Keeping tabs on authors in LINKcat: Mildred Pitts Walter

 

Source:  LINKcat South Central Library System online catalog

New York Times, 7/31/2026

Richard Sandomir reports:

As a kindergarten teacher in the 1950s and ’60s in South Central Los Angeles, where most of her students were, like her, Black, Ms. Walter searched for books that had Black characters with whom they could identify. The rare one, she recalled, was the Caldecott Medal-winning 1962 picture book “The Snowy Day,” by Ezra Jack Keats, a white author, which featured a young Black boy exploring his neighborhood after a snowfall. 

Knowing that the federal government under President Lyndon B. Johnson had in 1968 allocated funds to encourage publishers to create more books for students like hers, Ms. Walter eventually challenged an executive at a local publishing company, Ward Ritchie Press, to fill that need.

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