Last year, my multi-racial extended family and I spent the Thanksgiving holiday in Washington, D.C. We planned our trip around a visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. This experience was profound.
Visitors enter on the ground floor and descend three levels. The bottom level, which covers the forcible removal of Africans and transport on slave ships to the colonies, has low ceilings and tight corridors and dim lighting to simulate the passage. The next level documents what life was like for enslaved people in the Americas. It’s less physically confined than the lower level but equally intense with many artifacts including a cabin from the years of slavery. The next level begins with the Civil War and ends with the Civil Rights movement. It includes a devastating and gutting memorial to fourteen-year-old Emmett Till.
At this point in the experience, you are back on the main entrance level, and you proceed up through three more above ground levels. How different these are than the lower levels! Light enters through the scrollwork covered windows. Everywhere is sound and color and exuberance. These three levels are a joyous celebration of the contributions African Americans have made in technology, sports, science, music, art, dance, literature, politics, and culture. It makes you want to sing and dance and cheer. It makes you grateful for the richness African Americans bring to our cultural experience.
All of us were deeply affected by the museum, and I was reminded that both kinds of African American stories—those of tragedy and those of celebration—are equally important. Not just for black and brown kids, for ALL kids. We often talk about books being mirrors of and windows to a wider world… Well, let’s do it!
Build empathy with Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes and The Stars Beneath Our Feet by David Barclay Moore.
Celebrate with Young, Gifted and Black by Jamia Wilson and Andrea Pippins and Black History Flashcards by Urban Intellectuals
TRAVEL TIP: I recommend the museum to everyone visiting D.C. If you can, I suggest dedicating two days to the museum, one for the lower three levels and another for the upper three. Tickets are hard to get so check the website for details.
The boy hunched in an empty corner of the gym while the rest of the seventh and eight grade sprint-walked across the floor to join two Challenge Day leaders in an impromptu dance party. Everyone in the room vibrated with nervous energy and twittering laughter. Everyone except the boy in the corner. 
1- A book club for girls at Forgan Middle School in Forgan, Oklahoma chose to read my latest middle grade novel, TRUTH OR DARE. For the club’s seventh and eighth grade girls, as well as their teachers, to be able to buy their own copies, they needed a sponsor. And you know who sponsored their purchase of 23 hardcover copies? Delbert, the school custodian. The idea that this lovely man stepped up to buy all those copies of TRUTH OR DARE for a group discussing girls’ body issues, self-esteem, and related topics–well, it makes my heart burst. 
2-My next middle grade novel, STAR-CROSSED, will be published by Aladdin/S&S in March 2017. It’s about a middle school production of Romeo & Juliet in which the girl playing Romeo realizes she has a crush on the girl playing Juliet. This book is very much a middle grade novel–positive, gentle, and, unlike Shakespeare’s play, a comedy. Despite its lightness and wholesomeness, STAR-CROSSED would surely have been deemed too edgy for mainstream publication just a few years ago. But when I proposed STAR-CROSSED to my publisher, Simon & Schuster, they embraced it immediately–in fact, they recently highlighted it in their Spring 2017 Library/Education newsletter as a book promoting diversity. I’m also delighted to report that Scholastic has just licensed STAR-CROSSED (with a specially designed cover) for sale through book fairs and book clubs. 
