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The enduring impact of Rudine Sims Bishop's work
rudine Sims Bishop was 18 years old the first time she saw herself in a t book. While pursuing her bachelor's degree in elementary education at West Chester University, one of her roommates introduced her to Bright April (Doubleday) by Marguerite de Angeli-the story of a young, African American Brownie Scout and her first brush with racial prejudice.
"That's the first time I remember seeing a black child's family portrayed realistically and attractively," she says.
Growing up in Bucks County, PA, Bishop was an insatiable reader. Although she often frequented her local library, where she discovered a fondness for fairy tales, she can recall only one text that portrayed black families, Little Black Sambo-a story set in India about a young boy who outwits a band of tigers and returns home to a triumphant pancake feast. The controversy around racist interpretations of "Sambo" has been so explosive that the book has since disappeared from most bookshelves.
"It was not a story with which I identified," she says.
It wasn't until the early 1970s, while pursuing her master's degree at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI, that Bishop discovered a substantial collection of African American texts. Her colleague, Donald Bissett, director of the children's literature program, named "the Darker Brother collection" after the Langston Hughes poem "I, Too." Bissett encouraged her to read all the books in the collection and proposed they collaborate on an article about books portraying African American culture from their differing perspectives of a white male professor and a black female doctoral student. Although they never completed the article, this idea sparked her scholarly vocation.
"It wasn't until I had to do the research that I zeroed in on that notion of how African Americans are portrayed [in literature]," she says.
Bishop spent the next five decades immersed in the study of African American literature in its social, political, and cultural contexts. She has published five books and numerous essays, including her landmark 1990 essay, "Windows, Mirrors, and Sliding Glass Doors," which uses the metaphor to explain how children see themselves in books and how they can also learn about and enter the lives of others through literature.
Though coined nearly 30 years...