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- [00:02]
A
What we've got for you today is a feed drop. It's an episode of the New York Public Library's podcast series Borrowed and Returned that examines what our reading public, that's the New York Public Library's reading public, borrowed in the past and what they're reading now. In conversations with library workers, authors and readers across the country, they go and return to the books that changed us, changed America, too. This episode is about the snowy day we. It wasn't the first picture book to feature a black child as its protagonist, but it might be the most visible. When it came out in 1962, it challenged the publishing industry to champion books that depict kids of color. Today, we find ourselves a moment not so different from the one Ezra Jack Keats was when he sat down to create the Snowy Day. Here we are once again fighting for the right to let kids read the books they love, and we're still reminding each other that the characters kids see in those books really matters. So here's Borrowed and Returned from the New York Public Library. Enjoy.
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B
Snowy Day is one of those books that when people ask me if there's a perfect picture book, then I say, it's the snowy day.
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C
This is Lee Fox, a children's librarian at Brooklyn Public Library. We met up with her earlier this year on an actual snowy day in Brooklyn right before she was going to host a story time.
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B
All right, hello everyone.
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D
Story times can be a raucous experience on any day. And it was even more exuberant on this particular day because the book Lee was going to read was the Show Stopping Crowd, the Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats.
- [01:39]
B
It's sort of a perfect length of a book, so it can work well with really young children up to, you know, older school aged kids. There's fun noises in the book. There's fun, like tactile types, things that happen. Has anyone read the Snowy Day before me?
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D
I have a dandelion.
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B
Oh. When you bring it out, a lot of times you'll hear like, ah.
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C
Like.
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B
Because people feel that sort of nostalgia for it.
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C
Children and their caregivers filed into the library's programming room. Toddlers transitioned from strollers to the colorful rug and babies gurgled on parents laps. I talked with a little girl named Jane who was there with her mom, Joyce. It reminds me when I like the snow too. We read it multiple times at home.
- [02:28]
D
Just the collage element of it I really love. I'm a former art teacher and it wasn't just the parents and kids who loved the book. Teenagers remembered reading it too. Here's Grayson and Daphne, both teen interns at bpl.
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E
I grew up in Flatbush.
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F
The Snowy Day definitely brings back a lot of memories. Reading it during elementary school, it was just good memories.
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B
I was so excited because I was like, oh my gosh, the Snowy Day. That was one of my favorite books. Can you raise your hand if you've been going out in the side in the snow recently? I want inside.
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D
Yeah. I was after school time, noisy and energetic. Then Lee started to read.
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B
One winter morning, Peter woke up and looked out the window. Snow had fallen during the night. It covered everything as far as he could see.
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C
The Snowy Day is about an African American boy named Peter who wakes up to see his city block transformed by snow. He dons his now iconic red snow suit, the one with the pointy hat, and he walks in the snow. He makes snow angels, he puts a snowball in his pocket, and then he goes to bed.
- [03:38]
D
That's just about it. The whole story, it's very simple.
- [03:42]
C
But the story behind the Snowy Day is not as straightforward.
- [03:48]
D
Over time, this book has come to represent a shift in children's book publishing because when it came out, it challenged the industry to champion books that depict kids of color. The Snowy Day wasn't the first picture book to feature a black child as its beloved protagonist, but it might be the most visible.
- [04:07]
C
The Snowy Day has won a bunch of awards, including a Caldecott Medal, which is one of the highest honors in children's book publishing. The art from the book has been featured on a US Postage stamp and New York Public Library's library card, where the Snowy Day was NYPL's most checked out book of all time.
- [04:24]
D
The book is coming back to us now because we find ourselves in a moment not so different from the one Ezra Jack Keats was in when he sat down to create the Snowy Day in 1962. We are once again fighting for the right to let kids read the books that they love. And we're still reminding each other that the characters kids see in those books really does matter.
- [04:46]
C
So this episode, we're asking how the Snowy Day changed children's book publishing and whether that change really stuck. I'm Virginia Marshall, audio producer at Brooklyn Public Library.
- [04:57]
D
And I'm Adjwa Adouseh, managing librarian at BPL's Library for Arts and Culture. You're listening to Borrowed and Returned Revisiting the books that Changed Us and changed America Too. Because Peter is so notable for being one of the first black kids in a mainstream American children's Book people are often surprised to learn that his creator, Ezra Jack Keats, was.
