How The Snowy Day Changed Children's Books

Episode Transcript

Leigh Fox When people ask me if there's a picture perfect picture book, I say The Snowy Day.

Virginia Marshall This is Leigh 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.

Leigh Fox All right, hello everyone!

Adwoa Adusei Storytimes can be a raucous experience on any day … and it was even more exuberant on this particular day, because the book Leigh was going to read was the show-stopping crowd pleaser: The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats.

[Sound of singing, general kid chatter.]

Leigh Fox 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 type things that happen.

Leigh Fox Has anyone read The Snowy Day before?

Kids Me! I have it at my home!

Leigh Fox When you bring it out, a lot of times you'll hear like, like that “awww.” People feel that sort of nostalgia for it.

Virginia Marshall 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.

Jane It reminds me when I like the snow too.

Joyce We read it multiple times at home. Just the collage element of it I love. I’m a former art teacher.

Adwoa Adusei 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.

Grayson I grew up in Flatbush. The Snow Day definitely brings back a lot of memories reading it during elementary school. It was just good memories.

Daphne I was so excited because I was like, my gosh, The Snowy Day. That was one of my favorite books.

Leigh Fox Can you raise your hand if you’ve been going out in the snow recently?

Kids Me!!

Adwoa Adusei It was after-school time … noisy and energetic. Then, Leigh started to read.

Leigh Fox “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.”

Virginia Marshall 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 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 goes to bed.

Adwoa Adusei That’s just about it … the whole story. It’s very simple.

Virginia Marshall But the story behind The Snowy Day … is not as straightforward.

Adwoa Adusei Over time, the 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.

Virginia Marshall 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.

Adwoa Adusei 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 they love, and we’re still reminding each other that the characters kids see in those books really does matter.

Virginia Marshall 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.

Adwoa Adusei And I’m Adwoa Adusei, 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.

[Theme music out]

Adwoa Adusei 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 white.

Virginia Marshall Yeah, people are still surprised about that. Ezra Jack Keats was born Jacob Ezra Katz to Jewish immigrant parents in East New York, Brooklyn in 1916. If you listened 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!

Adwoa Adusei 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.

Deborah Pope Ezra and my father were boyhood friends and lifelong friends. He died holding my dad's hand. They were very close.

[Music]

Deborah Pope 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.

Adwoa Adusei Later, when Ezra started illustrating children’s books, you can see that love of color come through in his settings – particularly the setting for The Snowy Day.

Deborah Pope 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 was color everywhere.

Adwoa Adusei 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 camouflage.

Virginia Marshall 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.

Adwoa Adusei 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.

Deborah Pope He had seen a series of pictures of a little boy, a little African-American boy. Who was getting a blood test. The boy starts out just sunshine and happy. And during the course of these 4 or 5 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 the little boy in that series is of course, the boy was Peter.

Virginia Marshall The fact that Peter was a Black child made quite an impression on readers. In countless interviews after the book came out, Ezra had to answer questions about it. Here he is during a panel discussion at the Free Library of Philadelphia in 1969.

Ezra Jack Keats 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, it was the 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 oughta be.

[Music]

Virginia Marshall 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. One of the most striking examples is a book from the late 1800s that has the n-word in the title. We're going to hear an African-American children’s book scholar talk about it in a minute, but before we do, we wanted to say a bit more about the weight of that particular word.

Adwoa Adusei This reminds of a short poem by Harlem Renaissance poet, Countee Cullen called “The Incident.” I actually recited it in the 5th 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.

Virginia Marshall That's what we're trying to talk about in this episode, the idea that representation – and words – matter. If it's a positive representation, in the case of The Snowy Day and countless other wonderful kids’ books … that memory will stick with a kid. And if it's a negative representation like so many of the books about African American kids that came before, that sticks with a person, too, and shapes them.

[Music]

Dianne Johnson-Feelings In general, the mainstream depictions of African American children were very, very negative.

Virginia Marshall This is Dianne 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.

Dianne Johnson-Feelings 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 his self 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.

Adwoa Adusei 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 WEB DuBois was one of its editors.

Dianne Johnson-Feelings 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.

Adwoa Adusei 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 link to it in our show notes.

Dianne Johnson-Feelings When it came to stand-alone 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 Larrick analyzed thousands of kids books published between 1962 and 1964.

Adwoa Adusei 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 the United States or before World War II … which meant that less than one percent of the children’s books published in the US from 1962 to 1964 were about contemporary African Americans. // And one of those books was The Snowy Day.

Deborah Pope What was unique or outstanding about it was that it opened the door to more diversity in American mainstream children's book publishing.

Virginia Marshall Deborah Pope again.

Deborah Pope It was embraced across all ethnic and social and economic boundaries. Everybody bought it. And so publishers said, oh, there's a market here.

Virginia Marshall 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.

Deborah Pope Some of the leading authors and illustrators of children's books today say, “I was Peter.” Bryan Collier. Lawrence Fishburn. There are women with whom I worked who say, “I was Peter. It meant everything to me.” 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.”

[Music]

Virginia Marshall Part of the reason 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.

Adwoa Adusei It was a big time for radical books, too – you can see evidence of that in our series! We 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 ground-breaking environmental book by Rachel Carson, which – like The Snowy Day – came out in 1962.

