Center for Children's Books: Always a pleasure after the pandemic.
Center for Children's Books: Has described. The Gryphon suggests both the mystery and the pleasure of story. The logo associated with the lecture was designed by Trina Schart Hyman, Caldecott and Caldecott honor winning illustrator, known in particular for her many illustrations of fairy tale and legends.
Center for Children's Books: The University of Illinois iSchool has hosted the annual Gryphon Lecture since 2005, and it features a leading scholar in the field of youth literature, media, and or culture.
Center for Children's Books: That description fits well. Today's speaker is Dr. Katherine Capshaw,
Center for Children's Books: Professor of English and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of Connecticut. Professor Kaptures research has significantly advanced understanding of African American youth, literature as well as its readers and creators. She is the author of Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks,
Center for Children's Books: of Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, and co-editor with Anna May Duane, for Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900.
Center for Children's Books: Today's lecture, which is drawn from her current work
Center for Children's Books: returns us to the inspiring, complex, and abundantly represented figure of Dr. Martin Luther King. We're so glad that she's here to deepen and enrich The Center for Children's Books' year long examination of the representation of mid-century Civil Rights Movements in children's and youth literature. Please join me in welcoming our 2024 Gryphon Speaker, Dr. Katherine Capshaw.
Center for Children's Books: Thank you. Thank you so much for coming. I really appreciate it. It's so nice post-Covid to see humans in the room. So thank you so much, and thank you to the people online as well. This is truly an honor to be a part of this distinguished series. I so much appreciate the invitation and all of the work that everyone has done to to make this happen. It is no lie to say I've been looking forward to this all year and really excited to come. So I'm just thrilled. So thank you.
Center for Children's Books: So I want to start today by saying that my own life has been shaped by the civil rights movement, and if you think about it, your lives, as well, to some degree or another, was shaped by it in terms of education and social context, etc. So I grew up in a multiracial family built through adoption in the 1970s
Center for Children's Books: with parents who are active in a variety of social justice efforts in step with the Civil Rights Movement, not the least of which was building a family as a political statement about the power of love. At this point I want to acknowledge my positionality. Excuse me.
Center for Children's Books: I'm a white woman, descended from settler colonizers. And being raised in a multicultural family, does not preclude my own biases as a white woman. My own privilege, and I want to also say that I'm in an ongoing process of learning about racial and social oppressions and aiming to develop towards anti-racist practices in my life. So I did. I grew up in the wake of the 1960s, and
Center for Children's Books: hopefully this will work.
Center for Children's Books: There we are. My family of origin would not have been possible without the Civil rights movement. I'm the oldest sister there. Our family did not look like many others, especially south of the Mason Dixon line, and we were growing up between Baltimore and Washington, DC. But the very possibility of my family was generated by the titanic shifts of the Civil Rights movement. Shifts that have deep roots in black
Center for Children's Books: activism, going back centuries, shifts that you and I continue to advance through our work, through our teaching, our community collaborations, and our imaginings of different futures.
Center for Children's Books: and that time is now. We live in, as we all know here, a precarious moment, a time in which threats to democracy are real, and the denial and ignorance of our of history is encouraged, and the need for grassroots involvement is urgent.
Center for Children's Books: okay,
Center for Children's Books: Illinois is the first state to officially ban book bans. But then, just this week, a local school board decided to ban a youth based book award process. So it's not as the legislation fixes everything as we know through the Civil Rights Movement as well.
Center for Children's Books: so I just wanted to bring that up. Our involvement must be impelled by an awareness of the continuity of the Civil Rights Movement and the investment of everyday people, along with heroes and icons like Martin Luther King, and social justice work.
Center for Children's Books: Okay, we need to know the Civil Rights Movement. We need to know this history. We need it like rocket fuel to propel our work for change.
Center for Children's Books: and I I think that the work of this center this year has been
Center for Children's Books: so wonderful in terms of the The Watsons go to Birmingham, and that this topic, the invitation to open up a conversation about civil rights, and is really quite timely. But part of our shared challenge, at this moment, in contending with the civil rights movement is its' already told status, right?
Center for Children's Books: We think we know the Civil Rights Movement. We think we know it's key players. It's key events. And where were we told about these? Where do we learn about King as the sanctified, sanitized martyr of the Civil rights movement, and Rosa Parks as
Center for Children's Books: not a trained activist, but just a tired seamstress who just spontaneously decided to take a break. We learn these myths in our schools. Nowhere is
Center for Children's Books: the Federal holiday marking Martin Luther King's birthday more consistently celebrated than by young people in educational contexts. It's in schools where this consensus memory to use Rene Romano and Lee Rayford's influential term is is forged. This term consensus memory
Center for Children's Books: refers to the collective implicit agreement in U.S. memory that the Civil Rights movement took place during a truncated period, right? Brown v. the Board of Education to MLK's death in 1968, focused on injustices happening in the South, primarily, and was propelled by heroes rather than collective grassroots action. MLK is a key figure in this
Center for Children's Books: deleterious consensus memory, and stands in as shorthand for the entire movement as Romano and Rayford described. He's been appropriated, as we all know, by a range of politicians, corporations, and he's become this kind of malleable figure for whatever ideology people want to put forth.
Center for Children's Books: So the effect of this appropriation, this denuding of detail, is the containment of King's radical politics and this transformative potential.
Center for Children's Books: Romano and Rayford say, "the image of Martin Luther King, Jr. perpetuated in collective public memory, has been effectively sterilized, made non-threatening and harmless by ignoring King's struggles against poverty, his critique of capitalism and his attack on American foreign policy.
Center for Children's Books: King is instead revered publicly for his nonviolent, integrationist rhetoric, and especially for his "I have a dream" speech with its hope that one day little white children and little black children will hold hands and be judged on the basis of their characters rather than on their skin color.
