Artist Lois Mailou Jones as children’s books illustrator

I was looking through the box lots at the auction house when my auction buddy Janet hurried toward me. She’d found a book in another room with prints by African American artist Lois Mailou Jones.

Naturally, I dropped what I was doing and followed her. She knew that Jones was a favorite of mine, and her works were very special to me. I felt a connection to the artist after having interviewed her some years ago for a magazine article. Since I can’t afford any of her paintings, I figured that this book would be the closest I’d come to owning something with her images.

“If you don’t want it, I do,” Janet said, knowing I’m sure that I would snatch it up.

I found the book on top of some Black Americana sheet music (the faces of Amos and Andy were on the top sheet) on a table covered with magazines, books and other ephemera and papers. On the walls were movie posters, and in a glass case were shelves of books and other memorabilia about Shirley Temple, the Titanic, Little Orphan Annie and Gone With the Wind.

The Jones book had a bright red and yellow dust jacket that was worn and torn, and I could see the hard back of the book beneath it. It was titled “Great American Negroes in Verse 1723-1965,” written by Eloise Crosby Culver and illustrated by Lois Mailou Jones. Her illustration of a singing family was on the cover.

The book was published in 1966 by the Associated Publishers Inc. of Washington, DC. It was not a publishing company I was familiar with.

According to Culver’s preface, she wrote the book to let black children know that they had a history, too, that there were people who looked like them who had contributed mightily to this country. This, she believed, would induce a sense of pride and self-worth that would propel them to greatness.

A children’s book illustrated by Jones was a wonderful find for me, and I knew I had to take it home to add to my collection of children’s book illustrated by African American artists. Most of mine were newer books, including a reprint of a 1932 book by Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps.

The verses in the Jones book were sing-song, with a rhythmic flow that could just as easily be sung as spoken or read. They obviously were aimed at children but adults could also enjoy learning about such people as Crispus Attucks, the subject of the first set of verses:

“He died in the name of freedom
As he led a group that day.
The Redcoat’s aim was so true that
At his feet our good Crispus lay!”

The other heroes in the book included Richard Allen, Katherine Ferguson, Henry O. Tanner, Harriet Tubman, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Wilma Rudolph, Mahalia Jackson, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and James Meredith. What was interesting was that some of these people were still alive in 1966.

By the time Jones illustrated the book, she had been providing art for the Associated Publishers since the 1930s. The publishing house was started in 1921 by Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and Black History Month.

Fed up with paying a subsidy to have his books published by white publishers and the lack of scholarship and respect paid toward African American history, he founded his own publishing company. Researching and telling the history of his own people became the linchpin of his life.

The company produced books written by women schoolteachers for children, according to the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, Volume 2 by Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkleman. Teachers from across the country submitted poetry and other writings to him, some of which landed in both the books and his Negro History Bulletin. Jones – who in 1930 was hired as an art teacher at Howard University in Washington, where Woodson was based – got started by creating illustrations for Woodson’s Journal of Negro History.

Jones is said to have illustrated nine Associated Publishers books in the 1930s and 1940s. The first I came across in my research was “The Picture Poetry Book” by Gertrude Parthenia McBrown in 1935. McBrown was a writer for the Negro History Bulletin, and she and Jones had co-produced plays three years earlier.

The year 1938 appeared to be very prolific for her as an illustrator. She collaborated on “Negro Art, Music and Rhyme for Young Folks: Books I and II” by Helen Adele Whiting, “Negro Folk Tales for Pupils in the Primary Grades: Book I,” also by Whiting, and “The Child’s Story of the Negro” by Jane Dabney Shackelford, a teacher in the Terre Haute, IN, school system.

Others followed, including “Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers” (1940) by poet Effie Lee Newsome, who wrote a children’s column for the NAACP’s Crisis magazine in the late 1920s. Some of the poems and illustrations were reprinted in the 1999 book “Wonders: The Best Children’s Poems of Effie Lee Newsome.”

In 1941, Jones illustrated “Word Pictures of the Great” by Elise Palmer Derricotte, Geneva Calcier Turner and Jessie Hailstalk. In 1946, it was “Lilly May and Dan: Two Children of the South” by Marel Brown, published by the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention in Atlanta.

Jones was not the only artist who turned to children’s books. Many African American writers illustrated the books for both economic and other reasons, according to the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps worked together and separately on several books, including “Pipo and Fifina” (1932) – a reprint of which I picked up at a bookstore some years ago. This year at auction, I came across a battered copy of Hughes’ “First Book of Negroes.” Their books, the encyclopedia noted, were published by major houses.

At the auction, I was not the only person who desperately wanted the Jones’ book. I went tic-for-tac with another bidder and he obligingly – the auctioneer told me later – stepped back and I got the book, paying much more than I normally pay for items at auction. I’m glad he did, because the book set me off on a journey into another facet of the life of this extraordinary artist.

Now I wonder what happened to the original prints of those illustrations.