ABSTRACT
This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of my first book, Shadow and Substance: Afro-American Experience in Contemporary Children’s Fiction (1982). Published by NCTE, it was a survey of black-centered children’s books that had been published between 1965 and 1980. That study was seeded in part in my own history as an African-American child reader. Once I learned to read, I was hooked, and once I was old enough to walk downtown alone, I spent many hours in the children’s section of the public library browsing and reading whatever caught my attention. From that experience, I learned that the world of children’s books was an all-white world; I found not one child’s book in that library that featured characters who looked and lived like me. In a town full of unwritten but well-understood restrictions on jobs and housing for black people, and taken-for-granted power and privilege for whites, that was not surprising to me; that was just the way things were. It didn’t stop me from reading, but I did feel the absence. I remember devouring fairy tales, and enjoying them, but still feeling the same way as Faith Ringgold’s granddaughter, another fairy tale reader who, decades later, asked her grandmother, “Where are the African-American princesses?”
