Part of my morning reading always includes the online magazine Slate, and today I discovered that the parent company, The Washington Post, had added something new. A magazine, The Root, “that provides thought-provoking commentary on today's news from a variety of black perspectives.”

Okay, doesn’t the title seems a little cliché, and the timing of the debut, well, insincere? Does it take a black man running successfully for president for black perspectives to find a forum?

Or am I wrong. Is my reaction cynical? Am I too inclined (given the season) to see slavishness and pandering where there is only coincidence?

It’s not that we don’t need a forum for black experience and voices. And after all the editor-in-chief is Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. His (and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s) eight-volume, 4,000-entry, completely stupendous African American National Biography is coming out next month from Oxford.

And the title no doubt references the interactive genealogical section that the site also hosts. Through AfricanDNA.com (co-founded by Gates) African Americans can trace their ancestry in a number of different ways, including DNA testing.

The website states that “The Root aims to be an unprecedented departure from traditional American journalism, raising the profile of black voices in mainstream media and engaging anyone interested in black culture around the world.”

We welcome their perspectives and wish them well.

On a personal note, I’ve been collecting great books about African American issues for the last couple of months in anticipation of Black History
Month. Yes, I’m a couple of days early, but here’s the first.

Andrea Cheng has written and illustrated a very unusual book, Where the Steps Were (WordSong, 978-1-932425-88-8) about an ordinary class of third graders, their always extraordinary questions, and the teacher who guides them. Miss D. takes the class through lessons on American history, with an emphasis on the experiences and contributions of blacks. Five of the children narrate the year in poems.

CARMEN
Rosa Parks

Harriet Tubman,
she came before Lincoln,
but then how did Rosa Parks
fit in?
Miss Parks
just died,
Miss D. says.
—And she was a slave?
—No, she was a seamstress
who wanted to sit
in her seat on the bus.
We find 1955
on my time line.
Dang,
that was about one hundred years
after slavery.
That’s the year I was born,
Miss D. says.
—So when you were little,
we couldn’t have sat together
on the bus?

The children also talk about personal concerns and family matters.

JONATHAN
Everything Dies

Grams had a husband once
and so did my mom
but their husbands died.
Everything dies
like these cicadas
all over the playground.
Simon’s dad
was murdered one day
and so was Lincoln
in that theater
and Martin Luther King
talking about dreams.

There is additional tension as their school is to be demolished at the end of the year.

JONATHAN
Keys

Mr. O’Leary
has all the keys,
every last one
to every last door
in our school,
even the bathrooms
and the boiler room
where he took me and Anthony
to show us
all that heat.
What’s he going to do
with those keys
when they tear our school
down?

Cheng’s sister teaches third grade in Cincinnati, and the book is based on her experience. The class takes a field trip to a farm, and finally to a theater to see a play. There, history comes home to roost as the children, sitting in the balcony, are accused without evidence of spitting on the crowd below. Back in their classroom—having missed the play—the children write letters to the theater manager, asking him if their skin color had anything to do with their presumed guilt.

Where the Steps Were is fascinating, heartbreaking, and hilarious. It’s an extraordinary collection of voices of ordinary children. Our ordinary (not) children.