So I had never heard about Florence Mills. I did not know about her until I was having a conversation with my editor and I was saying, I’d love to do maybe a picture book about a black woman activist or something that maybe is a little unsung unknown. And she was like, oh, I have the perfect person for you. I just read this book about Florence Mills. And I was like, who? And so she gave me this book that was, I mean like an encyclopedia, a very thick, very adult, very dry book. And I was like, this is overwhelming for me as an adultery. How am I going to distill this to a picture book? And thank God for the Schomburg Center in Harlem in New York City.
They have collections where families have donated or given the papers of their loved ones to the Schomberg Center, so you can go, it’s a research library, and they have a collection on Florence Mill. So I got to go and read letters and see her passport and just her play bills, things that were her original works. And then I got a little bit more of what her story was. And so because of my editor, I was thinking about, yeah, I think I can do this. And I did a lot of research at the Schomberg Center, and I really wanted to focus on this idea of how else can we show up in the world and bring change? Do we have to be an activist that makes speeches? Do we have to march and protest? Are those the only ways to be involved in bringing change? No. Right?
So Florence, even as a child, had a very, she was very strong and very opinionated about justice and what was fair. Young people understand those words. Fairness, cooperation, love, family. So she was a child when she stood up to white manager who refused to let her friends in, she’s performing. She is opening up the night and she brings her friends and family with her and they won’t let them in because it is a white only space. And she is like, well, if they can’t come in, then I’m not coming in. I’m not singing if they can’t be in here with me. She was a child when she did this. And that just motivated me so much to get her story out that she was using her actual voice of singing to bring change. A lot of her songs were about change, but also her actual voice and standing up to people to fight for what was right and that she wasn’t waiting until she was a grown adult to do that.
So I just felt like, yeah, there’s a story there for young people to see how can they also stand up for what’s right in small and in big ways? And so I loved working on the, it was hard. Picture books are the hardest thing to write. You’re telling this huge story in the less amount of words. And I’m always thinking of, well, what does the child care about versus what does the adult care about? And so this idea of her voice being powerful and being able to change the world was the thing that I tried to keep coming back to. And then encouraging young people to find their voices and change the world.