Center for Children's Books: Kevin Brunel quotes Cornell West, who calls this the "Santa Clausification," of Martin Luther King. He calls this the haloing of Martin Luther King that has happened. It renders King a holy abstraction, one that can be deployed to stave off anti-racist change
Center for Children's Books: and service to some imaginary color blindness. So isn't that a kick in the teeth? Right? He's used to halt anti-racist change. So the question for us is, what do we do with King? What do we do with consensus memory in describing the movement to an audience of young people?
Center for Children's Books: How can we disrupt the totalizing scripts that contain his radical potential and the ongoing imperative
Center for Children's Books: of the civil rights movement for us today.
Center for Children's Books: So I wanna use my time and this talk to think about the role of sequence and potentially displacing these ways of seeing King and the movement. And I'd like to open up a conversation with you. And this is totally new work, and I would love your response and your ideas. About. I want to think about the potential sequence to emphasize process and the ongoing, unfinished nature of civil rights action,
Center for Children's Books: and thinking about sequence and continuity, I'm gonna focus especially on comics. I hope you all like that. I love comics so. And I'll briefly mention children's theater as well cause I think there's something to like the visualized embodiment of figures, bodies on stage or bodies and frames, bodies in motion that might allow for the disruption of the containment of King and the movement's consensus memory.
Center for Children's Books: I don't wanna suggest, though, that all comics do this. There are some comics that really do contain him in particular iconic moments. But perhaps there's a potential in sequence that we can engage. So I'm gonna talk mostly about contemporary graphic novels.
Center for Children's Books: But let's begin a little bit earlier. So readers of John Lewis's march.
Center for Children's Books: Oh, please. You've heard. Yeah, this is pretty serious. All 3 of these are amazing. Readers of March will remember that in Book One it deliberately connects civil rights action to a comic book, "Martin Luther King and the Montgomery story."
Center for Children's Books: which was originally published in 1957. But to teach King's nonviolent protest method to a diverse audience, including young people.
Center for Children's Books: Joanna Davis McElligatt talks persuasively about the importance of this comic for movement action. She locates its readership in young audiences. She explores the anti-racist implications of generic comics representation, and analyzes the comic's emphasis on collectivity through collective language. So that's one perspective on this comic.
Center for Children's Books: another perspective is Jorge Santos, a former student of mine, and he's brilliant. He alternately emphasizes the haloing of King saying, "The cover features a stoic MLK, and his reverence rock with heavenly light cascading around his shoulders. We might think of this image as iconic in a traditionally religious sense."
Center for Children's Books: So, but they're both right. I think they're both right. The comic sanctifies king and underscores grassroots participation in the movement largely through a central character, Jones, who struggles with non violence, and get this: He owns a gun. He owns a gun, and he wants to defend his family. The very fact of a comic in 1957 depicting a black man with a gun is absolutely radical and forward thinking in many ways. So
Center for Children's Books: here he is. Here's Jones. He introduces himself both by effacing his singularity and underscoring his shared identity with the reader. "Call me Jones. My name doesn't matter, but my story is important for you as well as me. We're all caught up in it one way or another."
Center for Children's Books: So the comic thus urgently insists both on the distinctiveness of king and on the readers implication and participation in the movement, especially young people. So I wanted to begin with this landmark comic because of its influence on March the most famous series of graphic novels about the movement, but also to signal that from the beginning, 1957, we're seeing this dichotomy around King: grassroots, halo'd. Those tensions that run deep.
Center for Children's Books: this comic also allows us to understand this genre, comics, as a pathway to extending action beyond the page, a refusal of containment and urgent imperative to action for the reader. So the Montgomery story extends the sequence of pages to the embodied response of the reader in the world.
Center for Children's Books: So this is my my little tiny moment on theater. And this is something I'd love to think about more deeply with with you. And thinking about the role of embodiment and disrupting containment, especially for young people. The experimental moment of theater in the late sixties and early seventies, just after King's assassination, fascinates me because there were several plays for children at this time unpublished, but plays did happen. So, for example, Alice Childress
Center for Children's Books: had a musical, can you imagine? A musical "Young Martin Luther King, Jr." written in 1968, just after his death, toured in 69, and 70, elementary school and junior high schools in New York and Massachusetts. And as a performance it is hysterical. It is funny, it is sarcastic. It's uplifting. He's one of many people who perform it's it's just amazing, and it offers as much emphasis on other people's dreams as it does on Martin Luther King's,
Center for Children's Books: like Coretta Scott King has this great moment where she sings about wanting to become a performer, and she's a trained singer in life.
Center for Children's Books: So it it's just fantastic. And there are very few moments where King holds forth and preaches, and it's more about sort of the exchange between King and the people around him. So I found one response to this play. Playwright Don Evans said, in an interview with Childress "Even when dealing with public figures," as in this play, "she was able to write him as an ordinary man, doing extraordinary things. His emotions and fears were just those that we all face, and therefore his accomplishments become even greater."
Center for Children's Books: Is it suggestive? This is my last bit on theater. Is it suggestive that theater for young people that MLK pops up right after his assassination, but has not been taken up more broadly. Does theater introduce too many interpretive possibilities for King? Like a figure in consensus memory and want to preserve him in amber? and
Center for Children's Books: embodying King on the stage and making him mutable, might be too much of a threat to people who want to contain him. I'm not sure. I'd love to talk more about that with anybody who knows theater. So
Center for Children's Books: How to represent King, how to represent the movement? One strategy is to displace him from the center of the narrative. So, turning to comics, an urgent attention to figures other than MLK shapes the current moment. So I have. These are the books I'll be talking about today.
Center for Children's Books: Tracy Baptiste and Shauna Grants' "Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin: Civil Rights Heroes" not only offers alternate models, but still keeps the hero-kind of framework, but is directly critical of the treatment of women during the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 to 1956.
Center for Children's Books: Tommie Smith, Derek Barnes and Dawud Anyabwile's "Victory. Stand! Raising my fists for justice." Amazing! Both of those books are just amazing. It discusses Smith's development as an athlete and commitment to civil rights as well as the iconic image that we all know of the Olympics in Mexico in 1968, when Smith won the gold medal.
