Ezra Jack Keats

And again, me thinking economically, one of the first things I noticed my first year was there weren't a lot of books that had characters that looked like my students.

You know, unless it was like Ezra Jack Keats, there was a lot of like animals or creatures or aliens like that.

But but just had black kids in the books.

So my second month that summer after my first year teaching, I spent my summer writing books, children's books, finding pictures online of black characters to match my words.

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Which brings us to 1962, Ezra Jack Keats and his masterpiece, A Snowy Day.

One of the most important works in the history of American children's literature.

It famously won the Caldecott Medal, the highest honor an illustrator can receive.

We learned it can stem from the informational scarcity of hidden identities and insider scouting passwords, like O. Henry's The Four Million

Mm.

Comes from fierce, unyielding artistic defiance, like Beatrix Potter paying out of pocket to protect her mice rhymes, or Ezra Jack Keats forcing the industry to finally reflect true reality

And sometimes it's just about the sheer horror of a swinging pendulum hidden inside a sparkly holiday gift book, or a crude drawing of Santa standing at a urinal that sends publishers into a panic

And I thought, "Oh, that's great.

She's supporting new and upcoming writers." But then a little bit later, then when they were going through and showing some of the books, they had Ezra Jack Keats' Snowy Day.

And I was like, wait a second, that book is way older than Dolly's Imagination Library.

That wasn't a new book.

I began to s- kind of delve into her life and work with the books of William Anderson and John Miller and Pamela Smith Hill and Caroline Fraser.

So I was really hopeful to be able to pass on that love to my, um, African American and Afro-Caribbean children with that Laura series, and I think we must have read about a million times, you know, Black authors, Ezra Jack Keats, who wrote Whistle for Willie, Jerry Pinkney, I don't know if you remember, a wonderful illustrator.

He illustrated John Henry, as well as Black Cowboys, White Horses.

Mary Hoffman wrote Amazing Grace, and we've got Mafara's Beautiful Daughters by John Steptoe.