Reading: Authors

Ezra Jack Keats Broke the Color Line

 

            It's hard to imagine an America in which kiddie lit was racially segregated. But that was the way it was . . . without brown faces in children's stories very often . . . until Ezra Jack Keats (1916-1983) did what was in his heart in the 1960s.

 

He broke the color line and showed African-American children's everyday lives with beauty and grace. His simple, striking watercolor and gouache (oily watercolor) images brought sweet stories of American childhood to life.

 

He was a great children's author/illustrator . . . and he was multicultural before multicultural was cool.

 

 

            A Caucasian artist with a 1960s mentality, Keats decided to start creating children's books with African-American characters in everyday, all-American scenes. The point wasn't that they were African-American children. The point was that he didn't make a big DEAL out of the race of his characters; they just were.

 

            Believe it or not, that was daring and original in the days in which the races lived separate lives, and you just never saw black characters, much less heroes and central characters, in mainstream media.

 

So the children's stories that broke the color line made American history, and made Ezra Jack Keats one of the most beloved American children's authors of all time.

 

 

            His book, The Snowy Day, won the Caldecott Medal in 1963, the highest award in children's literature, and was named by the New York Public Library as one of the 150 most influential books of the 20^th Century.

 

 

            A sequel of sorts, Whistle For Willie, is just as engaging

 

            Keats was born to a poor Polish Jewish immigrant family, and his art talent surfaced young. Upon his father's early death, though, he turned down three art school scholarships to go to work to support his family.

 

He painted murals, illustrated comic books, and in World War II designed camouflage patterns. After the war, he studied fine art and began doing magazine covers. Then he was asked to illustrate a children's book. The rest is history.

 

            Through his career, Keats illustrated 85 children's books, and wrote and illustrated 24 more of his own.

 

            Upon his death, he decreed that his continuing book royalties should go into a charitable foundation to increase literacy, inspire creativity and love of learning, and increase children's appreciation of the arts.

 

            See: www.ezra.jack.keats.org