Center for Children's Books: Ebony Joy Wilkins and Mark Simmons brief "Claudette Colvin refuses to move: Courageous Kid of the Civil Rights movement" offers a treatment of Colvin's decision, but positions her as the groundbreaker and leader of the movement. I'm I'm assuming people know who Claudette Colvin is. She was a 15 year old, who, before Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat and and was arrested.
Center for Children's Books: and also was involved in a very important lawsuit that led to the desegregation of buses in Montgomery.
Center for Children's Books: and finally, Ibram Kendi and Joel Christian Gill have recently adapted
Center for Children's Books: and illustrated Kendi's influential "Stamped from the beginning: a graphic history of racist ideas in America." This is a massive text that focuses on 5 historical figures from Cotton Mather to Angela Davis, and aims at an audience that includes young people as well as a broader, broader kind of audience. I think it's, I think teens are perhaps the intended audience in many ways.
Center for Children's Books: in terms of the books by Baptiste
Center for Children's Books: Smith and Wilkins. The overt emphasis is on other players, right. And the case of Wilkins even claiming the hero framing
Center for Children's Books: typically, that's been granted to King. So culminating panel of that book in employs King to redirect our understanding of individuals to ignited change.
Center for Children's Books: Quote "Several months later the Supreme Court ruled to end bus segregation for good. The ruling put an end to unfair bus laws and the bus boycott. Claudette and black people everywhere had won. You did it, baby girl. We're so proud of you.
Center for Children's Books: with King saying, your actions have helped spark a movement that will change the world.
Center for Children's Books: So Colvin, as I mentioned, was one of 5 plaintiffs in the case of Broward versus Gail, that went to the Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional, bus segregation. So check out the composition of this image. Claudette is the locus she framed by a community of people offering praise while King is facing away from the viewer, his face partially obscured. He's gazing at Claudette while he speaks. She's the hero. She's the center, and he's conspicuously deferring to her.
Center for Children's Books: Contemporary comics also displace King and disrupt consensus memory through paneling that places King in relationship to others and establishes parity, rendering him a part of a collective rather than a singular leader. So typical is the approach of Baptiste and Grant, who figure King on par with others in a frame.
Center for Children's Books: As when King and Parks work together on the bus boycott. So the figures here bear equal visual weight on the page. The text box above starts with King's network and concludes with Parks dispatching. Even the balance of the sentences are equal in that text box. If anything, the image lands on Parks extending extra effort as she speaks confidently, you can see, like the sweat marks coming off of her eyes. So they're equal, and they're working together. He's not a singular towering figure.
Center for Children's Books: Similarly, the first time that Lewis meets King in March Book one
Center for Children's Books: King doesn't tower over anybody. He's sitting behind the desk. See him in the bottom. He's flanked by others. He's more an office worker right than an inspiration, and he explains to King the possible pragmatic effects of his, of Lewis's, desire to integrate Troy State University rather than offering some inspirational or idealized depersonalized encouragement. So King's a man speaking to another man, and and he tells him the risks of action, and says, I don't know what will happen, so there's an uncertainty around him, too.
Center for Children's Books: I think that's I think it's very interesting. In depicting racial violence, Wilkins and Simmons
Center for Children's Books: use paneling to suggest King's parity with in relationship to others, and to reconsider our own understanding of the scope of white supremacist attacks. So in these panels we see Kings house firebombed, January thirtieth, 1956, side by side and actually prefacing a second bombing at local organizer E.D. Nixon's house 2 days later. So these panels are equal in size. The houses are relatively equal in proportion, and the purple shading across both
Center for Children's Books: images suggest cohesiveness rather than an elevation of King over Nixon. So the sequence enables us to see that the violence against King is one moment in many, and linking the 2 parallel panels, resists a tendency to think of King distinctively. He, Nixon, so many others, were subject to these kinds of violences. So not only does do recent comic studies displace King. Even when he appears, the form of the comic allows us understand him as one of many people going through very similar things.
Center for Children's Books: In terms of displacing King as the leader of the Montgomery boycott –Many of these texts focus on the Montgomery boycott because of Colvin, Claudette Calvin, Baptiste and Grant use the grand jury trial around bus desegregation to emphasize collectivity and public articulation of shared involvement. So the next panels have many words, and I'm sorry,
Center for Children's Books: you're not gonna be able to read all the words, but this sequence is really important. So they're at the courthouse, and many people are on the stand, and the prosecutor is trying to get them to say King is responsible for everything.
Center for Children's Books: And they all refuse to point to King. So the first text box emphasizes that the entire Montgomery Improvement association showed up to the court date, and in response to the prosecutor, various witnesses claim collective action.
Center for Children's Books: and so the prosecutor says "and did Reverend King encourage everyone to stop taking the buses?"
Center for Children's Books: "Wasn't no one started it. We all started it overnight," and the frustration in the bottom, you can see ,of the prosecutor becomes clear through the spiky speech bubble. At the end of the day, in the far right, at the bottom panel,
Center for Children's Books: we see
Center for Children's Books: Nixon and the attorney, Fred Gray, leave the courtroom, and they're saying "We knew they wanted to pin the entire thing on Reverend King." And then this this little touch at the end, "as if the rest of us did nothing at all." So it's not so that they're rallying around, King, they're saying, we all need to be, you know, acknowledged, even in this very disturbing setting in terms of the contributions.
Center for Children's Books: The black panel. Oh, wait, wait! I'm sorry I have to go to the next slide
Center for Children's Books: when Claudette takes the stand. Oh, Whoopsie, sorry
Center for Children's Books: when Claudette takes the stand. The prosecutor is again frustrated by her refusal to claim King. You can see at the bottom of the page especially, on the left.
Center for Children's Books: The sweating and exasperation coming off of his face. The black panel in the middle is especially key to the intervention in the representation of the boycott – that back and forth. "Did you have a leader?" She says, "our leaders are just we, ourselves."