- [05:29]
C
Yeah, people are still surprised about that. Ezra Jack Keats was actually born Jacob Ezra Katz to Jewish immigrant parents in East New York, Brooklyn, in 1916. And if you listen to our last episode about Howard Zinn, you might recall that Zinn had a similar background. In fact, both Keats and Zinn attended Thomas Jefferson High School just six years apart.
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D
What can we say? We love a Brooklyn story. And in order to tell this one, we asked Deborah Pope, executive director of the Ezra Jack Keats foundation, to help us out. Here she is.
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G
Ezra and my father were boyhood friends and lifelong friends. He died holding my dad's hand. They were very close. They met when my father was 12 and Ezra was 14. They both flunked algebra, and so they met in summer school and my dad helped Ezra with math, and Ezra taught my father about color and about seeing the world and seeing art in a different way. For Ezra, color was an emotional and physical sensation. It gave him incredible joy. And so his memories of his childhood, the neighborhood was full of color clotheslines and store signs and trucks and vendors.
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D
Later, when Ezra started illustrating children's books, you can see that love of color come through in his setting, particularly the setting for the snowy day.
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G
It definitely looks like East New York, but the way East New York would look to a child. In other words, it's home. It's a thriving community with people who knew you, and there's color everywhere.
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D
After graduating high school, Ezra held a variety of jobs in the arts. He painted murals with the WPA during the Great Depression and was drafted into the Second World War, where he designed camo.
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C
After the war, he started illustrating children's books for other writers and even co wrote a book about a Puerto Rican kid in New York City who loses his dog and gets help from kids all across Manhattan, from Chinatown to Harlem.
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D
But the opportunity to write and illustrate his own book for kids didn't come until 1962. By that time, Ezra knew what kind of character he wanted to write.
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G
He had seen a series of pictures of a little boy, little African American boy who was getting a blood test. The boy starts out just sunshine and happy, and during the course of these four or five pictures, he's poked with a needle and he looks at the camera. Why did you do that to me? It's a wonderful series. It's an emotional story. He cut that out in the early 1940s and kept it with him. And of course, the little boy in that series is, of course, the boy was Peter.
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C
The fact that Peter is a black child made quite an impression on readers when it first came out. In countless interviews, Keats had to answer questions about it. Here he is during a panel discussion at the Free Library of Philadelphia in 1969.
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H
I deal with universal themes. However, I selected to use black and Puerto Rican children. At the time I did my first books was because at that time, there were no, or almost no books where the heroes were black or Puerto Rican. And in the Snowy Day, there was a first full color picture book where the hero is black and he doesn't appear through the courtesy of other people. He's there on his own because he ought to be.
- [09:17]
C
This idea that Peter appears as himself on his own and not through the courtesy of other people is crucial because there's a long history of racism when it comes to American children's books. And one of the most striking examples is a book from the late 1800s that has the N word in the title. So we're going to hear an African American children's book scholar talk about it in a minute, and you will hear the N word. But before we do, we wanted to give a little bit more context about the weight of that particular word.
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D
This reminds me, actually, of a short poem by Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen called the Incident. I actually recited it in the fifth grade, and it still sticks with me today. Published in 1925, it's from the perspective of an adult speaking of a racist incident in his childhood that blighted any other memory of joy during that period. The N word is used in that poem as well, demonstrating how strong and powerful words are in memory making and identity forming, especially for young children.
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C
Yeah. And just thinking about saying that in front of a classroom, that sounds pretty wild.
- [10:23]
D
Yeah, it was.
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C
And that's actually what we're trying to talk about in this episode, that. That idea that representation and words matter, you know, if there's a positive representation, as in the case of the Snowy Day and countless other amazing children's books, that memory sticks with a kid. And if it's negative, like so many of the books about African American kids that came before, that sticks with a person, too.
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F
In general, the mainstream depictions of African American children were very, very negative.
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C
This is Diane Johnson Feelings. She's a professor of English at the University of South Carolina, where she studies the history of African American children's books. She also writes her own children's books under the name Dinah Johnson.
