Today in 1940, Life Magazine published a series of photos of a little boy in Liberty County, Georgia – photos that, two decades later, would inspire one of the most famous picture books ever published.
The youngster in these photos (his name isn’t included) is waiting to take a blood test; according to the captions, the child is “carefree at first.”
As the test approaches, he has very kid-like concerns about whether the test is going to hurt.
One reader who was fascinated by the child was a young author and illustrator named Ezra Jack Keats.
He said later of the little boy, “his expressive face, his body attitudes, the very way he wore his clothes, totally captivated me.”
Keats kept the photos above his desk, and eventually decided he wanted to do a book about a child just like this.
In 1962, he did, releasing the landmark children’s book The Snowy Day.
The main character is a little boy named Peter, who acts very kid-like as he heads out to play in some newly fallen snow.
Keats won the Caldecott Medal for his inventive and richly colorful artwork, and readers were fascinated with Peter the same way Keats had been fascinated by the real-life youngster in that decades-old magazine feature.
It was also a groundbreaking book: both Peter and his counterpart in Life magazine were African-American.
In the 1960s, Black characters weren’t in many children’s books, especially ones by white authors, and when they did appear, they were often caricatures.
For many readers, this was the first time a Black protagonist was representing the entire audience.
And that struck a chord with a lot of them.
One teacher wrote to Keats to say that her Black students were choosing brown crayons to draw themselves for the first time, because they had seen themselves in Peter.
Keats also saw himself in Peter, and while he denied that he was trying to make a point about race by having a Black main character, he did write that he thought the world of picture books was changing: “Children of all colors and national origins are finding their way more easily into stories and pictures. Soon, let us hope, we shall relegate to the past the kind of books, both trade and text, in which an entire people and a great heritage have been deliberately ignored.”
This Saturday in South Bend, Indiana, it’s the Donut & Beer Festival.
The festival has been traveling around the Midwest since 2017; this year it includes more than 100 different donuts to try and over 150 beers, ciders, seltzers, etc.
Feel free to bring all that to my town one of these years.
The Enduring Footprints of Peter, Ezra Jack Keats, and The Snowy Day (The Horn Book)
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Adapted photo from Princeton Public Library via Flickr/Creative Commons