Center for Children's Books: "But somebody spoke to the group." "We all spoke for ourselves," and then she leaves the courtroom, exiting the borders of the panels triumphantly, and we understand that the denial of King is less about his protection from prosecution. which might be assumed giving consensus memories, this idea that we're all rallying around King, but more claiming the public assertion of Colvin's agency and the collective work of countless individuals. So I linger on this example because it it kind of typifies the daring approach of Baptiste and Grants' book.
Center for Children's Books: and a moment that could be read as a community rallying around King instead is the legitimacy of a collective. It's a larger denial of King centrality to the boycott.
Center for Children's Books: which is kind of cool. And then this next thing:
Center for Children's Books: critiquing King. Many of the contemporary
Center for Children's Books: graphic novels are directly critical of Martin Luther King. So this is daring, and unprecedented. So, consider Baptiste and Grant's depiction of the boycott. Their book's imperative is to reset attention towards the women contributors to the movement, and by doing so they spotlight the injustice perpetrated by King and other male leaders in co-opting years of work of women in Montgomery, which is just–
Center for Children's Books: I love this book. It blew my mind. But even more to a critical point. Their King is ambivalent about the boycott from the beginning. When the local civil rights leader, E.D. Nixon, asks King to join the boycott. He defers: "Brother Nixon, let me think about it, and you call me back."
Center for Children's Books: and Nixon's in there to the right in the top. He's cross-eyed with shock that King would not want to join. And he calls King's friend Reverend Abernathy, to try and convince him, and Reverend Abernathy does, and therefore, King appears less a kind of like passionate
Center for Children's Books: and committed activist than a political maneuverer, afraid of being left out of public success.
Center for Children's Books: So the motivation of this book is to claim Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks, and women like Joanne Robinson, who did a lot of the grassroots work for the Montgomery bus boycott. So for Baptiste and Grant, the reason memory has [---] their contributions is very clear. Men have taken over, and to be more specific, King has taken over. And in history, this was the moment that King kind of rose to the surface as a public figure for the Civil Rights Movement.
Center for Children's Books: So when a meeting of male ministers takes place. King, he enters late.
Center for Children's Books: We hear Nixon say, "we need to turn history around and stop hiding behind these women who do all the work for us." And then King agrees - Let's stop hiding behind all the women and he's elected the leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association.
Center for Children's Books: and this section of the book culminates with the this really famous speech that King gave on December 5th, 1955, to the whole Baptist Church, the first day of the boycott to get everyone to agree to participate in a boycott
Center for Children's Books: and Parks was there, and she was not asked at all to participate. And so the book kind of spends a lot of time on this point.
Center for Children's Books: So
Center for Children's Books: at this speech, in the first panel of the sequence, we see Rosa Parks being congratulated at the top by women, and King, surrounded by men. The text box, which is actually voiced by Claudette Colvin, says, "many people spoke that night, but Mrs. Parks wasn't one of them. In fact, no women had the opportunity to speak that night. She thought she should, but someone told her 'why, you've said enough,' and that was that."
Center for Children's Books: this is audacious in terms of disrupting King and the myth around King. Even the balance of the the two texts in these three panels suggests the division between women and men. So in the next panel, Parks is alone, set larger than the male figures, but looking towards them with disappointment in her face, and the narration states: "as much as she was the mother of the movement. No one ever asked Mrs. Parks her opinion. Once the men had taken over, all the women who had worked for this day were shunted aside."
Center for Children's Books: by the end of the page, women are completely off panel and men like E.D. Nixon follow. Even E.D. Nixon falls away from King with resentment. So the effectiveness of the critique rests in this sequential approach, we see women being shifted off frame. We understand through the body language how male figures respond to affirm each other, and through these divided text boxes we're offered an interpretation of the sequence from a more contemporary lens, and we can see how this version of King sidelines women.
Center for Children's Books: In Kendi and Gill's novel, King is criticized for the lack of material change that his words have brought.
Center for Children's Books: And this is Angela Davis, who was friends with the 4 little girls, Birmingham, 1963. And so we see her claiming the losses as personal. "They're my friends." The girls are all named and a frame and a half circle around a detailed image of her crying. And we get a sense of the emotional impact of that loss. In contrast, King
Center for Children's Books: preaches in the middle. This is the very next page.
Center for Children's Books: Excuse me. His eulogy for the martyred children, and the visual tone shifts to that of a cartoon, and Davis says – Davis is a little figure in the middle of the 3 in the middle of the page.
Center for Children's Books: "He's probably just gonna march again" is what she says. So Davis has left the space of detailed grief and turned and turned into a cartoon. When King, you know, abstracts that loss and his eulogy which does abstract the loss of those girls into a kind of ideal. Also important on this page is that King's responses, drawn
Center for Children's Books: in parallel visually with that of the segregationist, George Wallace at the top, and John F. Kennedy at the bottom, who is more ineffectual than malevolent, but a case carrying a bomb -I don't know if you notice- in his right hand. So King's inadequacy, it gets structured there. It becomes part of this landscape.
Center for Children's Books: Further, King's followers, are depicted as particularly conservative in this text.
Center for Children's Books: So in the right, in terms of rise of black power, a small depiction of King, looking contemplative, includes 2 of his followers fainting with shock, and the text says, "King's disciples would rather be called ____,
Center for Children's Books: than black." And here we see Gill's –if you know Joel Christian Gill's brilliant work, you know he uses this icon repeatedly across his text as a trademark visual gesture replacing a racial slur with an icon derived from minstrelsy, and it's weaved in to render Gill's refusal to repeat the word, but to evoke centuries of visual tropes around it.
Center for Children's Books: So the direct critique that we receive on King, in Baptiste and Grant and Kendi and Gill courageously maks use of the potential of the comics form with sequence enabling an awareness of the process of sexist erasure for Baptiste and Gill. I'm sorry, and Grant and iconicity and the format of the page, allowing an understanding of the disappointments and limitations of King's philosophy, as well as the larger political landscape in which that philosophy is literally placed on the page.
