Brandi Halston
English 1101
Formal summary
Walter Myers Dean
Work cited
Myers Walter Dean. ”Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?” New York Times 15 March 2014, New York ed.: SR 1+. Print. In the article “Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?” children’s book author Walter Dean Myers illustrates how a young troubled teenager, who loved to read and later grew up to write books for other troubled children to help them make a difference. Myers stepmother would read to him at a young age. Walter would imagine the characters and what they were doing, as she would read one of her True Romance magazines. The magazines and comics would push the road of Myers imaginative process. Walter began the quest to his own identity, he found who he was in the books he read. Myers was a person who felt the drama of great pain and the greater joys, whose emotions could soar. Every book was a landscape upon which Myers was free to wonder. Walter realized that his economics would not allow him to go to college, he began to lose hope. Myers read eagerly, spending days in central park reading when he should have been at school. There was something missing, he needed more than the Bible to identify with. Myers discovered who he was, a black teenager in a white-dominated world. He saw that these characters, these lives, were not his, Myers did not want to become the “black” representative or some shining example of diversity. Myers wanted, needed really, and was to become an integral and valued part of the mosaic that he saw around himself. Books did not become his enemies, they were more like friends, whom no longer felt comfortable. Myers stopped reading, and stopped going to school. Walters English teacher in high school gave him a meaningful conversation. On his seventeenth birthday he joined the Army, he saw that he had lost the potential person he would become. After the army his days became dreadful, a drunken stumble through life, with him holding on just enough to survive. Walter began to write short columns for a local tabloid and racy stories for men’s magazines. Myers read a story by James Baldwin “Sonny’s Blues” he did not love the story , but was lifted by it, for it took place in Harlem, it was a story concerned with black people like those he knew.. The story gave permission that he didn’t know he needed, the permission to write about his own landscape, his own map. Young teens have been struck by the recognition of themselves in the stories, a validation of their existence as human beings. 40 percent of public schools students nationwide are Black and Latino. Myers was doing research for his book “Monster” he talked with a white lawyer doing Pro Bono work in the courts defending poor clients. Myers said “it must be difficult to get witnesses to court to testify on behalf of an inner-city client.” The man responded back by saying “The trouble is to humanize my clients in the eyes of a jury to make them think of this defendant as a human being and not just one of them.” Myers wanted to make the poor inner city children human in the eyes of readers and especially in their own eyes. Myers needed to make them feel as if they are wanted in this country. The story to me was very powerful and it changed my perspective on many things. I remember reading Myers books when I was in middle school and high school. I read “Monster” in middle school and I really understood what Myers was trying to say in the book. Myers has changed the meaning of children’s books by introducing “color” for many unprivileged young children. There are many children where I grew up that turned to many things like; football, basketball and many other sports related things. When I was younger I would turn to reading and always wanted to know why there were never any people in my books that looked like me. A child relates to people who look the same as themselves, at the daycare I work at they have many books and toys that
