“I have a dream, too!”: The American dream in Coretta Scott King award-winning books

Parsons, Linda T., & Castleman, Michele. (2011). “I have a dream, too!”: The American dream in Coretta Scott King award-winning books. Journal of Children’s Literature, 37(1), 6-19.

These two authors present a content analysis of 33 Coretta Scott King Award winners from 2000 to 2009. They focused their very thorough analysis on the theme of dreams: specifically the quest for “the American dream” as it is lived by the African-American characters in these books. The authors, one an assistant professor at Ohio State (Parsons), and the other a doctoral student (Castleman), read these books in search of categories for the kinds of dreams the characters had. They discovered six basic themes, each containing subcategories (see Figure 1 on page 9 for the full outline). The six main themes were: Dream of Mobility, Dream of Achievement, Dream of Selfhood, Dream of Family, Dream of Remaining a Child, and Dream of Promoting Social Justice. Some books embodied more than one of these dream categories. The authors cite several examples from the books for each subcategory under the six themes. Each theme was subdivided into two subcategories, so in the end there were twelve segments to the analysis.

Reading this sort of article is usually pleasant for me, even though it is a quieter read than the kinds of articles that get me fired up about something, either in a positive or a negative way. For those of us who deeply love children’s books, reading an in-depth, richly detailed, thematically interesting analysis of a truly wonderful set of books is a quiet delight. A good article on children’s books should make me want to go out and get some of the books, and curl up in a chair with them, and this article did that.

Although many of the books which have won the Coretta Scott King Award are beautifully crafted, with beautifully drawn characters, beautiful language, and beautifully built plots, the problems and struggles and difficulties those books share with us are not all that beautiful. Slavery, discrimination, racism, prejudice, poverty, and even violence are constant themes in Coretta Scott King Award books, and they serve to point out much of America’s shameful past, and sadly, its shameful present. Reading some of these books is painful, but it’s a necessary pain. The dreams are beautiful and shining and inspiring, but the evils that fueled those dreams are all too real. We have to share both sides of the dream with school children, even though the stories are not all pleasant, and the endings are not all happy. If children can understand the evils of racism early, we might have some chance of putting an end to it. Articles like this can help me and other teachers put together text sets that could be tools to use toward that purpose.