Center for Children's Books: How to represent the movement? And next section, what else can we do? Okay, how about reassessing our collective memory?
Center for Children's Books: So in addition to creating King as one of many or directly criticizing his approach, a third way in which texts dislodge our collective understanding of King is by confronting and reassessing sites of memory. So when we think of the civil rights movement, we see it through iconic images, right. Photographs, newsreels. This is part of the already known sort of
Center for Children's Books: status of the civil rights movement
Center for Children's Books: and graphic novels, because of sequence, because of the remediation of photographs within longer narratives, can alter our processing of core shared memories. And that's what I want to kind of think about through looking at these, the way they work with photographs. For example.
Center for Children's Books: this photograph of Rosa Parks.
Center for Children's Books: If this affirms the collective memory of just a tired seamstress spontaneously resisting segregation. But after the decision to desegregate buses was upheld by the Supreme Court, and the boycott was concluded. Baptiste and Grant
Center for Children's Books: offer this, and obviously it's small, but the image is on the the bottom on the right. And the text says, "the next morning Reverend King and the other leaders of the movement all took the bus together near the Reverend's home. They didn't notice that Rosa Parks was not included." So, like, their absence from her picture, and her isolation becomes really pronounced. Look at the self satisfied
Center for Children's Books: Look in this panel. I don't know if you can see, hey? They're all really happy with themselves in the middle of the page.
Center for Children's Books: And we get this unbounded text. "Mrs. Park wasn't with the other leaders that day. Only one reporter sought her out. He asked Mrs. Parks to stage a picture on an empty bus. It became famous."
Center for Children's Books: So because of the sequence of events and the introduction of King and Abernathy before the remediation of the photograph, we understand that image differently. So the empty bus notation signals the artificiality of that photograph. Her exclusion from the actual accomplishment of integrating the buses with King becomes pronounced. She didn't get to go on the bus and launch integration – she's left behind by King. So the photo in our minds thus resonates differently.
Center for Children's Books: Similarly the images of King in the famous 'I have a dream speech,' 1963, are among the most iconic of the movement, so in our minds eye, we can see him on the Mall, thronged by crowds, delivering the speech that has become the most malleable, misappropriated text in his body of work, and I talked about this moment elsewhere, but it's worth mentioning that Lewis and Powell here in March, remove the crowds.
Center for Children's Books: They don't represent the speech at all, and they focus on how that speech affected Lewis and the people there. You can see the voice of King through the expressive marks around his mouth. But we don't need to hear his words. In this way, Lewis and Powell allow us to reflect on how King enables us to dream, to imagine, and the space of darkness across these
Center for Children's Books: text signals Lewis's interiority, and we even get sequence through Mahalia Jackson's speech bubbles, "Tell him about the dream," entering, so we know it's part of a sequence rather than an icon.
Center for Children's Books: and a perhaps more audacious remediation of this iconic photograph. Kendi and Gill offer this panel, and I'm gonna read it, and I'm gonna bust out laughing. I'm sorry, because it is very, very funny.
Center for Children's Books: Here it goes.
Center for Children's Books: "I have a dream that one day these folks that called me a troublemaker will pretend that they always supported me.
Center for Children's Books: I have a dream that one day conservative politicians all across this great land will misquote me in order to win a political argument.
Center for Children's Books: and I have a dream that what white girls that will tweet out that black lives matter on my birthday and change their profile pictures to images of me, but will not do anything for our cause, but everything for the Gram." Sorry, I think it's so so smart and funny. So John Lewis is there by his elbow. And King here draws in Kendi and Gills, broader critique of the way King's memory has been deployed politically and in social media. It's comedy, of course, is the juxtaposition of our expectation for the moment.
Center for Children's Books: The somber, inspirational King on the mall with the hypocritical, manipulative, superficial utilization of his memory. And if you sit with this, it's a gut punch, right? Like, the legacy of this culminating moment
Center for Children's Books: is just clickbait for slacktivists, right? Like, that's that's their point.
Center for Children's Books: so yeah. So another way.
Center for Children's Books: another thing to think about. If we're gonna you know, think about how to reposition him, or critique him or re interrogate our memory is how we actually claim him. How do we actually claim Martin Luther King?
Center for Children's Books: So how do these texts claim a more complicated version of the haloed or sanctified king, or represent a king that isn't truncated, more in tune with his later commitments, when his energy is focused on anti war, anti-poverty efforts.
Center for Children's Books: So one way to to balance the desire to respect King with the resistance to crediting him with solving racism is to focus on how he affects others. So we saw that with the the March image of Lewis thinking about and appreciating
Center for Children's Books: His "I have a dream" speech on the Mall. But when we first encountered King in March Book one, he's not even. He's a voice on the radio. His words are literally scratchy. the crackle and the whir of the radio is as prominent as any apprehensible language on the page. And interestingly, we never hear King's voice.
Center for Children's Books: The statement is, we just heard him speak. "Thank you. And again you just heard from Dr. Martin Luther King, and coming up next," so we never hear his voice at all. We just see what it does to John Lewis. "Dr. King's message hit me like a bolt of lightning. I felt like he was preaching directly to me." So there's an intimacy there between King and Lewis. So we focus on the effect on Lewis.
Center for Children's Books: Similarly, in "Victory. Stand!"
Center for Children's Books: We see Smith listen to King at the 1967 Western Regional Black Youth Conference. King's back is turned, his mouth is open. We don't get to see his words or hear his words, and Smith's reaction is positive. "When he spoke he was just as he was when I seen him on television, reverent, captivating, powerful, sincere." And in the text that follows, he, he then says, you know, that King, spoke along with black panthers and athletes, who are activists like Harry Edwards and John Carlos.
Center for Children's Books: He wants to recognize everyone in that moment and not just King. And the sequential
Center for Children's Books: kind of movement focuses again on his interiority: the effect of this moment on Tommy as an activist. So King becomes inspirational
Center for Children's Books: without his words.
