“We want to go to the museum and see black and brown people,” Tanya Nixon-Silberg of Wee The People told children during a social justice story time that was part of the “Give the Gift of Black Children’s Literature” event at the Frugal Bookstore in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood yesterday. “We want to see people like us.”
She read the book “Milo’s Museum” by Zetta Elliott and Purple Wong, and talked with the children about equity in representation in our museums. Then she led the kids in drawing pictures of what they’d like to see in their own museum.
Nixon-Silberg and Francie Latour are two moms who founded Wee The People to teach children about protest, racism, class, xenophobia, gentrification, gender and difference through visual and performing arts so “that kids can engage on their level.”
“It came out of us wanting to go to a protest and realizing they’re not really family friendly,” Nixon-Silberg told me earlier this year.
Their first event—a family march for social justice—was in spring 2016. They often appear at libraries and children’s events. During the Porchfest in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood in July, they hosted a “Protestival” at Boston’s Mozart Park that offered music, stenciling T-shirts, and “Bridges Not Walls.” Kids were invited to protest Donald Trump’s planned wall along the United States’ border with Mexico by building a giant wall with boxes and knocking it down and building it again and knocking it down again and building it again and knocking it down again.
Previously: “Tearing Down The Wall At Wee The People’s ‘Protestival.’”
Photos copyright 2017 Greg Cook.
