When Tom Feelings flew into Dakar, Senegal, and needed a place to stay while waiting for the next flight, someone suggested he contact Roosevelt (Bo) Weaver, one of the earliest Peace Corps volunteers
Honor is past due
The world was so small back in the 1960s that when Tom Feelings flew into Dakar, Senegal, and needed a place to stay while waiting for the next flight, someone suggested he contact Roosevelt (Bo) Weaver, one of the earliest Peace Corps volunteers. That layover lasted for a month, and two black guys - Feelings from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and Weaver from Macon, Ga. - began a lifelong friendship based on wanting to make that small world a better - and bigger - one.
Feelings went on to teach college, but also touched the lives of those much younger, writing and illustrating award-winning children's books. I have Tom Feelings' books, including "Jambo Means Hello," which won a Caldecott award, but I did not know that he died just about a year ago until Bo Weaver recently mentioned it to me. Nor did a friend of mine who is big on Feelings. And that's a shame.
But more shameful is that few in major news media took notice that this pioneer had died last Aug. 25. So let me try to correct that oversight, which Councilman Al Vann and others began to rectify in June by renaming the intersection of Putnam and Bedford Aves. - one of his old stomping grounds - Tom Feelings Way.
What a wonderful double meaning. What was Tom Feelings' way? Marie Brown, his literary agent and longtime friend, says his mission "was to offer African-American children in particular - and all people - very positive, beautiful images of us and to counter so many of the negative stereotypical images that we all grew up with."
The pre-1954 black doll-white doll experiment comes to mind. When given the choice, black children chose the white dolls because they had no concept of what many of us were later privileged to use as our mantra: "Black is beautiful!"
In 1965, an article in the Saturday Review by Nancy Larrick, "The All-White World of Children's Books," helped launch the Council on Inter-racial Books for Children. Feelings was right there to further the cause.
For Feelings, much of his work grew out of the pain of seeing wonderfully innocent children whose street play he would sketch become victims of low expectations and lower self-esteem. Even as he regularly produced well-received books, he devoted more than 20 years on what became his major work prior to his death, "The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo." Its 64 illustrated pages - without text - tell the story of life in Africa disrupted by slavery and the middle passage that those Africans endured en route to, among other places, the Americas. To get over it, he seemed to say, you - blacks, whites, others - have to understand it.
Of course, it takes more than books to save a child, but the sort illustrated and written by Feelings and those still toiling in his wake are an antidote to a view that starts with poverty and fractured families and ends with the thug's life.
Originally published on August 22, 2004
