United States Postal Service

‘The Snowy Day’ Captured in New Stamp Series

By MARIA RUSSO

SEPT. 22, 2017

On Oct. 4, the United States Postal Service will issue four stamps, part of the “Forever” series, featuring Peter, the little boy from Ezra Jack Keats’s “The Snowy Day.” The book was published in 1962. The next year, Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, and “The Snowy Day” won the Caldecott Medal. It’s a simple story: Peter wakes up, puts on a red snowsuit and plays in the snow, making tracks and snow angels and sliding down a “mountain” of snow. He puts a snowball in his pocket and is sad when, after his bath, it’s gone. But the next day he’s delighted that it has snowed again. Simple, but world-shifting: Peter was black, and no black child had ever been the protagonist of a full-color American picture book.

I can’t help wondering if King had seen “The Snowy Day,” maybe even read it to his own four children, who made such a momentous appearance in that speech. He might have found in the elegant collaged art and spare, poetic words by Keats, an American born to Polish Jewish immigrants, a glimpse of the world he was dreaming about, in which his children would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

More than half a century later, that world hasn’t arrived — not even in children’s books, where brown children are still far underrepresented, relative to their percentage of the population. Peter is still, in a sense, a figure out of a dream. But those stamps will remind us that the dream still stands strong.

THE NEW YORK TIMES