JENN McKINLAY: Today marks the start of Black History Month. Having been a public librarian for twenty years, this was always a glorious month for book displays. An opportunity to showcase stories and history and unsung heroes, well, as you can imagine, it gets librarians all in a fizz. So much to highlight and share and only one month to do it! Ack!
Recently, publishing has come to realize that authors of color are woefully underrepresented and they've stepped up their game to be much more inclusive and supportive. This is such a huge win for readers! I am just thrilled that we will have so many amazingly diverse stories available to us now.
It also made me think back on the books I read as a child of the 70's/80's and I was trying to remember the first book I read by an author of color - beyond the picture books I loved such as The Snowy Day by Jack Ezra Keats. Sadly, it took me awhile to pin it down.
I was a freshman in high school and I chose to write a paper about I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. I remember falling love with her use of language and thinking that my own rough and tumble beginnings would make me strong and possibly a storyteller -- like her. This is one of my favorite quotes:
So, what about you Reds? Who is the first author of color that you remember reading?
HALLIE EPHRON: Great question. The first ones I remember were James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Also, assigned pre-college reading: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The first book by a woman of color took longer - the one I remember is THE COLOR PURPLE by Alice Walker. Shocking that it took so long.
RHYS BOWEN: Gosh, I’m trying to remember. My childhood reading was certainly confined to white writers only. There were writers of Indian descent in England but not any of African that I knew about. The first time I was conscious of a black writer was reading the autobiography of Frederick Douglass and being blown away by his eloquence, a man who grew up as a slave! It wasn’t until well into adulthood that I discovered Maya Angelou and she immediately became one of my favorite poets.
HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, I had to think about this, too. The first? I had to look up the exact words, but we did read the poetry of Langston Hughes. When I googled, I remembered the poem “I, too” which includes “Tomorrow / I’ll be at the table / When company comes. / Nobody’ll dare / Say to me, / “Eat in the kitchen. It ends with “I, too, am America.”
Langston Hughes
Of course we read Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Ellison’s Invisible Man. And at some point, James Baldwin’s essays The Fire Next Time. But when, and the first one? That is such a good question. (And I’d love to hear how we talked about them. Possibly pretty cringe-worthy.)
LUCY BURDETTE: cringe worthy is what I am thinking as well, Hank. I really can’t remember reading a single book from a black author. Maybe there were some in my mind has let them go, but it’s possible there weren’t. I wasn’t good at reading books that I hadn’t chosen, and I suppose that hasn’t changed one bit!
DEBORAH CROMBIE: The first thing I thought of was John Howard Griffin’s BLACK LIKE ME, published in 1961. Of course, Griffin WASN’T black. He was a white novelist from Texas who dyed his skin and traveled through the segregated south. Griffin might have eventually come to see his book as cultural appropriation--he wrote some years later that it was “absurd for a white man to presume to speak for black people when they have superlative voices of their own,” but it is still a remarkable document and had a powerful effect on me as young teen. Here’s a link to a 2011 piece in Smithsonian: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/black-like-me-50-years-later-74543463/
I later read James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, and then Maya Angelou and Alice Walker, of course, but it was the Griffin book that really opened my eyes to segregation for the first time.
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I couldn't recall the name of the first African-American author I read, but I remember the novel, so I went looking: CONTENDING FORCES by Pauline Hopkins (who, it turns out, was born in Portland, Maine!)
My grandmother ran an antique/vintage/junk shop out of her enormous 19th century barn. One of the former box stalls was completely lines on three sides by old books, and during my 12th, 13th and 14th summers I read through most of them. I loved the over-the-top romantic drama of the late 19th/early 20th century women's novels, and Pauline Hopkins was a great example of the genre. There were terrible villains, mistaken identities, at least two women who are supposed to have died but show up later, and lots of romance.
And the whole thing is about several generations of a Black family in the south and the north. It's only thinking back on it now that I realize Hopkins must have been using the popular commercial conventions of the day to educate white readers on Black life and to create understanding and empathy around the prejudices prevalent then... and unfortunately, still with us today.
So, what about you Readers? Who is the first author of color that you remember reading?
For more reading recommendations (sorry, librarian!) here's a list of favorite Black authors from the African American Literature Book Club: https://aalbc.com/authors/top50authors.php?