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F
So going back into the 1800s and the early 1900s, there was a book called Ten Little Niggers. So it starts like Ten Little Niggers went out to dine. One choked itself, and then there were nine. And it keeps going until, poof, all black people have disappeared. So it was this white fantasy of a world without people of African descent. So black creators in the United States have been struggling against those kinds of stereotypical depictions for a very long time.
- [11:48]
D
One of the first positive illustrated stories for and about black children appeared in a magazine in 1920. It was called the Brownies Book, and W.E.B. dubois was one of its editors.
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F
And it was aimed mainly at the children of members of the NAACP. So it served as the children's counterpart to the NAACP's Crisis magazine. Their working model was to highlight the writing and the art of black creators. It was a place where people like the young Langston Hughes and other names that all of us would recognize started their publishing lives.
- [12:32]
D
The magazine lasted just about two years, but it was well loved. You can read archival digital copies at the Library of Congress website. We'll put a link to it in our show Notes.
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C
When it came to standalone picture books, though, the publishing industry had a long road ahead in terms of positive depictions of black children. In an article titled the all white world of children's books, published in 1965, editor and educator Nancy Lerick analyzed thousands of kids books published between 1962 and 1964.
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D
Of the 5,206 books from major publishers, only 349 included one or more black people in illustrations. Of those, more than half took place outside of the United States or before World War II, which meant that less than 1% of the children's book published in the US from 1962 to 1964 were about contemporary African Americans. And one of those books was was the Snowy Day.
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G
What was unique or outstanding about it was that it opened the door to more diversity in American mainstream children's book publishing.
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C
Deborah Pope Again, it was embraced across.
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G
All ethnic and social and economic boundaries. Everybody bought it. And so publishers said, oh, there's a market here.
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C
Because it was so popular, the Snowy Day had the chance to get into the hands of kids who most needed to see themselves on the page.
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G
Some of the leading authors and illustrators of children's books today say, I was Peter. Brian Collier, Laurence Fishburne. There are women with whom I worked who say, I was Peter. In his acceptance speech for the National Book Award, Sherman Alexie got up and he said, first I have to thank Ezra Jack Keats, because if I hadn't read that book I wouldn't have known that I had a place in that world.
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C
Part of the reason that the Snowy Day made such a splash is that it came out in the midst of the civil rights movement, when activists were making the case that literacy and civil liberties went hand in hand. In the 1960s, there were sit ins happening at public libraries to desegregate them, and students of color were showing up at all white schools to demand a better education.
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D
It was a big time for radical books, too. You can see evidence of that in our series. We've talked about the Autobiography of Malcolm X in our second episode that was published in 1965. And in a later episode, we'll feature Silent Spring, the groundbreaking environmental book by Rachel Carson, which, like the Snowy Day, came out in 1962.
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C
Yeah, and it's no accident that these books of the 60s are rising to the top of our list. Right. They challenged the way we saw ourselves and our nation when they came out, and they're still challenging us today. They force the question, have we really come that far? And what other stories are we leaving out? Here's Dr. Johnson feelings again.
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F
So at the same time, during this era, there were so many African American writers and illustrators working to open the doors into publishing. That included Wade and Cheryl Hudson, who are pioneers with their publishing company, Just Us Books, which is important to this day. There was Tom Feelings, who was the first African American to win the Caldecott honor for his illustrations of children's books. There was George Ford and many, many others. So forces just started bubbling up from every quarter, leading to opening up the world of publishing to black creators of children's books.
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D
So writers and illustrators of color were working at the same time as Keats, but it took several more years for them to receive similar attention from the industry. In fact, Tom Feelings won the Caldecott honor only in 1972. That begs the question, has the publishing industry changed since that time? Not only more books featuring positive stories about black kids, but books written and illustrated by black creators?
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C
The answer is yes, and we still have work to do. The Cooperative Children's Book center collects data every year on the numbers of kids books written by and about black characters, as well as Asian, indigenous, Arab, Latinx, and Pacific Islander creators and subjects. And in 2018, children's book scholars crunched the data and found that of the over 3,000 kids books published that year, 10% featured Black characters, 7% Asian and Pacific Islander characters, 5% Latinx, and 1% Indigenous characters. And that's compared to over 50% that featured white characters and 27% featuring animals or other non human characters.
