12 Books Published by Albert Whitman & Company on Our Site — Book Cover Mosaic

A little-known but fascinating and larger-than-life character, Mary Fields is one of the unsung, trailblazing African American women who helped settle the American West. A former slave, Fields became the first African American woman stagecoach driver in 1895, when, in her 60s, she beat out all the cowboys applying for the job by being the fastest to hitch a team of six horses. She won the dangerous and challenging job, and for many years traveled the badlands with her pet eagle, protecting the mail from outlaws and wild animals, never losing a single horse or package. Fields helped pave the way for other women and people of color to become stagecoach drivers and postal workers.

After a day of being taunted by classmates about her unruly hair, Mackenzie can’t take any more. On her way home from school, she seeks the guidance of her wise and comforting neighbor, Miss Tillie. Using the beautiful garden in her backyard as a metaphor, Miss Tillie shows Mackenzie that maintaining healthy hair is not a chore nor is it something to fear. But most importantly, Mackenzie learns that natural black hair is beautiful.

Although Bunnybear was born a bear, he feels more like a bunny. He prefers bouncing in the thicket to tramping in the forest, and in his heart he’s fluffy and tiny, like a rabbit, instead of burly and loud, like a bear. The other bears don’t understand him, and neither do the bunnies. Will Bunnybear ever find a friend who likes him just the way he is?

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved science and dance. My new picture book, published by Albert Whitman & Co., was inspired by those two passions. Isn’t the cover awesome? So blessed to have Luke Flowers as the illustrator of my counting story of dinos who like to groove. From jitterbug to disco, Cupid Shuffle to waltz, watch the dinos get down to a Jurassic beat.

His white teacher tells her all-black class, You’ll all wind up porters and waiters. What did she know? Gordon Parks is most famous for being the first black director in Hollywood. But before he made movies and wrote books, he was a poor African American looking for work. When he bought a camera, his life changed forever. He taught himself how to take pictures and before long, people noticed. His success as a fashion photographer landed him a job working for the government. In Washington DC, Gordon went looking for a subject, but what he found was segregation. He and others were treated differently because of the color of their skin. Gordon wanted to take a stand against the racism he observed. With his camera in hand, he found a way. Told through lyrical verse and atmospheric art, this is the story of how, with a single photograph, a self-taught artist got America to take notice.

Take a walk through Harlem’s Sugar Hill and meet all the amazing people who made this neighborhood legendary. With upbeat rhyming, read-aloud text, Sugar Hill celebrates the Harlem neighborhood that successful African Americans first called home during the 1920s. Children raised in Sugar Hill not only looked up to these achievers but also experienced art and culture at home, at church, and in the community. Books, music lessons, and art classes expanded their horizons beyond the narrow limits of segregation. Includes brief biographies of jazz greats Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sonny Rollins, and Miles Davis; artists Aaron Douglas and Faith Ringgold; entertainers Lena Horne and the Nicholas Brothers; writer Zora Neale Hurston; civil rights leader W. E. B. DuBois and lawyer Thurgood Marshall.

If you ran for president, you would have to do a lot of hard work. You would study the nation’s problems, tell the American people about your platform, select a running mate, and debate your opponents on live television.

Mable Jean wants to go to school. She has to walk five miles to get there, though, and her papa told her that if she can’t keep up, she’ll have to wait another year. Mable Jean asks her parents why the black children don’t have a bus, too.

A brief biography of Oseola McCarty, a hard-working washer woman who, without a formal education herself, donated a portion of her life savings to the University of Southern Mississippi to endow a scholarship fund for needy students.

In the segregated south, a young girl thinks that she can drink from a fountain marked "Whites Only" because she is wearing her white socks.

Celebrating the differences between a mother and father that blend to make the perfect combination in their daughter. An African American mother and a white father are only one reason why this family is "just right."

When her grandmother is hurt in a fall, Mary Jo must get help to the remote farm where they live.