Children’s author Dorothy Sterling dies
Published 10:30 pm Sunday, December 14, 2008
Dorothy Sterling, a significant figure in 20th-century children’s literature for her well-researched portrayals of historical black Americans written decades before multiculturalism became mainstream, died Dec. 1 at her home in Wellfleet, Mass. She was 95.
A self-described accidental historian, Sterling wrote more than 35 books, among the best known of which is “Freedom Train: The Story of Harriet Tubman.” Published in 1954 and still in print, it was one of the first full-length biographies of a historical black figure written for children.
The author drew attention to more obscure but important figures in “Captain of the Planter: The Story of Robert Smalls” (1958), the first children’s biography of the slave who captured a Confederate gunboat during the Civil War. “The Making of an Afro-American: Martin Robison Delany” (1971) helped stir interest in the little-known abolitionist, Harvard-educated physician and early proponent of black nationalism.
In the mid-1960s, Sterling testified before a congressional committee headed by Adam Clayton Powell Jr., D-N.Y., on racial bias in textbooks and helped form the Council on Interracial Books for Children, which worked to improve the portrayal of minorities in children’s books.
Sterling, who was white, developed an interest in black American history after reading the works of radical historians such as Herbert Aptheker and W.E.B. Du Bois.
Sterling completed her last book, a memoir called “Close to My Heart” (2005), when she was 90 and nearly blind.
She is survived by two children, Peter Sterling of Philadelphia and Anne Fausto-Sterling of Providence, R.I.; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
