Abstract
Marie Bradby and Chris Soentpiet’s More Than Anything Else (1995) and Thomas Amper and Jeni Reeves’s Booker T. Washington (1998) both rely on the literacy myth to present Booker T. Washington’s early pursuit of education. Yet they come to different conclusions about black educational achievement and promote opposing sides in late twentieth-century debates about multicultural education. While the Bradby-Soentpiet book depicts black working-class culture as an important intellectual support, Amper-Reeves book obscures its role, emphasizing Washington’s white mentors. Booker T. Washington associates black achievement with assimilating to the dominant culture, while More Than Anything Else posits an alternative approach insisting on the compatibility of blackness and print culture.
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Notes
- 1.
See Connolly, 198, for a discussion of publishers’ focus on a limited number of African American biographical subjects.
- 2.
Scholastic also has a page devoted to Amper and Reeves’ book. One difference between the listings is that Lerner recommends the book for children in grades 2 through 4, but Scholastic recommends it for children in pre-kindergarten through second grades. I first purchased the book at a Scholastic Book Fair when my son was a kindergartner.
- 3.
More Than Anything Else first appeared in hardcover with a suggested US retail price of $15.95, and after winning the International Reading Association Award and many other honors, a paperback edition followed in 1997, the same year actor Malcolm Jamal-Warner read the book on PBS’s Storytime .
- 4.
Stepto has maintained that “the pursuit of freedom and literacy” is a “pregeneric myth” in African American culture (18). This myth, according to Stepto, determines the structure and content of much African American literature, including antebellum slave narratives and twentieth-century fiction and autobiography.
- 5.
For a discussion of the historical tendency within black communities for individuals to teach what they had learned, see Brandt 127–129.
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Chandler, K. (2020). Reading for Success: Booker T. Washington’s Pursuit of Education in Two Children’s Books. In: Conrad, R., Kennedy, L.B. (eds) Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods. Literary Cultures and Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35392-6_8
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