Check out the cover above. It’s from the pilot issue of Cricket magazine which appeared nearly 43 years ago in September 1973. What do you notice? If you said “diversity” I won’t point out that you probably figured that out from the title of this blog post. You see, today we aren’t at all surprised when we see children with different skin tones on the covers of books or magazines, but back in the early 1970s this was unusual. In fact, the illustrator of the pilot issue, who was also Cricket’s very first art director, Trina Schart Hyman, is recognized as being among the first white American illustrators (after Ezra Jack Keats) to incorporate black characters into her illustrations regularly.
See below for some other illustration by Trina Schart Hyman that appeared in Cricket magazine over the years. Thanks to Trina and the founders of Cricket, children of all colors could find themselves in the pages of a quality magazine way back in the 1970s . Now that’s a legacy worth celebrating.
September 1978
September 1974
