Progressive Communities, Children’s Literature, and Free to Be … You and Me

The children’s book version of Free to Be … You and Me became a powerful force in the lives of progressive young people in the 1970s. In addition to the 1972 record that began the Free to Be project and alongside the television special that followed the book’s publication, the children’s book offered textual stability to the feminist concepts offered in all of the project’s incarnations. But what struck me as a young person in the early 1970s was its interracial visual aesthetic, its photographs of various children sitting happily side by side. I was raised in a family that resembled few others at the time. I am white, as are two of my siblings; my brother is African American; and my sister is African American and Vietnamese American. My parents were progressive thinkers and activists and they raised us in Columbia, Maryland, a township founded in 1967 with the goal of social change. We lived in a community that featured interfaith centers rather than churches, “village centers” with housing of varied economic levels, and shared community schools that actively promoted integration. In many ways it seemed an ideal setting for our family. At the same time, Columbia was in fact located below the Mason-Dixon Line, and popular culture and social realities conspired to make us feel conspicuous in many ways. Even in Columbia, Maryland, my siblings and I experienced hostility, especially from other children, for being a “mixed” family. This is part of the reason why Thomas’s book, album, and television program seemed a blessing, an idealized place where children like us could be comfortable in ourselves and in our love for each other.

My own work as an academic focuses on African American childhood and social change and I recognize the influence of Free to Be on my own investments. Through the book and television program, I experienced the transformative possibilities of interracial representation. Here I’d like to consider briefly Marlo Thomas’s book within the context of post-1960s social activism in order to emphasize its coherence with progressive children’s literature at large.¹ While the book was certainly distinctive in countering sexist expectations for children’s socialization, its methodology shared certain tendencies with activist children’s literature, particularly that which addressed racism, during the early 1970s. In the wake of the early civil rights movement, after the losses of the “four little girls” in the 1963 Birmingham bombing and the assassinations of Malcolm X, the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jr., and so many other civil rights figures, the cultural moment of the early 1970s for black communities was tinged with frustration and despair. The response in black children’s literature emphasized continued child commitment to social change. For instance, feminist writer June Jordan urged readers in her photographic children’s book Dry Victories to “do something about this after-mess of aftermath, following on so much tragedy” (1972, 75). The imperative to take action, to intervene in social relations, structured much of the literary work for children within black communities at this moment.

Further, the black arts movement (BAM) of the late 1960s and early 1970s encouraged an art that was functional, one that reeducated communities about the harmful effects of white education and literacies. Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), within Larry Neal’s 1968 essay “The Black Arts Movement,” addressed American and children’s literature, as well as the totalizing process of literacy training, by asserting, “We must destroy Faulkner, dick, jane, and other perpetrators of evil” (Neal 1968, 29). In response, BAM writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Jean Carey Bond, Sam Cornish, Tom Feelings, Nikki Giovanni, Rosa Guy, Kristin Hunter, Julius Lester, Sharon Bell Mathis, Sonia Sanchez, and Jean Pajot Smith offered experimental, participatory texts for young people, including poetry, photography, drama, coloring books, and prose narratives. Bolstered by the 1965 Elementary and Secondary School Act, the founding of the Council on Interracial Books for Children in 1966, and the creation of the Coretta Scott King Award by the American Library Association in 1970, black writers for...