Yet, in 1968, author Don Freeman wrote and published an excellent children’s book featuring a black family. We like to think that our country has come so far since the Civil Rights movement. How else do you explain the complete disappearance of a black family from a beloved children’s series? Instead, Corduroy’s family has been replaced by a cadre of cute animal characters.Īt this point, I cannot help but wonder if racism is at work here. Once again, Lisa and her mother are nowhere to be found in this book. We checked out a few more books, including the 2010 Play Ball, Corduroy. Sometime later, my daughter found the Corduroy section at the library. She and her mother were not featured in this book, which was published in 2000, 22 years after author Don Freeman’s death. Needless to say, we were surprised by it.īy the end of it, we had no idea what had become of Lisa. I didn't open Corduroy’s Christmas Surprise until it was time to read it during Advent. Because of how much we love the original Corduroy, I ordered it, sight unseen. Last year, I was thrilled to discover a Christmas book featuring Corduroy. Each year, I add a few books to our family’s stack of Christmas books. This may be true but I can’t help but wonder, was Corduroy also rejected because, during a time of escalating racial tensions, it featured a black family? This was stunning to me.Ī little digging into Corduroy shows that its publisher, Viking Press, initially rejected it, apparently because they only published a small number of books each year. In the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, author and illustrator Don Freeman (a white male) published a children’s book starring a black family. So, I immediately looked at the copyright. Children don’t take note of skin color the way adults do.Įven so, as an adult, this jumped out to me. It’s not surprising to me that this didn't register to me as a young child.
What I didn’t remember from my childhood was that Lisa, the young girl who walks into the department store and falls in love with Corduroy, is black. So, when someone gave us Corduroy at my daughter’s baby shower, I was delighted, eager to share the adorable bear with the missing button with my daughter. I have faint memories of reading Corduroy as a child.
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