Dorothy Sterling, 95, Children’s Author, Dies. Wrote about black history.
Dorothy Sterling, whose more than 35 books for children and adults included some of the first nonfiction works about black history for young readers, notably “Freedom Train,” about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, died on Monday at her home in Wellfleet, Mass. She was 95.
The death was confirmed by her daughter, Anne Fausto-Sterling.
A New Yorker with a passion for trees, flowers and bugs, Ms. Sterling found many of her subjects while following up on questions about the natural world posed by her two children. While casting about for a biographical subject, she found inspiration in Tubman and her work for the Underground Railroad, which led to the groundbreaking “Freedom Train” in 1954, as the civil rights movement gathered momentum. Her research for that book using the Schomburg collection of the New York Public Library resulted in a series of books designed to introduce young readers to black history. These included “Captain of the Planter: The Story of Robert Smalls” (1958), about a former slave who captured a Confederate gunboat and later became a congressman from South Carolina, and “Lucretia Mott: Gentle Warrior” (1964), a biography of that Quaker abolitionist.
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The death was confirmed by her daughter, Anne Fausto-Sterling.
A New Yorker with a passion for trees, flowers and bugs, Ms. Sterling found many of her subjects while following up on questions about the natural world posed by her two children. While casting about for a biographical subject, she found inspiration in Tubman and her work for the Underground Railroad, which led to the groundbreaking “Freedom Train” in 1954, as the civil rights movement gathered momentum. Her research for that book using the Schomburg collection of the New York Public Library resulted in a series of books designed to introduce young readers to black history. These included “Captain of the Planter: The Story of Robert Smalls” (1958), about a former slave who captured a Confederate gunboat and later became a congressman from South Carolina, and “Lucretia Mott: Gentle Warrior” (1964), a biography of that Quaker abolitionist.