“And he believed that children deserved the truth. “Floyd’s legacy is that he was storyteller who believed the greatest gift you can give is the truth,” Weatherford said in a phone interview. The story about the boy in Alabama riding with Rosa Parks, “Back of the Bus,” by Aaron Reynolds, was released in 2010. And in “Granddaddy’s Street Songs” (1999), by Monalisa De Gross, an old man spins yarns for his grandson about his past as one of the Black fruit vendors who traveled around Baltimore on horse-drawn wagons.
In “Juneteenth for Mazie” (2015), which Cooper also wrote, a father tells his daughter about the origins of the holiday Juneteenth, which commemorates the day in June 1865 that the last of the enslaved people finally were emancipated. Smith Jr.’s story of enslaved people who toiled to build the White House. In “Brick by Brick” (2012), he illustrated Charles R.
Over 30 years and some 100 titles, Cooper illustrated children’s stories that not only carried his earthy and golden pastel impressions of Black life, but that also strived to recount chapters of African American history that he felt weren’t taught enough in classrooms - if they were taught at all.
His wife, Velma Cooper, said the cause was cancer. Floyd Cooper, a celebrated children’s book illustrator who explored African American experiences in stories rooted in history, like one about a boy in Alabama in 1955 trying to comprehend why a Black woman on his bus refused to give up her seat to a white passenger, died July 15 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
0 kommentar(er)
