Brian Lehrer: With us now is Jacqueline Woodson, perhaps best known for her 2014 book Brown Girl Dreaming, a memoir of her childhood written in verse which won the national book award. She grew up in South Carolina and Brooklyn in the 1960s and '70s, living with what she has called the remnants of Jim Crow and a growing awareness of the civil rights movement at that time. She says one of her first pieces of writing as a child was a poem about Martin Luther King that the adults around her couldn't believe she wrote because it was that good for a kid.

Woodson has written about 30 books in all for children, adolescents, and adults. She's won many awards. Maybe you also know Another Brooklyn or Red at the Bone, or If You Come Softly or one of her others. Jacqueline Woodson, thanks so much for joining us for Martin Luther King Day. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jacqueline Woodson: Thank you, so good to be back.

Brian Lehrer: Can you tell us more about the poem about Dr. King that you wrote as a kid? You were born in '63, I believe, so I'm guessing he had already been assassinated by then?

Jacqueline Woodson: No. King was assassinated in '68. I thought you were saying '63. Yes, he was long assassinated by the time I wrote that poem, which was in the '70s when I was in the fifth grade. I remember the beginning of it. Black brothers, Black sisters, all of them were great. No fear, no fright, but a willingness to fight. In big fine houses live the whites, and little old shacks live the Blacks, but the Blacks were smart, and in fear, they took no part. One of them was Martin with a heart of gold, not like white bigots with hearts colder than cold.

Why I remember it so well is because I ended up having to recite it a bunch of times, but it goes on. My clearest memory of it is that my teacher's one note, one editorial change was that I should say some white bigots, that I shouldn't say white bigots. I added the word some. I was so stunned that it was getting attention, that she was paying attention to this poem. Then it went on to win an all-school contest at PS106. I won a Scrabble game. That was the prize.

Brian Lehrer: That's great and appropriate that it was a word game, I guess, in your case. Do you remember at that time, at that age, what it was about Dr. King as an individual or the movement in general that was most with you at that age?

Jacqueline Woodson: By then the movement felt like it was in the far past, but it was part of the continuum. I was growing up where the Black Panthers were really loud, and say it loud, I'm Black and I'm proud, and all the Black pride that had come out of that part of the movement. We were being taught about King and the civil rights movement in school. It felt like something that had happened a long time ago.

Even though I was born in the midst of it all happening, it didn't feel like it was something very present, but it felt like something that had a huge impact on who I was at that moment in Brooklyn. We were always talking about King in school. We were celebrating him. Of course, MLK Day wasn't a legal holiday yet, but there was a lot of attention paid to the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, and, of course, Rosa Parks.

Brian Lehrer: What you call in your bio, the remnants of the Jim Crow south, which I guess refers to your first few years of childhood when you lived in Greenville, South Carolina, it was remnants, I guess, because it wasn't technically Jim Crow anymore. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had been passed by then. What are some of your memories of what you would call those remnants as you experienced them?

Jacqueline Woodson: My grandmother would go to the back of the bus automatically. That was the thing. We would get on the bus and we would walk to the back of it. I didn't understand at that point that that's what that was about. She had grown up going to the back of the bus and that "law" had been changed, but in terms of how physical bodies reacted to it, it was still there. There were certain stores that she would never go into that she had not been allowed to go into. She's like, no, I'm not shopping there now that we are "allowed" to shop there. We lived in Nicholtown. It was still completely segregated. When you went downtown, that's when you saw Black and white folks engaging-- not engaging, but in the same spaces.

Brian Lehrer: After your family moved to Brooklyn, you would go back and forth because your grandmother was still down in Greenville?

Jacqueline Woodson: Yes. It was kind of the thing. Many people who were part of the great migration did. Our families moved north and in the summer we would go back to the place from whence we came and spend the time with the relatives there. We would spend many summers in Greenville.

Brian Lehrer: Was that like a jolt? Or we don't want to overestimate how not racist New York was. Was it a jolt as you would go back and forth?

