This book offers the first history of the Council on Interracial Books for Children (CIBC), an activist organization that was a pioneering force in developing multicultural education and challenging a white supremacist education system. The organization was created out of the Civil Rights Movement in 1964, but its activism developed alongside Black Power activists’ calls for self-determination and the revolutionary power of education, and it continued to work with a range of grassroots activist groups throughout its existence into the 1980s. One of its founders, Nancy Larrick, sought to highlight the issue of the “all white world of children’s books” in 1964, and over the next two decades the CIBC supported and promoted the publication of children’s literature by authors and illustrators of color, as well as championing an education that catered to the needs of all children. A history of the CIBC’s activism establishes the interrelations between children’s literature and grassrootsactivism in the United States, as education became fundamental to the culture wars between the right and left.

Nick Batho is Honorary Fellow at Durham University, UK.