Virginia Marshall 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 see ourselves and our nation when they came out, and are 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.

Dianne Johnson-Feelings 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.

Adwoa Adusei 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?

Virginia Marshall 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 people, as well as Asian, Indigenous, Arab, Latinx, and Pacific Islander creators and subjects. In 2018, children’s book scholars crunched the data and found that of the over 3000 kids books published that year, 10 percent featured Black characters, 7 percent Asian and Pacific Islander characters, 5 percent Latinx and 1 percent Indigenous characters. That’s compared to over 50 percent that featured white characters, and 27 percent featuring animals or other non-human characters.

Adwoa Adusei That’s more non-human characters than characters of color. 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.

Virginia Marshall That being said, another important piece of this publishing and visibility machine is awards. When a children’s book wins an award, it gets added to school libraries and placed at the front of book shop displays.

Adwoa Adusei 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.

Deborah Pope The instructions that he left for the foundation were: do good. And so, “do good” is open to a lot of interpretation.

Virginia Marshall 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 book-making 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.

Meg Medina The Ezra jack Keats Award for me changed everything.

Adwoa Adusei This is Meg 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.

Meg Medina 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 car?

Adwoa Adusei The book that won her the award was called Tía Isa Wants a Car. It’s based on the story of Medina’s own aunt who emigrated from Cuba to New York City in the 1960s. She left her family behind to start a new life here.

Meg Medina I wrote this story that felt deeply personal for me, but that also spoke to Latine 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. So that's the story. And, you know, kids enjoy it because the car is just fabulous, right?

Virginia Marshall 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 the story.

Meg Medina What I love about it today when I look at 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 and opens it up to also include kids of color, a Black child. So often people want the story of the immigrant child, the Black child, the marginalized child to be one of suffering and redemption. And those stories matter. But there's also ordinary joy that is alive in all of us. And that has to be captured and celebrated also.

Matt de la Peña 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.

Adwoa Adusei This is Matt de la Peña. 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 Peña said that The Snowy Day was a kind of touchstone for him as he was writing.

Matt de la Peña 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.

Virginia Marshall One of his picture books, Last Stop on Market Street, is the simple story of a boy on a bus with his grandmother. Illustrated by Christian Robinson, and the boy, CJ, is a little Black kid not unlike Peter in the Snowy Day: 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 Peña won the Newbery Medal, which made him the first Hispanic writer to win that award.

Adwoa Adusei 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.

Matt de la Peña I also went into the story knowing that I was exploring a version of Christian's own childhood. He grew up with an incarcerated mother, and he would visit her sometimes and he was ready to share that story. So when I went to write the story, I had to just take this template of a boy going to visit his incarcerated mother. And I said, okay, well, what am I gonna do to the story? Some kids are going to come into this book knowing nothing about, you know, the criminal justice system in America and all the problems there. And they're just going to focus on Milo making pictures on the bus of the people around it. So that's an entry point.

Adwoa Adusei 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 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.

Virginia Marshall 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.

Adwoa Adusei Last year, Milo Imagines the World was among the top ten 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 first title, a Young Adult book called Mexican White Boy.

Matt de la Peña It was pulled from a curriculum in Arizona, you know, because it was a book that explored a Mexican character and talked about race. So when my experience with Milo Imagines the World came along and I found out I was getting challenged and pulled from schools. I thought for sure, okay, I know what it's going to be. It's going to be a critical race theory conversation. Then, when I found out why I was being pulled … it's because there's a same sex couple in Milo's imagination. When I found out it was that, I just felt so sad for the people who are challenging it, because it's so silly. It's just a, it's a quick thought, a possibility that enters Milo's head, which to me is 100 percent valid and even beautiful.

Virginia Marshall 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. And it 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.

Adwoa Adusei The stories of Milo and CJ and Tia Isa and Peter show us that the people we draw into our children’s books speak volumes. The fact that they are there in our books is, unfortunately, still political. Here’s Meg Medina again.

Meg Medina I think The Snowy Day continues to change America. I think 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 joy? He made a simple, beautiful, impactful decision in who Peter was. Peter has lasted all these years. And we look to Peter in so many ways, right? As the guiding star. All kids have this longing for joy, have ordinary days. We need to capture that. That’s worth celebrating.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei Special thanks to Dianne Johnson-Feelings, Meg Medina and Matt de la Peña 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 Peña as bonus episodes over the next two weeks.

Virginia Marshall And there are so many amazing kids books you should read – not just The Snowy Day! We created a book list with all of the titles mentioned on this episode, and more. Check that out in our show notes.

Adwoa Adusei 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.

[Music]

Virginia Marshall Borrowed and Returned is a production of Brooklyn Public Library. It’s written and produced by me, Virginia Marshall, and co-hosted with Adwoa Adusei. You can read a transcript of this episode and our show notes at BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] podcasts.  

Adwoa Adusei Brooklyn Public 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 [dot] org [slash] donate. Our Borrowed advisory team is made up of Nick Higgins, Fritzi Bodenheimer, Robin Lester Kenton, and Damaris Olivo. Jennifer Proffitt and Ashley Gill run our social media. Laurie Elvove designed our logo. 

Virginia Marshall That’s it for this episode. Until next time… keep re-reading.