Photo: Martine Severin Photography; Simon & Schuster
That last item on the list, however, proved the most challenging of all. “It wasn’t easy to find books with leading Black characters that were just books about kids being kids,” Ewing, who is mom to daughter Stella, 7, and son Jackson, 5, tells PEOPLE.
There were the classics, likeCorduroyandThe Snowy Day— and there were plenty of kids' books about inspiring Black historical figures likeMartin Luther King Jr. andIda B. Wells, but filling out a bookshelf with stories of Black children’s joy became a surprisingly difficult task.
For Ewing, vice president of strategic communications atThe Chicago Community Trust, a non-profit that works to close the racial and ethnic wealth gap, it was also a deeply meaningful mission. “My kids are imaginative, they are joyful. They’re like any other kids. It’s as important that they see books with kids that look like them outside playing hopscotch or enjoying a popsicle,” says Ewing, 43, who worked in communications forPresident Barack Obama’s2012 re-election campaign and, previously, as a producer forThe Oprah Winfrey Show.
“As important as books are that talk about the civil rights movement and people who have achieved amazing things, they need thatandthe other. In order to have a more complete portrait of who we are and who we can be, we need all of it.”
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She cut out the column, pinned it to her vision board and vowed to take on the problem herself. “I realized that I was meant to try and do something about it and be part of the change,” she says. She sent an email to family and friends telling them that she planned to write her own children’s book — the kind she wanted to read to her own children.
Ewing and husband Jean Kenol at her book launch with their children Stella, 7, and Jackson, 5.Clothilde Ewing
Ewing says she had a very clear vision for how she saw Stella that illustratorLynn Gaineshelped bring to life. “I wanted to make sure that Stella was a little black girl — complexion-wise, I wanted to make sure there wasn’t any ambiguity,” she says.
“I wanted Stella to have a beautiful brown skin tone and I wanted to make sure her hair looked like my daughter’s hair, that it had texture. And that she was colorful and exuded joy.” When she first saw Gaines’s drawings, “I almost cried,” she says. “It was so spot-on.”
“Each page celebrates this little girl and her family. For my children, I wanted them to see a character that reflected their joy and their image,” Ewing says. “But for children who didn’t look like mine, I wanted them to see a peer, a friend, a co-conspirator to figure out how to have ice cream for breakfast. It’s important to see children of color in books where the kids are just having fun, where they’re relatable. There has been improvement over the last several years, and that’s great, but we can do more — and it benefits us all when we do.”
source: people.com
