In an increasingly diverse culture and classroom, it is even more significant that both text and illustrations retain accuracy and validity for diverse readers. However, the representation of African Americans in text and/or illustration appears to be related to shifting views of race relations in American culture and society. In Culture and Conflict, authors Pescosolido, Grauerholz, and Milkie investigate illustrations or images of Blacks in U.S. childrenÆs literature between 1937 and 1993. It is not only the inclusion of negative or stereotypical imagery that can undermine a cultureÆs validity and provide negative perspectives to child readers but it is also the symbolic annihilation of African American their absence. In reviewing a variety of books from this period, the authors maintain that the relationship between text and illustration depended on larger socially-oriented views of race, maintaining the books show ôthe power struggles, reflected in racial conflict in the larger society as they relate to symbolic representationàstereotypes of blacks may not have been eliminated but changed in character, taking subtler and more indirect forms,ö (Pescosolido, et al., p. 444-45).

Sims, Rudine. Shadow and Substance. Urbana, ILL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1982.

Arbuthnot and Sutherland (p. 738) maintain that this trend of stereotypical textual and illustrative depictions of African Americans continued into the 1970s, a decade in which ômainstream publishers and book criticsö became more and more conscious of the need to pursue publication of ôpluralisticö stories. Arbuthnot (et al., p. 734) notes that white America during this era became increasingly aware of the activism of minority groups and, consequently, pub