Scholastic
Jackie Carter, a publishing executive who promoted in children’s books the racial diversity she had missed growing up in a mostly white neighborhood, died on April 13 in Manhattan. She was 62.
The cause was complications of lymphoma, her husband, Barry M. Herbold, said. After learning she had the disease when she was 48, Ms. Carter mounted a photography exhibit in Manhattan in which she chronicled her resolve to remain vital and elegant while undergoing chemotherapy.
Ms. Carter’s dedication to presenting diversity in children’s books was rooted in painful memories of her own childhood in New York State. When her family, in 1960, moved from Westchester County to a mostly white area of Middletown, in Orange County, they were greeted, she said, not with housewarming gifts but with a burning cross and a petition to ban them from the neighborhood.
In school, too, she felt out of place. She told The Network Journal, a magazine for black professionals, that after she got to first grade, “I was confused, and couldn’t figure out why there weren’t any children in the books that looked like me.”
Many years later she had a similar experience as a first-grade teacher herself: She still could not find learning materials that featured nonwhite characters. So in 1975 she quit teaching and decided to devote her career to editing and publishing books that might captivate minority children and also reflect their lives.
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She started at Sesame Street magazine, then joined Scholastic in 1985 as editorial director of the early childhood division. Leaving Scholastic in 1997, she went on to work for Hyperion, Dorling Kindersley, Global Educational Books, Marvel Comics and Disney Global Children’s Book Division, where she published the Winnie-the-Pooh Nature Encyclopedia and was editorial director of Jump at the Sun, an imprint celebrating African-American culture.
Her diagnosis of stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2002 led to another inspiration: to mount an exhibition of glamorous portraits of herself, taken by a photographer friend, with a guide on how to survive grueling chemotherapy treatments. The show, at the Creative Arts Center for People with Cancer in Manhattan, was called “The It Girl’s Guide to Chemo.” She had hoped to turn it into a book but never did.
Despite the illness, she became vice president and publisher of nonfiction books for the Scholastic Classroom and Library Group in 2004. There she was responsible for several series, including “A Wicked History,” on villains in history; “Mythlopedia,” which introduced students to Greek mythology; and “24/7: Science Behind the Scenes.”
She also worked with Alfred W. Tatum, the dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, on “ID: Voice, Vision, Identity,” a reading and writing program to help African-American boys build self-esteem.
She wrote several books herself, including “One Night,” “Helping,” “Mosquito!” and “Knock, Knock.”
“My mantra is to create books that kids want to read, not have to read,” Ms. Carter said.
Jacquelyn Lynette Carter was born in Port Chester, N.Y., on June 28, 1953. Her father, William, was the first black principal in the Middletown public schools and a professional golfer. Her mother, the former Earnestine LeGrande, was a math teacher and one of only two black instructors in the school district.
Ms. Carter graduated from Hampton University in Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education and earned a Master of Science in educational instructional technology from New York University.
She had homes in Manhattan and Kinderhook, N.Y. In addition to her husband, she is survived by her sister, Dr. Sharon Carter, and her stepchildren, Laura French and Barry Herbold II.
Ms. Carter said she had learned of her lymphoma diagnosis by phone in a taxi. She was on her way to her hairdresser.
“My mom turned to me and said, ‘We don’t have to go,’” she told The New York Post in 2004. “And I said, ‘Honey, as long as I have hair, I’m going to get it done.’”
She underwent surgery, scheduled chemotherapy and called her friend Martin Mistretta, a photographer, to start creating portraits, giving him only one rule.
“I didn’t want to look like a victim,” she said.
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