The formation of self-identity is a process each of us must go through on our journey to adulthood. The development of a system by which to lead our adult lives is difficult for all children, but especially for African American children. In addition to defining their personal character, they must define themselves in terms of their culture and nationality – African American and American. One of the ways in which black children create their self-identity is through the illustrations they see in the literature they are exposed to. We look to African American children’s books to help promote self-esteem, cultural identity, and pride for African American children. As books are read to them, children concentrate on the images, and become subject to the impressions these images create. Children’s books that are authentic to African American culture, physicality and intelligence are few and far between. With consideration to our theme, “Black Literary Contemplations on Thomas Jefferson and Western Enlightenment Ideologies of Race and Humanity” and Thomas Jefferson’s Query XIV, it is my belief that the images in children’s literature are important to development of self- identity and esteem in African American children. In Query XIV, in his comparison of whites and blacks, Thomas Jefferson commented on the beauty of whites and blacks, and critiqued blacks because of their “immovable veil of black” and lack of flowing hair. He then stated that black men favored white women over black women as
“uniformly as is the preference of Oran-ootans for the black women over those of their own species…. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior…. the improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed