This January: Children’s Book Creators Who Made the World a Better Place

lindsey4824
Jan 9
5 min read

Updated: Mar 4

All through January we’ll be celebrating the work and legacies of Byrd Baylor, Eloise Greenfield, Marc Simont, and Vera Williams. Each of these children’s book creators devoted themselves to causes including the environment, peace, and equality.

Byrd Baylor (1924-2021)

In the books she wrote and her approach to life, it's evident how deeply Byrd Baylor cared for nature and people around her. Living in Arizona, she advocated for native wildlife and indigenous people. From Everybody Needs a Rock to Hawk, I’m Your Brother Byrd's books remind us of our connection with nature through her poetic and rhythmic prose.

She immersed herself in the southwestern landscape that she loved, living off the grid in an adobe house without electricity and a compostable toilet. She did most of her writing with a legal pad and manual typewriters.

Byrd Baylor at her home near Arivaca, Arizona in 2009. | Image from Arizona Daily Star

Her home was about an hour away from Tucson, Arizona, and thirty minutes from the nearest small town. Talking about her new-to-her used truck in an interview she lamented that she did not yet have the universally essential “Question Authority,” bumper sticker. In her area she said authority was represented by border patrol, which she said she could question every day.

Byrd partnered with the humanitarian group No More Deaths, which provides food, water, and first aid to undocumented migrants from Mexico, allowing the organization to build and create "Byrd Camp" on her property.

Listen to a 2009 interview with Byrd Baylor from Tuscan community radio station KXCI.

Eloise Greenfield (1929-2021)

Through her own work and by elevating the work of others, Eloise Greenfield made a profound impact on the diversity of children’s books. As an emerging poet in the 1950s, she realized there was a dearth of books that accurately represented African Americans.

“Then and there, I decided to make that my mission,” she said. “I wanted my books to enable Black children to realize how beautiful and smart they are. I wanted to write books that inspired and uplifted them, that made them laugh and be happy.”

Eloise’s first book, Bubbles, was published in 1972 by Drum and Spear Press, which was founded by members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In addition to her commitment to realistic portrayals of Black life through her fiction and nonfiction, Eloise’s books created space for children to understand and solve challenges including divorce, death, anger, loneliness, poverty and more. In total, Eloise created 48 children's books, including picture books, novels, poetry and biographies.

In addition to her own writing, Eloise championed other Black authors and illustrators through her works with District of Columbia Black Writers' Workshop, writing residencies, and teaching creative writing in schools.

In 2016, Eloise was awarded Teaching for Change’s Education for Liberation Award.

In her acceptance speech Eloise said, “Our work is far from over. All of us — Teaching for Change, authors, illustrators, educators, and many others — will continue our commitment to this work so that children can see themselves in books, see their beauty and intelligence, see the strengths they have inherited from a long line of predecessors, see their ability to overcome difficulties, challenges, pain, and find deep joy and laughter in books, in characters they recognize as themselves.”

Watch Eloise rap one of her poems.

Marc Simont (1915-2013)

Marc Simont was born in Paris, France, during WW1.

“At night my parents would hear the explosions and try and guess what part of Paris was hit,” Marc said in an interview. “One of my first expressions as a baby was ‘BOOM! BOOM! Boche*!’”

Marc spent his childhood in France, Spain, and the United States. He made the U.S. his permanent home when he was 19. He attended the National Academy of Design in New York City and was roommates with Robert McCloskey, which is why you’ll find our exhibit for The Happy Day is right next to Blueberries for Sal. Shortly after moving to Cornwall, Connecticut, Marc was drafted into WWII and served stateside in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946.

Editorial cartoon drawn by Marc Simont — Editorial cartoon by Marc Simont published in The Lakeville Journal on Thursday, July 9th, 1970

In addition to a career spent creating children’s books, Marc created political cartoons for the community newspaper, The Lakeville Journal in Lakeville, Connecticut. In 2007 he was honored with the Grambs Aronson Award for Cartooning With a Conscience, presented by Hunter College in New York.

In an interview with The Lakeville Journal he reflected, “Well, wonderful things have happened in my lifetime. But there are so many lessons that have remained unlearned which is sad to realize at my age. The two world wars were caused by nations who had, or at least they felt they had, military superiority—Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. When you see the United States almost falling into the same category, it’s disturbing.”

Marc’s final book, The Beautiful Planet: Ours To Lose is an anti-war cartoon book questioning modern wars from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan.

*Boche is a derogatory term for Germans. It originated with French soldiers' slang, originally in the sense ‘rascal,’ later used in the First World War meaning ‘German’

Vera Williams (1927-2015)

Growing up during the Great Depression, Vera Williams and her family dealt with their fair share of challenges. Though her parents, who she describes as radicals, often struggled to make ends meet, Vera remembered her childhood as a time of possibility and exploration. From a young age she was able to attend a variety of art classes through the Works Progress Administrations’s Federal Art Project and also recalled participating in protests.

Vera attended Black Mountain College, an experimental and progressive college that prioritized the arts and a holistic education. The college relied on the cooperative labor of students (Vera enjoyed working in the milk room on the college’s farm) and it was nonhierarchical. Students were part of institutional decision making, including when they were ready to graduate.

“I came from a very political background, in which it was assumed in my life, as a child, that you were interested in what went on in the world. That you were responsible, that things didn’t just happen to you, that you participated in change. We were enthusiastic activists. That carried over very much into life at Black Mountain College.”

Beginning in the 1950s Vera illustrated many covers from the leftist magazine, Liberation. As a life-long activist and non-violent protester, Vera was dedicated to the rights of women and children and anti-war causes. She spent a month in Alderson Federal Penitentiary in West Virginia for her role in a 1981 protest where women wove the steps of the Pentagon in ribbon.

Vera did not start creating children's books until she was 48. She illustrated her first children’s book Hooray For Me, written by Remy Charlip and Lilian Moore, in 1975. Through her books she championed the same causes as she did in the rest of her life, including working class families, strong female characters, and placing people over material things. Her book “More, More, More,” Said the Baby: Three Love Stories was one of the first picture books to feature a biracial family.

Watch an interview with Vera Williams about her youth and time at Black Mountain College.