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D
That's more non human characters than characters of color. Yeah, there are whole podcasts and dissertations and think pieces about the reasons why we can't seem to do better than that. A lot of it has to do with the editors and publishers themselves being mostly white. Also, teachers and library workers are often the strongest supporters of books about diverse kids. So when we see cuts to education and public libraries, the people who get those diverse books to kids who need them can't do their jobs right.
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C
And that being said, though, another important piece of this publishing and visibility machine is awards. So when a children's book wins an award, it gets added to school libraries and placed at the front of bookshop displays.
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D
True. And there are a lot of awards for kids books, and some for diverse kids books in particular. One of the most famous is the Coretta Scott King Award for African American creators of children's books. And another one is the Ezra Jack Keats Award, which is for debut picture books by writers and illustrators of color. That award is run by the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation. Here's Deborah Pope again.
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G
The instructions that he left for the foundation were do good. And so do good is open to a lot of interpretation.
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C
The trustees of the foundation decided to invest in education and books for kids. They set up grant programs for public schools and public libraries. There's even a yearly bookmaking competition for kids in New York City with winners displayed here at Brooklyn Public Library. So we mean it literally when we say that the Snowy Day and Ezra's success has impacted children's book publishing, beginning with the Ezra Jack Keats Award.
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I
The Ezra Jack Keats Award for me, changed everything.
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D
This is Mag Medina. She's a writer of books for teens and kids. And last year, she was the national Ambassador for Young People's Literature at the Library of Congress. But before all of that, way back in 2012, she won the Ezra Jack Keats Award for her first picture book.
- [19:32]
I
It's very hard in the beginning to feel like you're going to be seen somewhere, right? For me, it was especially daunting because did anybody want to read about this family that wanted to buy their first family?
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D
The book that won her the award was called Tia Isa Wants a Car. It's based on the story of Medina's own aunt who immigrated from Cuba to New York city in the 1960s. She left her family behind to start a new life here.
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I
I wrote this story that felt deeply personal for me, but that also spoke to Latin kids right now who may be separated from their families and have families far away and who have lots of different longings. There's financial longing and emotional longing for people you miss and a longing for power, agency over yourself, driving yourself wherever you want to go. That's the story. And, you know, kids enjoy it because the car is just fabulous, right?
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C
As with so many beloved children's books, the story is really simple. Tia Isa wants independence and a car, and she saves up to buy one of her own. Meg Medina said she was inspired by books like the Snowy Day when she wrote her story.
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I
What I love about it is just the fabulous audacity of Ezra Jack Keats writing the ordinary happiness of this little boy on a snowy day. I love it. He captures the joy of childhood, opens it up to also include kids of color. A black child. You know, so often people want the story of the immigrant child, the black child, the marginalized child, to be one of suffering and get, you know, redemption. And those stories matter. And there are many pieces of that experience that have to be captured and told, but there's also ordinary joy that is alive in all of us and that has to be captured and celebrated also.
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E
The genius of the Snowy Day is it's not about race. Even though the story around the book became about race because it was a first, it was a seminal book in mainstream publishing.
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D
This is Matt de la Pena. He's written YA books and several picture books for kids, two of which with the illustrator Christian Robinson, whose art won him an Ezra Jack keats Award in 2014. Matt de la Pena said that Snowy Day was a kind of touchstone for him as he was writing.
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E
Honestly, I think that's why the book is so enduring, is because it's not pedantic. It's not trying to teach a lesson or trying to, like, pull on our moral heartstrings. It's just a story, and the character happens to be a race that isn't represented in books.
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C
One of de la Pena's picture books, Last Stop on Market street, is the simple story of a boy on a bus with his grandmother. It's illustrated by Christian Robinson, and the boy, C.J. is a little black kid, not unlike Peter in the Snowy Day. And both Ezra Jack Keats and Christian Robinson used a colorful collage style to depict their main characters. Last Stop on Market street won Robinson the Coretta Scott King illustrator honor. And Matt de La Pena won the Newbery Medal, which made him the first Hispanic writer to win that award.
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D
The book was so successful that the Pair decided to write another for their second book called Milo Imagines the World. They wanted to write a story closer to home.
