Jerry Pinkney, children’s book illustrator who celebrated African American culture, dies at 81

“With pencil and pad in hand, I might get misplaced,” he wrote in a 2016 essay for the radio station WHYY. “I delivered to life what was inside my head, making a world the place I used to be not nervous, the place there was no yelling, no loud music, no cursing neighbors, no dyslexia, no sweaty palms earlier than studying at school, no Friday spelling exams, no bullying. . . . There have been no police sirens in my illustrated world, both, or metropolis curfews, or newspaper headlines exclaiming the lynching demise of Emmett Until, simply two years youthful than me. Actual life was scary, however in drawing, I felt secure.”