Mildred Pitts Walter, a Los Angeles schoolteacher who grew up in the Jim Crow South and wrote award-winning children’s books focusing on Black characters, filling a void in her students’ reading material, died on May 19 in Redwood City, Calif. She was 103.
Her death, at an assisted-living facility, was confirmed by her grandson, Nizam Walter.
As a kindergarten teacher in the 1950s and ’60s in South Central Los Angeles, where most of her students were, like her, Black, Ms. Walter searched for books that had Black characters with whom they could identify. The rare one, she recalled, was the Caldecott Medal-winning 1962 picture book “The Snowy Day,” by Ezra Jack Keats, a white author, which featured a young Black boy exploring his neighborhood after a snowfall.
Knowing that the federal government under President Lyndon B. Johnson had in 1968 allocated funds to encourage publishers to create more books for students like hers, Ms. Walter eventually challenged an executive at a local publishing company, Ward Ritchie Press, to fill that need.
“‘Well, write them,’ he responded,” she wrote in her autobiography, “Something Inside So Strong: Life in Pursuit of Choice, Courage and Change” (2019). “I felt he was passing the buck and told him so. But he insisted. I reluctantly agreed.”
Over the next three decades, she wrote more than 20 books that “changed the course of children’s literature,” Lin Oliver, a founder of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, which Ms. Walter also helped to found, wrote in a tribute after her death.
There was one question that Ms. Walter was often asked about her books when she talked to elementary school students, most of them white: “Why don’t you write about white people?”
Her answer: “I write about what I know best.”
In her first book, “Lillie of Watts: A Birthday Discovery” (1969, illustrated by Leonora E. Prince), Ms. Walter told the story of a shy girl in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles — four years after the riots there — who spends her 11th birthday searching for a lost cat.
In the sequel, “Lillie of Watts Takes a Giant Step” (1971, illustrated by Bonnie Helene Johnson), Lillie discovers a hero in Malcolm X, along with a new feeling of self-worth.
Ms. Walter drew on vivid childhood memories to write “Ty’s One-Man Band” (1980, with illustrations by Margot Tomes), the story of a boy who meets an itinerant disabled man who brings joy to others with the music he makes using a washboard, spoons, a pail and a comb.
Her writing in the book, Kirkus Reviews noted, was “filled with rhythms: the sound of the peg-legged man walking, the freight train passing, drumming fingers and stamping feet.” In 1983, the singer Lou Rawls read the story aloud during an episode of the PBS series “Reading Rainbow.”
Ms. Walter’s 1986 book, “Justin and the Best Biscuits in the World” (with illustrations by Catherine Stock), about a boy’s relationship with his grandfather, won the Coretta Scott King Award from the American Library Association. Ms. Walter was a finalist for the prize for “Because We Are” (1983), “Trouble’s Child” (1985) and “Mississippi Challenge” (1992), a nonfiction book about the struggle for racial justice in the state.
Pat Cummings, who illustrated four books with Ms. Walter, including “My Mama Needs Me” (1983), about a boy who helps take care of his baby sister, admired her passion for encouraging children to read and to learn about their history.
“She adamantly believed society was still plagued by pervasive racism,” Ms. Cummings wrote in an email, “but her stories were never heavy-handed or tried to preach to kids.”
Mildred Pitts was born on Sept. 9, 1922, at a logging camp in Sweetville, La. Her father, Paul Pitts, was a migrant sawmill worker, and her mother, Mary (Ward) Pitts, was a beautician and midwife.
In her memoir, Ms. Walter recalled the pain and humiliation of growing up in segregated Louisiana, where drunken white men would knock on her family’s door late at night and she had to buy shoes without knowing if they fit because white store owners refused to let Black children try them on. The only library in town was off limits to the Black residents.
After graduating from high school in 1940, she enrolled at Southern University, in Baton Rouge, where she majored in English. Strapped for cash, she would sometimes go hungry for days at a time. She took a year off to work at a shipyard in Vancouver, Wash., to earn enough money to finish college, which she did in 1944.
After earning her bachelor’s degree, she moved to Los Angeles, where she was hired as a saleswoman at a laundry business and then as a clerk for the Los Angeles Unified School District, after being rejected as a teacher.
In 1947, she married Earl Walter, a social worker who would become the chairman of the Los Angeles chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE.
She was also active in CORE, and she and Mr. Walter were part of an integrated CORE team that tested compliance with the Unruh Civil Rights Act, which the California legislature had enacted in 1959 to ban racial discrimination by businesses, including hotels and motels.
The Walters would try to obtain motel rooms for themselves and their two sons. If they were told that no rooms were available, a white family would follow them, asking for a room and often getting it.
“Later, we presented our findings to the owners and negotiated with them to change their policies,” Ms. Walter wrote in her memoir. “The Unruh Act enabled us to bring legal action against those who didn’t.”
Mr. Walter died in 1965. In addition to her grandson, Ms. Walter is survived by a son, Craig; a granddaughter; and four great-grandchildren.
In 1952, after earning her teaching certificate from California State University, Los Angeles, Ms. Walter began teaching kindergarten. By the time she wrote “Lillie of Watts,” she had contributed book reviews and essays to The Los Angeles Times.
She retired from teaching in 1970 and then moved to Denver, where she worked as an educational consultant. She also helped start the Northeast Women’s Center, to train and place women in jobs, and Colorado Black Women for Political Action, a nonprofit organization. In 1976, she also earned her master’s degree from an affiliate of Antioch College. She was inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996.
Despite some rejections, she also continued to write.
“She wasn’t one of those people who were writing all the time since she was a teenager,” Barbara Lalicki, who edited many of her books, said. “But she saw a need to fill and turned out to be good at it.”
One of Ms. Walter’s young adult novels, “The Girl on the Outside” (1982), was a fictionalized account of the violent integration of Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas in 1957. The main characters are two teenage girls — one white and the other one of the nine Black students who faced angry mobs and the Arkansas National Guard before receiving the protection of U.S. Army troops.
Empathizing with her characters wasn’t difficult, given her experience. She understood what it was like to be a target of racism.
“It was difficult to understand why we were so hated for no reason we could seem,” she wrote in her memoir. “Over and over we were told, ‘Be strong in the Lord.’ Our weapons were our quiet strength and making sure we pulled together for survival.”
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