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From 1970 until 1974, the Council on Interracial Children’s Books (CIBC) ran the Arts and Storytelling in the Streets program throughout New York City. This program involved African American and Puerto Rican artists and storytellers bringing children’s literature directly to children in the streets. This occurred amid a rise in African American children’s literature and educational upheavals in the city as local communities demanded oversight of their schools. Originating in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district in New York City, the Arts and Storytelling on the Streets program helps to underscore the interrelation between African American children’s literature and educational activism. This article examines how storytelling sessions run by authors and illustrators became extensions of African American children’s literature and educational activism in the city as Black American children’s books became key tools in a fight for a more representative and relevant education. Storytelling teams hoped to use African American children’s literature to help engage children in reading and provide a positive association with literature among local children. The Art and Storytelling program mirrored ideas and themes within African American children’s literature including Black pride, community strength, and resisting white supremacy. The program also became a key extension of the literature as the locations, storytellers, and the audiences all helped to expand upon the impact and many meanings inherent in contemporary African American children’s literature.

[...]by emphasizing that the blues had developed from African American agency and resistance, these researchers and scholars propelled the goals of the Black Power Movement-substantive desegregation, transformation of the criminal justice system, antipoverty programs, and the incorporation of black history into school curricula.1 Over the past fifty years, historians such as Peniel E. Joseph and Jeanne Theoharis have come to acknowledge the Black Power Movement as an important and legitimate development in black thought. [...]his work stands as a significant contribution to the field of folklore-including the 1980 documentary film The Land Where the Blues Began.1 Education united Worth Long's passions for folklore and activism. In defiance of the status quo in Mississippi, SNCc's Education for Liberation programs empowered locals to challenge society's established experts, make their own decisions, take action, and collaborate to overturn exploitative systems. Drawing on Baker's principles and endless strategy meetings at Highlander, sncc followed through with its promises to launch voter registration campaigns; establish the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an independent political party; and open freedom schools.3 One of Long's poems, \"Arson and Cold Lace,\" which first appeared in the 1967 Umbra Anthology, reveals how the civic ideals of the nation, to which the movement sought access, seemed hollow and empty in the face of an unsympathetic white majority's support of racial violence. On July 5, Worth Long introduced the five-piece band of bluesman Joe Willie Wilkins, which featured guitarist Houston Stackhouse, bassist Willis Kinebrew, harmonicist Sammie Lewis, and drummer Theophlies \"Fat Hurd\" Hessensha, who, \"after it was all over, stepped up to the microphone and told the crowd, 'We are just country boys who love to play the blues.

Tewkesbury talks about Julius Lester's 1994 novel And All Our Wounds Forgiven, which features as its protagonist the fictional civil rights leader John Calvin Marshall, a thinly disguised version of King because of overlapping biographical details and the play on names of Protestant Reformation leaders. Although And All Our Wounds Forgiven was published four years before Dreamer, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was well reviewed, Harris does not even mention the novel in an endnote where she lists fiction that references King.

Julius Lester, author, civil rights activist, photographer, musician, and educator who taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for more than 30 years, has died at the age of 78.

An obituary for author Julius Lester, who died on Jan 18, 2018, is presented. Lester wrote more than four dozen books, including some thirty for children, most deeply rooted in black oral tradition and history. His groundbreaking To Be a Slave, illustrated by Tom Feelings, was a 1969 Newbery Honor Book.

In 1922, the first Newbery Medal was given--the earliest significant prize honoring US children's books. Since then many awards have been established, with the goal of recognizing the best in particular areas of children's literature. Here, responses of the 10 winners, including Lynn Rae Perkins, Chris Raschka and Julius Lester, of the 2006 US children's literature award to 10 questions about their lives and work are presented.

From that survey, I concluded that three main sociocultural perspectives or stances appeared to motivate the creation of the Black-centered children's fiction of that period: 1 a view of books as a means to foster a social conscience among children of privilege, 2 a view of books as a means to figuratively assimilate African Americans into the American melting pot, 3 a view of books as a means to share stories derived from or grounded in the experience of growing up Black in America.

\"The universe is made of stories not of atoms!\" At one point, Lester discusses the three things that prepared him to be a writer: reading widely and studying art and music. [...]Kerry Mallan in her reading of two lesbian novels for adolescents advocates a method for reading texts queerly that rejects simplistic binaries by recognizing that within the \"family space\" of these novels, motherdaughter relationships, in particular, are \"complex,\" \"unorthodox,\" and \"uncanny.\" If we are to grant children agency, we need to learn to reject a view of children that describes them as \"Its\" and recognize that we can either leave the universe in disrepair or-through stories and art and music and play-do our best to repair it.

\"I'll take off my skin, will you take off yours?\" This was said by Julius Lester, author of Let's Talk About Race. I'm a believer of celebrating our differences and accepting them. It's sad to me how anyone feels the need to remind us, if nothing else, that we are the same inside. \"I'll take off my skin, will you take off yours?\"