Preface to the LibraryPress@UF Edition by Kathleen Benson Haskins
Jim Haskins was born in 1941 in Demopolis, Alabama. He grew up in a working-class household with four brothers, two sisters, two cousins, and assorted other children whom his mother took in. “One of the places I found privacy was in books,” he wrote in an author’s statement for HarperCollins Publishers in the late 1990s. “I could be anywhere at all, but if I was reading a book, I was by myself.” He concluded that statement with these words: “Books were once—and still are—a way to find my own private world. But they have also introduced me to a world far larger than I would otherwise have experienced. I love books, and I feel very fortunate to have been able to share this love with so many people.”
Books were not easy to come by for a little Black boy in the segregated South. Jim’s mother wanted to nurture his intellectual curiosity, so she acquired an encyclopedia set, one volume at a time, by purchasing certain dollar amounts of merchandise at the local grocery store. Black people were not allowed in the Demopolis Public Library, so his mother asked a white woman for whom she cleaned to borrow books on his behalf.
In 1979 I accompanied Jim to the Demopolis Public Library, where he presented copies of several of his books for young adults to the librarian on duty. “When I was growing up, I could not enter this library,” he told her, to which she responded, “That was another time.” We didn’t realize until we turned to leave that Jim’s niece was sitting at a desk over in the corner of the main reading room with her boyfriend. Another time indeed.
Jim was educated in segregated schools and later extolled his teachers for their missionary zeal in educating their students. He recalled that they displayed photographs of African American heroes throughout the schools (and took them down when expecting a visit from white school authorities) and tried to instill intellectual curiosity and love of learning in their young charges. He attended an HBCU as well as integrated colleges, majoring, serially, in history, psychology, and social psychology but ended up teaching special education in an elementary school in Harlem.
It was the 1960s, an era of movements—for Civil Rights and Free Speech and against the Vietnam War. A newshound since childhood, when he listened with fascination as his parents discussed the articles in the weekly Pittsburgh Courier, one of the leading Black newspapers in the country, Jim followed these movements avidly and discussed them in his classroom. He was eager to provide his students with reading material on their level about current events, but he was unable to find what he was looking for.
His first teaching experience impelled him to become a writer—almost simultaneously of books for adult and young adult audiences. His first book, Diary of a Harlem Schoolteacher, was published by Grove Press in 1969. It is regarded as a classic in literature on urban education and is still available in an edition published by the New Press. In 1970, his first books for young adults, Resistance: Profiles in Nonviolence, and The War and the Protest: Vietnam, were published by Doubleday. He later wrote biographies of African American sports, entertainment, and political figures, primarily for young adult audiences.
Jim taught as well as wrote for the rest of his life. After his first teaching job at the elementary school, he taught on the high school, community college, and four-year college levels—sometimes concurrently.
His writings indirectly led to his being offered a teaching position at the University of Florida. The Children’s Literature Association was founded at the University of Connecticut in 1973 with a mission to elevate children’s literature—then often called “kiddy lit”—as a field of study. Jim was invited to speak at the ChLA’s first conference in March 1974, and he remained involved with the organization, developing an ever-expanding group of contacts, among them Dr. Joy Anderson, professor of English at the University of Florida. Dr. Anderson was influential in Jim’s being hired by the University, and he joined the English Department faculty in the fall of 1977.
Coincidentally, at the same time, Dr. Anderson was spearheading the effort of the University of Florida Libraries to acquire the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. Neither she nor Jim could possibly have foreseen that one day some of his books for children would become part of that collection.
There were few African American teachers at UF when Jim arrived. He always wore a jacket and tie and in downtown Gainesville was often mistaken for a preacher. When he explained that he was a teacher, he would be asked why he was downtown in the middle of the day. He taught Children’s Literature and Adolescent Literature and, after he was awarded tenure, a course in Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-Winning Literature. He continued to write for children, young adults, and adults, and commuted between New York City and Gainesville until his untimely death in 2005 at the age of 63. Many of his books won awards, among them the Coretta Scott King Award, the Carter G. Woodson Award of the National Council for the Social Studies, and the Jane Addams Peace Award. In 1994 the Washington Post Children’s Book Guild honored him for his body of work in nonfiction for young people.
In the year or two before he died, Jim arranged for a James Haskins Visiting Scholar Fellowship in African American Studies at UF. He also donated his professional papers and personal libraries to UF’s George A. Smathers Libraries. He imagined the James Haskins Collection in African American Literature, which comprises both books he owned and books he wrote, serving as a testament to his wide-ranging interests and love of learning. He hoped that young people of color, especially, would be inspired to believe in their own promise. He would have been delighted that LibraryPress@UF has reissued some of his books to make them available to a new generation of readers.
Kathleen Benson Haskins, 2024
