My work has been to open up contributions of the black peoples to the audience as a whole, because that at one point was closed. There was the time in 1965 when Nancy Larrack wrote her essay, the “All-White World of Children’s Books”. That shook up the field, in 1965. Jean Carl came to me earlier in the ’60s and I was working with her before that article came out. When that article came out, a group of people got together, black and white, and they formed the Coretta Scott King Award.
That award was formed to recognize the very few Blacks who were in the field at the time and to encourage publishers to open up to a recognition of what it meant to be United States. United States means people from all over the world — the only indigenous Americans are the Native Americans — everyone else has come from another country. They’ve all fed into the culture of the United States. It was very restrictive and limited. When Blacks opened the door, it’s opened to everyone. The Native American came through, people from Poland came through, people from China, people from parts of India, from Japan, from the different countries of Africa, all began to enter the field of young people’s books so that today you have a variety of backgrounds for a child to relate to.
Not only to his or her own, but to other children and other people that really make up the world and the work in that area is very rich today. You have people from all these backgrounds who are doing significant work. The artwork is so, so beautiful that you can develop your esthetic response to art through picture books.
