History now is my passion. History makes me whole, I think it makes everyone whole. But when I was a kid, I hated history, it was called social studies. It was, it was dry and boring and it was flashcard history. And it used to be people like me would say I hated history because there was no one in the history books who looked like me. While that was true, I also think had there been people in the history who didn’t look like me who were interesting, I would have been interested in history.
You know no one connected the dots. No one, it was like you must learn this, it was in the past and that was the past. But no one ever helped me understand why the past was relevant in my present. And then you know now I’m always reminding kids that MLK said we are made by history and Baldwin said history is literally present in all that we do.
What changed for me was writing history. I came into publishing as a writer for hire, doing projects that other people wanted and I did this project and that project and after I did Mom I Want to Sing, turning Vy Higginsen’s gospel musical into a young adult novel, that editor Anne Wright said I’d like to do another book with you. And I said why, what should I do? And she said well you know Jim Haskins did a book on One More River to Cross, biographies of I think ten or twelve black Americans.
She said why don’t you a book of profiles of black women and you know Jim Haskins was huge back then and I said why don’t you want Jim Haskins to do it and she said because you’re a woman, you’re a Black woman. And I did that book which turned out to be And Not Afraid to Dare. And that was a real turning point for me because I wrote about Bethune, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Mary Fields, Leontyne Price, Mother Hale. And everything I wrote about I learned in the writing, in the researching, in the doing.
And it was like an epiphany when I said my god, history is fascinating. Now I had a hint of that a few years earlier when I was doing book reviews for Black Enterprise Magazine. They only reviewed non-fiction. I’m reading about Adam Clayton Powell, I’m reading about the Civil War you know by these great historians who could also write very well. And I said oh my god, history is fascinating and it’s complicated and there are things that happened in history that if someone wrote into fiction you would say oh come on, that’s not realistic.
And so reading good non-fiction as an adult opened my eyes to how necessary history is and what it did was it inspired me to want to give to young people what I never had which is history coming alive. History engaging, history that not only gives you information but also hopefully leaves you with questions. Asking questions and wanting to know more and wondering about more.