Jacqueline Woodson: It wasn't because it was something I had always known. I grew up in Bushwick which was predominantly Black and Latino. There were very few whites. It was during white flight, so white people were getting out of there. I wasn't engaging with a lot of white folks in Brooklyn either, excuse me, except my teachers mainly. The difference in Greenville was the cultural and the geographic difference. People said we talk like New Yorkers, and we're like, "No, we talk like the people on television." In terms of race, it didn't feel outside for me.

Brian Lehrer: You said that, as a kid, prior to fifth grade, you liked to make up not just stories, but outright lies. Was that from having such an active imagination, the Jacqueline Woodson who would grow into the writer, or did you just want to get away with stuff?

Jacqueline Woodson: Both. I think that's such a great question. It was both. love telling stories. I love engaging with people that way and seeing the wonder that came when I had these fantastic stories that kept them listening to me. It felt like my own life wasn't that interesting that I had to exaggerate it to make it something that would interest others, but I just love story and I loved getting away with it. I loved when I told crazy stories about what I'd done and people believed it. I guess I did it well back then.

Brian Lehrer: Did you ever think of becoming a politician instead of a writer? No, I'm just kidding. You have written, for those who don't know your work, all kinds of stories about all kinds of people. You care about diversity and having different kinds of people, certainly young, Black, and brown characters, so kids of color can see themselves reflected in literature. You've talked about that, but I don't think you'd call yourself an activist exactly. Correct me if I'm wrong, but how did the ideas of writing for equity and writing for artistry intersect for you if that's something you even think about?

Jacqueline Woodson: I do consider myself an activist. I consider myself an activist through my writing because it's a way of getting myself first to think about something other than what is or other than what we believe to be true all the time. I started writing because I love writing, but also I started writing books with people of color because I was growing up and those books weren't in our libraries in our classrooms. I didn't understand why my existence as a person of color was erased from literature. At that time, did I know that that was activism, that I was activated to do that?

No, I didn't, but I knew I was upset about it and I knew I wanted to change it. I think when you look at what ignites people to do the work that they do to change the world, that's where it starts, right? That point of something not feeling the way it should feel or being the way it should be. I thought the idea of myself not in the world made me feel illegitimate. I wanted the Black experience to be legitimate in the world and writing it into the narrative would do that.

Brian Lehrer: I see that just before the pandemic, you spent about two years going around to different places representing Young People's Literature, and you focused mainly on Title I schools, meaning schools with a large population of kids in poverty, and on juvenile detention centers. Why'd you pick those? I'm sure our viewers and listeners would love to hear about that.

Jacqueline Woodson: I was a national ambassador for Young People's Literature, a position that Jason Reynolds now holds. You get to decide what your platform will be. I decided it was going to be reading equals hope times change. You read, you become hopeful, and you have the tools to change the world. I wanted to go into Title I schools and juvenile detention centers because I knew those were places where young people might not ever have the opportunity to meet a living writer and talk about craft, talk about story, talk about the importance of their own existences, their own bodies in the world. It was amazing. I just met so many amazing young people in those spaces. Hopefully, we'll hear from them. We'll see their books in the world at some point.

Brian Lehrer: I think it's a sign of your own openness that I saw you quoted, saying, "Well, maybe you were there to teach them but you also learned so much from them." Yes?

Jacqueline Woodson: It is so true. They're so wise. I was talking to someone yesterday about the importance of just listening to young folks. They have so much to say, especially now. For me to just be able to be in a space with them and open the dialogue in which they realize they're safe to speak, to talk about things that they might otherwise have not felt safe to talk about. When I was growing up, my uncle was incarcerated and we weren't allowed to talk about it. There was so much shame around it. I knew nothing about the prison industrial complex, mass incarceration, none of this.

I just knew that my uncle was incarcerated. I knew other people who had family members that were incarcerated. I realized so many of these young people had those similar experiences so I go in there and read my book, Visiting Day, which is about a girl whose dad is in prison, and suddenly, all these kids realize, "Oh, here's a green light, I can actually talk about this thing that I've been hiding and feeling ashamed about," because I've set the tone as the writer, with the literature, with my own body, with a similar experience. I've said, "Okay, this is okay to talk about."