Center for Children's Books: King's introduced very simply in in Watkins and Simmons text.
Center for Children's Books: so, see, sort of he's in the middle of a few people there and then it is very small at the bottom she waves to him, and then in the moment where she refuses, she thinks of him. But she thinks of him alongside Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. So it becomes sort of part of a collective, and women centered set of heroes. Even in Baptiste and Grant's book, which is so critical of King's exclusion of women, they offer moments where they appreciate King.
Center for Children's Books: So Claudette
Center for Children's Books: praises King's language. That's Claudette there listening to King.
Center for Children's Books: "Once I saw Reverend King himself. Those speeches he made brought out everyone's emotions. He put all our feelings into words."
Center for Children's Books: as in the approach of March we only hear the effects of King's words, we don't hear the content, and the image of King is very small, set off to the side. In December she actually meets King at a reception, and he says "you're a very brave young lady," and Colvin, thinks, "Meeting Reverend King didn't pay my bills or make my life safer, or stop anyone from talking about me behind my back.
Center for Children's Books: But just that little bit of encouragement meant a lot to me. And this book is very much indebted to Philip Hoose's "Claudette Colvin: twice towards justice." The interviews with what I call it. So this is a really gutsy, graphic novel. It aims to recenter women and the many unnamed contributors, and brings this largely critical version of King. But still is these grace notes of appreciating him in terms of his emotional recognition of Colvin.
Center for Children's Books: so how the claim King part 2? We can reflect on his loss. Some of the books describe the impact of his loss is very generative. So Tommy Smith's graphic novel,
Center for Children's Books: we attend to his loss through his absence again through photographs. So we see here the Lorraine Motel and the remediation of the iconic photograph
Center for Children's Books: of King on the ground nearly obscured by the railing, with people pointing towards the assassin. And the language, here, the praising language, places him into a sports metaphor, appropriately. He's a "champion of justice brutally shot down." So what does it mean that we get the iconic motel and this iconic photograph? Is this a wound, an absent presence of King, is this a way in which Smith allows us to call up our own experience
Center for Children's Books: of grief through these iconic images, in ways that are familiar, and ask us to reflect on King? So it's again about how it's activated and animating grief in the reader.
Center for Children's Books: Kendi and Gill, when they introduce King's death, they similarly focus on this effect on others. So Angela Davis comes home, sees her friends in despair watching the television news.
Center for Children's Books: It could end there. But instead, this is a really, I think, audacious and groundbreaking depiction of King's – and you can't read all the words, of course – but through sequence, what what Kendi and Gill do is they take King's death, and they place it into a larger landscape of the shift of the civil rights movement towards black power. And so,
Center for Children's Books: unlike the the parody of King's speech, they actually give King his own words there: the speech that he gave before he was assassinated.
Center for Children's Books: and Angela Davis says, with her head sort of down. "I don't think we had realized that his new notion of struggle– involving poor people of all colors involving oppressed people throughout the world could potentially present a greater threat to our enemy." And so this, to my mind, is a really important move, because we might understand King's death, as like the ultimate irony of a nonviolent icon being, you know, killed through violence. But what she is saying is that the the radical politics in that moment is what
Center for Children's Books: created the loss, is what created the violence. Not the non violence, but, like his commitment to poor people and his commitment really to in their book, Black Power, even without him recognizing that it's black power that he's advocating for.
Center for Children's Books: So we have Angela Davis,
Center for Children's Books: And a companion, point pointing at Uncle Sam and saying, "first, Malcolm, now, Martin, this is you!" And the final panel transforms the loss into James Brown and the crowd, saying, "I'm black, and I'm proud." So you get sort of, through sequence, it doesn't end with his death. It becomes part of what fuels black power. So I think that's that's pretty amazing.
Center for Children's Books: How to claim King? Engage the range of his politics. So this is the the Black Power move that Kendi and Gill offer. So how do you embrace a more complicated version of King? You focus, perhaps, on on what he was doing towards the end of his life. So he met Malcolm X. So they put, you know, this photograph, and remediate this photograph from when they were both advocating for the Civil Rights Bill in 1964. The figures seem affable in both panels. Sort of setting the tone. When Malcolm X is assassinated,
Center for Children's Books: this image appear. So that's King and Ossie Davis,
Center for Children's Books: and it quotes from a telegraph that a telegram that came sent to Betty Shabaz when Malcolm X was assassinated, and it's
Center for Children's Books: on the page.
Center for Children's Books: It says, "I always had a deep affection for Malcolm, and felt he had a great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem."
Center for Children's Books: And then you have Ossie Davis saying, "Did you ever did you ever really listen to him?"
Center for Children's Books: And the way this is framed, you see at the bottom it's actually from his eulogy. So it's not actually an attack on King or questioning of King, but the way it's framed, it's posed in that way. It's two oppositional kind of speech bubbles.
Center for Children's Books: And also important is that Kendi and Gill take out a qualifier from the original telegram. The original telegram said, "while we did not always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problem, I always had a deep affection from Malcolm," etc. So they they remove that part of it and they make a much more complicated relationship between King and Malcolm X. Usually they are posed really simplistically.
Center for Children's Books: So. That's one way in which they're kind of moving towards black power. And so they create a bit of a more radical King on the page. And so in 1967 before his assassination, he had this very famous speech, "Where do we go from here?" which turned into a book. Kendi and Gill see this as pointing towards his alignment with black power.
Center for Children's Books: And
Center for Children's Books: after introducing that,
Center for Children's Books: after introducing that speech,
Center for Children's Books: They offer these panels here.
Center for Children's Books: So the 2 boxes show King flanked by traditionalist voices.
Center for Children's Books: and first he is lauded by 4 voices,
Center for Children's Books: praising his non violence and moderation. When he authors his. "Where do we go from here?" speech, which becomes a book, right? We see these 4 assimilationist voices switching to critique: "troublemaker," "gone too far," "black radical," "militant." And remember, most people did not appreciate Martin Luther King in his day. Right? So they're excavating that, too. And one text bubble there is dripping with ooze of racism that characterizes
Center for Children's Books: the speech bubbles of racists across this text. It's really very interesting. And King's response is this trademark, Joel Christian Gill 'side eye.' Amanda Greenwell has an article about this, the way that he uses the sort of the sarcasm of the look, the critical glance.
