ABSTRACT
“My career as a writer began when I was teaching music and special-education classes in Harlem; my first book, Diary of a Harlem Schoolteacher, was a result of my experiences. So were my first books for young adults. It was the 1960s, and there were very few books on the events of that tumultuous decade written on my students’ level. I believe that the same void in literature for Black children continues to this day; and to this day I continue to write such books. Another void I see in literature for Black children is biographies of undeservedly obscure Black people in history; every year, more biographies are published about Mary McLeod Bethune, George Washington Carver, and Booker T. Washington, but where are the biographies of Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin?
