Fredrick Lemuel "Fred" McKissack, Sr. (August 12, 1939 – April 28, 2013) was an American writer, best known for collaborating with his wife, Patricia C. McKissack, on more than 100 children's books about the history of African-Americans.
The McKissacks jointly received the biennial American Library Association Coretta Scott King – Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2014 (after Fredrick's death).
Biography
McKissack was born in 1939 to a prominent family of African-American architects in
Nashville, Tennessee
Nashville, often known as Music City, is the capital and List of municipalities in Tennessee, most populous city in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is the county seat, seat of Davidson County, Tennessee, Davidson County in Middle Tennessee, locat ...
— McKissack & McKissack, "widely regarded as the oldest African-American-owned architectural and construction firm in the United States". After high school, McKissack joined the United States Marines, before earning a degree in civil engineering from
Tennessee State University
Tennessee State University (Tennessee State, Tenn State, or TSU) is a public historically black land-grant university in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1912, it is the only state-funded historically black university in Tennes ...
. He was active in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, participating in sit-ins to end segregation.
In 1964, McKissack and Patricia Leanna Carwell married, eventually having three children. In the early 1980s, the couple began writing children's books together, focusing on African-American history, which they felt was underrepresented in children's literature. "In those days there were so few books for and about the African-American child...Black kids needed to see themselves in books."
Patricia had been a teacher and an editor of religious books. She did most of the writing while Fredrick focused on research. She said later, "He was gone most of the time. He was always into an interview trying to scrounge out some little piece of information."
McKissack was survived by three brothers and five grandchildren as well as the couple's three sons: Frederick L. McKissack, Jr., and twins Robert and John.
Selected works
The seven books below, marked with a double asterisk, were written by Fredrick and Patricia McKissack and are among the 10 works by Fredrick McKissack most widely held in
WorldCat
WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the O ...
participating libraries. (Three are among her 10 most widely held works.)
* ''The Civil Rights Movement in America from 1865 to the Present''** (1987)
* ''A Long Hard Journey: The Story of the Pullman Porter''** (1989) – 1990 Coretta Scott King Author Award
* ''
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth (; born Isabella Bomefree; November 26, 1883) was an American Abolitionism in the United States, abolitionist and activist for African-American civil rights, women's rights, and Temperance movement, alcohol temperance. Truth was ...