Brian Lehrer: Here's a green light. What a great little phrase you dropped in there. It's accurate to say we live in a time of activism for social justice, for racial justice that's probably greater than anything since Martin Luther King's Day, since the 1960s. Is it influencing either what you read or what you write in the last couple of years?

Jacqueline Woodson: It's definitely made me think harder about the stories I want to read. I want to read stuff where people have something to say. I've never been engaged with stories where there's a whole lot of navel-gazing anyway but I am much more intentional about what I read. I feel like my time is shorter too. In terms of my own writing, I've always been committed to social justice.

That hasn't changed so much. It's always been the challenge of finding the right language, finding the love language that people can hear. I think now, more than ever, there's so much noise. There's so much outside noise. There's also the pushback against that love language and that pushback against social justice. I do find myself being much more thoughtful and intentional about how I'm telling stories, and again, like I said, what I'm reading.

Brian Lehrer: Jacqueline, one of the things going on these days, as I'm sure you know, might be called a war on writing with attempts to censor the 1619 project, what some people call critical race theory, even if they misinterpret entirely and sometimes willfully what it is. I wonder if you are feeling that as a writer either with respect to your own work or just as you look out at the world.

Jacqueline Woodson: It's such a great question. First and foremost, I have to give my flowers to Nicole Hannah Jones who's holding down the floor on so much of the pushback and hatred she's getting for telling the truth. I think that I have seen-- I'm censored in a lot of places. One thing I think about is if I was growing up today, would I have gotten all of the class learning I got about Martin Luther King Jr. because people would say this is something that we don't want taught in our classrooms because it might make our white kids feel bad. That's what the dialogue is, that's what the argument is.

Books like The Story of Ruby Bridges are being struck from the reading lists, Brown Girl Dreaming has been challenged. A couple of my books, but that one was surprising to me in that it's about American history and people are pushing back against American history told from the point of view of the non-white bodies that lived it. It's exhausting but the work has always been exhausting.

The only thing I can say is we have to keep speaking up, we have to keep reading those books, we have to keep demanding them in our classrooms, we have to get on the school boards because people on school boards are getting threatened, their lives are getting threatened for bringing a book, like The Story of Ruby Bridges, into the classroom. It's bananas but it makes perfect sense because when this kind of change is happening, people get very fearful.

We see in this that words and books are very powerful. For me, as a writer, I just want the books to get into the hands of the young people who need them so that they have the tools for understanding the context of the world they're living in now. It's heartbreaking and it's exhausting and it's exciting. We know where the struggle is, we know where the fight is, and we know the work that we need to do to make this country better.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have any story of engaging with a particular school district or whoever it would be over an attempt to ban Ruby Bridges or Brown Girl Dreaming or anything?

Jacqueline Woodson: A friend of mine in Long Island was on her school board when they were talking about taking Brown Girl Dreaming off the list and she was able to be there and fight against it. That's the thing about it, we don't know where books are getting challenged or taken off of shelves or out of classrooms because we're not there and they're not getting the press. If some school in a small town in upstate New York decides to pull every book by a non-white author off the shelf and no one is there to speak out, we don't know. I remember From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun, and this is years ago, it was given out to a whole school and some parent complained about it. This is one of my books.

The principal over the PA system said everyone had to bring their book back and return it and they got two books back out of like 150. That sense of someone saying you can't do this or you shouldn't do this is, of course, sometimes going to make people want to do it more, but if the books don't even make it as far as the hands of the young people, then how can they ever begin to push back against the pushback?

Brian Lehrer: Before you go, do you want to say anything about your brand new book just released this month, The Year We Learned To Fly?

Jacqueline Woodson: I have to drop Virginia Hamilton's name who was a wondrous and wonderful writer. I do feel like The Year We Learned To Fly would not be here without her book, The People Could Fly. It's a story about kids getting themselves free by using their imagination, so we're back to the beginning of this interview. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: With the beginning, we end. Jacqueline Woodson, thank you so much for participating in our Martin Luther King birthday celebration.

Jacqueline Woodson: Thank you, Brian. It's great to talk to you.

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