Logan’s philosophy for living in a racist world. What Quashie calls “antiblackness” Mr. Logan encapsulates in “things you gotta take a stand on,” but both agree that the phenomenon, whatever it is called, is deeply rooted. Thus, Quashie’s interpretative framework for “reply” is both relevant to and potentially generative of further engagement with Roll of Thunder and, by contrast, Mockingbird: We are supposed to not-see ourselves or to see ourselves through not-seeing; we are, indeed, supposed to fear—and hate—our black selves. But Clifton’s poem invites us into a practice of encountering black being as it is, in its beingness, in its terribleness and wonder and particularity. . . . A racist happening prefaces the poem, and racist happenings surely linger in every indicative verb in the verse. But in a black world, the racist thing is not the beginning or the end of being, and what matters is not only what is done to the subject but also how the subject is. Antiblackness is part of blackness but not all of how or what blackness is. Antiblackness is total in the world, but it is not total in the black world. (Quashie 2021, 5)

In Roll of Thunder, the many “racist things” that occur do not become the totality of Blackness and this fundamental difference with

Mockingbird is anchored in the relative visibility of Black children within each text. While Quashie sees “a world of heterogeneity” in Clifton’s poem, I see how a similar world is evoked from multiple perspectives in Roll of Thunder. From the opening images of “rusty Mississippi dust” with which each of the Logan children has a different relationship, to the forest sanctuary where important conversations take place and emotions are shared, to learning about the political and economic imperative that the Logans do all that they can to keep hold of their two hundred acres of farmland, Cassie and her siblings are presented in their heterogeneity, their innocence, and their evolving maturity.

Similarly, in her 2021 book, Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life, Ibrahim offers theoretical frameworks that are applicable to an expanded study of Roll of Thunder. She considers the impact of the transatlantic slave trade as well as liberal humanist discourses that link humanity and Whiteness and how these have shaped Black literary representations of age—adulthood as well as youth. Ibrahim writes, “Black age is the prism through which the abuses of liberal humanist dispossession, as well as black cultural, political, and historical reclamation, are visible” (2021, 3), and we could find no better set of examples of this linked phenomena than in Mockingbird and Roll of Thunder. The mutually constitutive idea of Black adulthood and Black childhood examined from multiple angles in Roll of Thunder is extraneous to Mockingbird. If the work of figuring Black children critically begins with seeing Black children, then Mockingbird remains a very useful text for its example of conceptual blindness. In Roll of Thunder, multifaceted acts of resistance are co-articulated through the presentation of fully embodied Black adulthood and Black childhood whereby robust claims on the distinction of age are made. Such difference signifies beyond just resistance to antiblackness but rather extends to the entitlement of “black aliveness,” an embeddedness within and a symbiotic relation to the landscape, and an investment in the very schema of age, whereby Black pasts, presents, and futures are not just possible but known.

NOTES

1 In addition to feminist readings, another avenue of contemporary To Kill a Mockingbird research explores its queer epistemologies; see Gregory S.

Jay (2015).

2 Enlightenment ideologies of race, such those presented in Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia” (1787) or David Hume’s “Of

National Characters” (1754) are but two examples of ideologies of the intrinsic superiority of Whiteness and how this ideology, fundamental to the birth of the American nation and the transatlantic slave trade, effortlessly reproduces itself within politics, economics, and culture. 3 Andrew Sargent contrasts William Melvin Kelley’s 1962 novel A Different Drummer with Mockingbird to highlight a similar rejection of the necessity of “black sacrifice” and “white heroism” that I see evident in

Roll of Thunder (2018, 38).

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Historicity of To Kill a Mockingbird.” The Southern Literary Journal 32 (2): 1–26. Ibrahim, Habiba. 2021. Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life.

New York: NYU Press. Jay, Gregory S. 2015. “Queer Children and Representative Men: Harper

Lee, Racial Liberalism, and the Dilemma of To Kill a Mockingbird.”

American Literary History 27 (3): 487–522. Lee, Harper. 2010. To Kill a Mockingbird. London: Arrow Books. First published 1960. McDowell, Kelly. 2002. “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry: A Culturally Specific, Subversive Concept of Child Agency.” Children’s Literature in Education 33 (3): 213–25. Murray, Jennifer. 2010. “More Than One Way to (Mis)Read a Mockingbird.”

The Southern Literary Journal 43 (1): 75–91. Quashie, Kevin. 2021. Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being. Durham, NC:

Duke University Press. Sargent, Andrew. 2018. “To Counter a Mockingbird: Black Sacrifice, White

Heroism, and Racial Innocence in William Melvin Kelley’s A Different

Drummer.” African American Review 51 (1): 37–54. Spillers, Hortense J. 2000. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American

Grammar Book.” In The Black Feminist Reader, edited by Joy James and

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, 57–87. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Taylor, Mildred D. 1997. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. New York: Puffin.

First published 1976. Yoo, Hyun-Joo. 2018. “Rewriting American History in Roll of Thunder,

Hear My Cry: Metahistoricity, the Postcolonial Subject, and the Return of the Repressed.” Children’s Literature in Education 50 (3): 333–46.

DR. NICOLE KING was lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London until the summer of 2022 when she joined Exeter College and the Faculty of English at Oxford University as Associate Professor. She is the author of C.L.R. James and Creolization: Circles of Influence (2001) and her second monograph, Black Childhood in Modern African American Fiction, is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. She is a scholar of African American, Caribbean, and Black British literatures.