PUBLISHING
Just Us for All BY KATE MOONEY ’08
ILLUSTRATION: ERIC VELASQUEZ FOR OAM
while raising their son and daughter in the late ’80s, Cheryl Willis Hudson ’70 and her husband, Wade, struggled to find children’s books that represented the young Black experience. So they decided to write their own. “As a child growing up in the Jim Crow South, I never had a textbook with a Black child used in a story or example,” says Willis Hudson. “We wanted to make sure [our kids] had nursery books that reflected their own heritage, yet we found it very difficult to get those books.” In 1987, the pair got the idea for a kid’s alphabet book called the Afro-bets ABC Book, which would feature Black children as characters and incorporate Afrocentric language to teach OBERLIN ALUMNI MAGAZINE 2021 SPRING
young readers their letters. After it was met with rejections from major publishing houses, they decided to publish the book on their own. At the time, Willis Hudson had worked in publishing for more than 15 years as an art editor for Houghton-Mifflin, where she curated a diverse selection of photographs and illustrations for kids’ textbooks. Wade was coming off a background in playwriting, public relations, and newspaper reporting. “It was kind of an epiphany: we know how to do this, so why were we asking somebody else? Let’s do it ourselves,” Willis Hudson recalls. Using a direct mail campaign, distributing the book to Black organizations, churches, daycares, and street fairs—“basically a grassroots concept that spread”—the Hudsons sold the book. They got such good feedback that they released a second one and in 1988 formed Just Us Books, a publishing house focused on books “that all kids would enjoy, but that foreground Black
children to give them experiences to tell and share their own stories,” says Willis Hudson. “It’s so important that all kids have an opportunity to see themselves in books.” Just Us has published around 100 titles, including picture books, poetry, and non-fiction that tell everyday stories for kids of color. Jamal’s Busy Day is about “a little boy who loves going to school. He happens to be a brown boy.” The Book of Black Heroes from A-Z gives kids examples of many notable Black historical figures “so not everybody is doing a report on Booker T. Washington because that’s the only biography in the library,” Willis Hudson says. Two recent titles offer guidance to kids growing up in a fraught political climate. We Rise, We Resist, We Raise Our Voices, published in 2019, is a post-election anthology of essays, poems, and letters from 50 contributors responding to the prompt, “What can you tell your children during divisive times?” Their latest book, The Talk, released in August 2020, follows in the same vein of We Rise, with stories, essays, and poems from writers and artists detailing talks with their own kids about growing up as a minority in America today. The “talk” can cover any topic, such as teaching your Black son how to keep himself safe if stopped by the police or warning your daughter about sexism. Most of all, the stories affirm to children that they are inherently worthy of love and respect, despite the prejudices they’ll face as they come of age. Based in East Orange, New Jersey, Just Us Books is a family affair, with Cheryl as editorial director, Wade as CEO, daughter Coutura as marketing director, and son Stefan as head of design. Reflecting back on their 30-some years in business, Willis Hudson says, “It is a big deal, and it’s hard, and sometimes I wonder, why did we think we could do this?” But she believes the instinct to tell one’s own stories, to create opportunities that weren’t immediately available to someone, as something “Black people have been doing for a long time, out of need and necessity and because of the way racism permeates our society and has been such a huge social construct.” “For too long, other people have been telling stories about Black people,” she says. “It’s important that we be able to share our stories from our authentic selves and from a base of our culture and our history, through the lens of our own experience.” PORTRAIT BY ERIC VELASQUEZ, ILLUSTRATOR OF WILLIS HUDSON’S 2010 BOOK MY FRIEND MAYA LOVES TO DANCE. 9