Center for Children's Books: It's really really smart. So Kendi and Gill described the developments of King's Poor People campaign and the rationale for his ideological development
Center for Children's Books: "He realized that focusing on desegregation had primarily benefited black elites, leaving millions wallowing in the wrenching poverty that had led to their urban rebellions."
Center for Children's Books: They describe his economic bill of rights as eerily similar to Black Panthers 10 point program that you know King may not have understood. But they're putting it all side by side so that we can understand that his ideas at the end were aligned with the Black Panthers and the Black Power Movement to some degree.
Center for Children's Books: and I think the culmination of this move comes across in this image. I mean, have you ever seen an image of Martin Luther King, that is like this? This is
Center for Children's Books: Stokely Carmichael, who wrote the book, "Black Power: the Politics of Liberation in America" and King, who's quoting from his, "Where do we go from here?" speech. So, in quoting from each of the 2 texts, we're able to see the alignment of King's insistence on –there at the bottom–"I'm black, but I'm black and beautiful," with Stokely Carmichael's, "It's a call for black people in this country to unite,
Center for Children's Books: and recognize their heritage." So King is the aesthetic of the Black power movement and
Center for Children's Books: which you would assume would be Carmichael's, and Carmichael is the economic, which is the poor people's campaign. It's all kind of like coming together, and the raised black power fist in the middle – the icon sticks in your mind, right? The two figures are given equal visual weight as are their speech bubbles. Their raised fist, draws their minds together into a shared mind, a mind that is grounded in black power.
Center for Children's Books: and there, at the bottom, you see these tiny figures of a white man who's associated with institutional racism and Uncle Sam. And they say, "Crap." "Yeah, crap." Like, we need to understand like this the synchronicity of the way that the two supposed camps were working at this time.
Center for Children's Books: that's their argument, I think, in Kendi and Gill. So the economy of representation enabled by comics allows a reader to appreciate again the complicated relationship of King to the the moment, and the nature and his shift in thinking. So, sequence and iconicity work together to reset King, acknowledge this more radical version, suppressed by consensus memory, and argue for its alignment with Black Power. Which is a form of elevation of Black Power, as well with this association. In some ways, I think, in this book,
Center for Children's Books: and within its association with King.
Center for Children's Books: And so finally, I just want to say that sequence within comics insists on breaking the wall down between the text and the reader. Between the idea of the Civil Rights movement located only in the sixties. And what's happening now, the urgency of social justice movements today. So we saw this move in 1957.
Center for Children's Books: with the Montgomery Stories' direct address to the reader and the function of the comic book as an urgent training manual in nonviolence. I love the way that hand is like: you. It's about you. You need to get out there. You need to, you know, read this book and make it make it alive.
Center for Children's Books: The March series is predicated on breaking down the idea of the difference and distance between the Civil Rights movement and, say, the context of the book's publication around Obama's inauguration but we even see in book one,
Center for Children's Books: the way particular images reach out to the reader. So this is like, some directions on how to be nonviolent. You don't need that hand there. The hand is there to give the reader. Here, take this. Take this into the world right?
Center for Children's Books: And Claudette Colvin at in at the end of Baptiste's book, her last words are, "Someday you may have to stand up for what you believe in, too." And she's at a Black Lives Matter protest, and she's raising her fists in support. And Kendi and Gill similarly end their novel with a call for anti-racist action from the reader, in this black panel that says, "Maybe, just maybe, that time is now."
Center for Children's Books: So the black space, to my mind, becomes a kind of space for the reader to enter the narrative imaginatively, and imagine themselves in sync with the action there. So all of the novels I've described today refuse containment of Civil Rights movement and use comics as a pathway to move action off of the page. Sequence as unfinished work.
Center for Children's Books: And again, like we, we all know we're in an urgent liminal moment as a nation where states, and communities, and libraries, and boards of education, parent groups, and students are all struggling with
Center for Children's Books: challenges, debates and outright attacks on the representation of history, particularly the national injustices around race and national violences around race. So our response is impelled by these real threats to democracy and concerted deliberate erasure of history, and our response should be urgent. The text that I mentioned today push us to recognize the continuity of the long Civil Rights movement, the presence and endurance of the past, as well as the implication of the reader in the ongoing work.
Center for Children's Books: Knowledge about history requires a complicated understanding of King, his place, and his legacy, and the investment of everyday people in the movement and its efforts for social justice. So, comics like these provide a necessary compelling pathway to young people's understanding and involvement.
Center for Children's Books: So, thank you. I know I had a lot of words, and I rushed through some of it, so I appreciate your tolerance. Thank you so much.
Center for Children's Books: We have a few moments for questions here.
Center for Children's Books: Anyone in the room have questions?
Center for Children's Books: comics, fans out there? Yeah.
Center for Children's Books: no, it doesn't. I don't have a question at the moment. Just like singling. Yes, yes, Sarah.
Center for Children's Books: So I was wondering. I loved this by the way, it was great, and I was wondering if you had read "More than a dream"
Center for Children's Books: by Yohuru Williams? I have it pulled up here. It was a national book award long list, Yohuru Williams and Michael G. Long.
Center for Children's Books: So, 2 dudes who wrote about this time period and this book is also really critical of the way that the men silenced the women during the civil rights movement. And so I understand here, you're looking specifically at comics and images. Do you plan to expand out to look at other formats?
Center for Children's Books: I'm not familiar with that book. I'll have to get that the name of it from you. But I am. I'm like I'm super interested. Do you know the year of that publication? Yes, it was last year (2023), cause it was our National Book Award long list. So that's how I remember it, cause I read it many, many times. I appreciate it so much because I feel like this. I feel like the
Center for Children's Books: Black Lives matter movement, and our particular moment is opening up different ways of imagining what you know, the limitations of potential of social justice. I don't think these kinds of books could have appeared before 2020. Honestly. So this seems like, totally in step, right?