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E
I also went into the story knowing that I was exploring a version of Christian's own childhood, which is he grew up with an incarcerated mother and he would visit her sometimes. So and he was ready to share that story. And so when I went to write the story, I had to just take this template of boy going to visit incarcerated mother and I said, okay, well what am I going to do to the story? Some kids are going to come in to this book knowing nothing about, you know, the criminal justice system in America and they're just going to focus on Milo making pictures on the bus of the people around him. So that's an entry point.
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D
Like Last stop on Market Street. Milo imagines the world is very simple. A little black boy named Milo rides the subway with his sister. They're going to visit their mom. And along the way Milo draws the people he sees and imagines the their lives. It's not pedantic, it's not even trying to say too much about visiting a prison. The fact that their mother is incarcerated is only something you see in the pictures, not the text.
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C
It's a really beautiful book that challenges readers assumptions about different kinds of people. But recently the book has been making headlines for reasons outside of the story.
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D
Last year, Milo Imagines the World with among the top 10 most banned picture books in public schools according to Pen America. Unfortunately, this wasn't Matt's first time having one of his books banned. It happened with his young adult book called Mexican White Boy.
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E
It was pulled from a curriculum in Arizona because it was a book that explored a Mexican character and talked about race. So when my experience with Milo Imagines World came along and I found out I was getting challenged and pulled from, you know, schools, I thought for sure, okay, I know what it's going to be. It's going to be a critical race theory conversation. But then when I found out why I was being pulled, it's because there's a same sex couple in Milo's imagination. At first he sees a wedding dressed woman on the train and he imagines her going off to get married to a man. And that's his initial premise. But then later on in the book when he's rethinking or reimagining all these pictures he drew and he's thinking what could be the furthest from my original idea? Maybe he had it all wrong who she was going off to marry and it's two women in dress, wedding gowns. When I found out it was that, I just felt so sad for the people that. Who are challenging it because it's just a. It's a quick thought, a possibility that enters Milo's head, which to me is 100% valid and even beautiful.
- [26:13]
C
The idea that a book could be banned for what one little boy imagines in his head, in pictures and not even words, it's pretty shocking. It just this goes to show that even the suggestion of difference, even a drawing of someone living their joy, is enough to get a book pulled off the shelves. That's the world we're living in.
- [26:35]
D
The stories of Milo and CJ and Tia, ESA and Peter show us that the characters we draw into our children's books speak volumes. The fact that they are there in our books at all is unfortunately still political. Here's Mag Medina again.
- [26:51]
I
I think A Snowy Day continues to change America. I think we, we come back to this book again and again with the same question, which is why can't we celebrate the ordinary joys? Everyone's ordinary joys. I think that was just part of the genius. He made a sense, simple, beautiful, impactful decision in who Peter was. And Peter has lasted all these years. And we look to Peter in so many ways, right as the guiding star there. Like kids, all kids have, have this longing for joy, have ordinary days like we need to capture that. That's worth celebrating.
- [27:45]
D
Special thanks to Dr. Diane Johnson Feelings, Meg Medina and Matt De la Pena for speaking with us for this episode. There was so much in our conversations that we couldn't fit here, so we'll be sharing our full interviews with Meg Medina and Matt De La Pena as bonus episodes over the next two weeks.
- [28:03]
C
And there are so many amazing kids books that you should read, not just the Snowy Day. We created a book list with all of the titles mentioned in this episode and more, so check that out in our show notes.
- [28:14]
D
Our next episode will be about Maus by Art Spiegelman and on September 10th, Art Spiegelman himself is coming to BPL's Central Library for a talk so you can come see him in person. We'll have information about that on our website.
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C
Borrowed and Returned is the production of Brooklyn Public Library. It's written and produced by me, Virginia Marshall and co hosted with Adra Adouse. You can read a transcript of this episode and our show notes with all of our Great links@bklynlibrary.org Podcasts Brooklyn Public.
- [28:48]
D
Library relies on the support of individuals for many of its most critical programs and services. To make a gift, please go to Bklyn Library. Our borrowed advisory team is made up of Fritzi Boatenheimer, Nick Higgins, Robin Lester Kenton, and Damaris Oliva. Our marketing and design team for this series includes Lori Elvov, Ashley Gill, Jennifer Profitt, Lauren Rockford, and Leila Taylor.
- [29:17]
C
That's it for this episode. Until next time. Keep rereading.