Center for Children's Books: I appreciate that. I'm sorry about my, my ignorance of it. No, it's okay. It's new. So yeah, very good.
Center for Children's Books: Hi, thank you so much for this wonderful talk. I'm wondering if you
Center for Children's Books: can talk about the ways that these books
Center for Children's Books: may or may not show uncertainty around the formation of history itself, cause it's it's one of the things that, for example,
Center for Children's Books: There's a major point in Joe Sutliff Sanders' "The literature of questions" around the way that, like
Center for Children's Books: that readers are often brought into stories when the making of history itself is obvious from the way that the book is put together, so that then they're able to see that even the book that they're reading is the product of somebody's decision about what to disclose to them.
Center for Children's Books: Yeah, that's a fabulous question.
Center for Children's Books: are there? Do you know if the the Zoom people can hear the questions? Oh, yeah. And it was a question about sort of the the way in which a a question about whether or not sort of the artificiality or constructedness of history comes through - as I'm understanding it. And I think I love this question because I feel like graphic novels are exactly the best - one of the best formats for this, because, you see the artistic decisions and the artist hand in creating and recreating memory. So
Center for Children's Books: This sort of punctuates for me when it's an iconic photograph, and you go wait a minute. I know that photograph, but that's different, or it's in a different tilt, or the shading is different, or where the crowds, or you know, and you can see sort of the decisions that have been made around that construction of history. For instance, I think there are many people, many scholars of comics who talk about the way the artists handle the the conspicuous excavation of the creation of the piece comes to the fore in comics and ways
Center for Children's Books: that some forms are may maybe more immersive. But you're sort of always called to think. And because you're making meaning across sequence to think about how sequences are arranged. But I think that's that's such an important question, I think, and particularly for these texts, there's there's an article I think it was
Center for Children's Books: I want to say, Daniel Stein, who worried about teaching the March series, and he makes this point, that there are many
Center for Children's Books: ways that the text seems to be sort of representing history in a kind of neutral way. But it's making all these really conspicuous decisions about how to use photographs and how to use a historical record. But I think comics are, are perhaps an ideal way to bring the materiality in the process of creating history to the service.
Center for Children's Books: Can you tell I love comics? Yeah.
Center for Children's Books: Yes, thank you so much for the talk. I learned a lot and still realize I have to learn a lot more.
Center for Children's Books: as I'm trying to situate myself within like [inaudible]
Center for Children's Books: like have the history of like wanting to teach like diverse histories, or like non-white narratives.
Center for Children's Books: You mentioned this moment being very particular. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more on how you see this moment to be different than other calls to action that have happened in the past, that kind of - things bubbling up, and then things subside.
Center for Children's Books: or if you think this will won't subside.
Center for Children's Books: Are you talking about sort of the contemporary moment in terms of...? The contemporary moment, or, like,
Center for Children's Books: I'm kind of thinking. I believe it was
Center for Children's Books: Walter Dean Myers, like there were multiple of these Op eds of like: Where are the books. I asked where the books were years ago, and where are they now? Right? Yeah. So these kind of moments, right? And we're still, I mean, we just had a fabulous
Center for Children's Books: sort of informational article about prejudice, and the whiteness of publishing - the ongoing whiteness of publishing - by Laura Mendez just came out a few weeks ago. I mean, I think, that the the urgency is still present in terms of transforming publishing and
Center for Children's Books: and getting access to diverse books. I think that's absolutely still present. One of the things that I see in some of this kind of work is an acknowledgement of submerged histories. It's not as though these things haven't happened. It's just we haven't talked about them. They haven't had this space right? It's not exactly parallel to what you're saying about, there are no books, but there are grassroots heroes that we've never attended to. There are stories that haven't been told, and sort of having this space in a in a very engaging, and I think,
Center for Children's Books: almost reciprocal relationship with the reader that that breaks down the boundaries between that was then, and this is now I think all of these books are really trying to do that. And comics is such an invitational mode that it's the way in which you know, you can say, take this book into the world like you can be in this book kind of thing.
Center for Children's Books: Thank you.
Center for Children's Books: Yeah, I suppose I'm wondering.
Center for Children's Books: if there's anything you think is still missing, like, I'm wondering if
Center for Children's Books: how these, you know, graphic novels and other forms can sort of contend with King and the entire civil rights movements as well as you know, international politics or gender politics, and how we might get there. And I don't know, what graphic novels can do for us to get there? I think there are so many stories of the Civil rights movement that haven't been told like
Center for Children's Books: countless stories. I mean, I did this book on photographic picture books around the Civil Rights movement, and I interviewed a woman, Doris Derby, who ran a preschool in Mississippi, and had, you know, the community guarding that preschool from being attacked, being bombed and trying to create a space for children there like, so that they can, you know, flourish and be proud, and learn and build community. That's a story that you know is never told.
Center for Children's Books: It's not out there, right? But that's a story of, like, incredible courage. And I really do think is those
Center for Children's Books: particular individuals' contributions to the larger landscape of the civil rights movement that we just have a lot of work to do to kind of bring to the surface. And it's difficult, right? Because in schools we have– and it's wonderful –that we have Martin Luther King Day. But then I think about like, what can we do in schools to sort of detether the movement just from King.
Center for Children's Books: And that's that's a challenge I think a lot of people are thinking about, too. So I think there's tons of room. I'm endlessly fascinated by the civil rights movement. And it's tendrils, you know. It's still it's still ongoing. Yeah.
Center for Children's Books: I feel so happy right now. Thank you for your smart questions.
Center for Children's Books: Thank you. Thank you very much. [inaudible] long discussion about representation and civil rights movement, and all the work that still remains. And thank you all for being here, present and on zoom. Thank you.
Center for Children's Books: ...