Richie’s Picks: MAIN STREET: A COMMUNITY STORY ABOUT REDLINING
Richie Partington
Richie’s Picks: MAIN STREET: A COMMUNITY STORY ABOUT REDLINING by Britt Hawthorne, Tiffany Jewell, and David Wilkerson, ill., Penguin Random House/Kokila, January 2026, 40p., ISBN: 979-8-217-00267-2
“Our house is a very, very, very fine house.”
– Graham Nash (1970)
“Redlining was the legal practice of denying or rejecting home loans based on color-coded maps. These maps were created by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the 1930s. They determined whether a neighborhood was a ‘safe’ or ‘risky’ investment for the bank. Loans were approved or denied based on these assessments. Neighborhoods where Black families, other people of color, and poor families lived were labeled as ‘high risk’ and outlined in red–hence the term redlining.”
– from the Author’s Note
“‘Olivia, your mom will be here in five minutes.’
We’re having so much fun! I’m not ready to leave this party, or my friends.
So I tell everyone about the other party: the 62nd Annual Main Street Block Party.
Our party. And I ask, ‘Will you come?’
I hope for them to say yes.
But then Alison blurts out ‘I can’t. My mom says Main Street isn’t safe!’
My stomach aches. My face is hot. My eyes fill with water.
I can’t wait to leave.
Inside the car, the houses and shops blur past as we drive home. My eyes turn to storm clouds.
Mama asks, ‘What’s up, buttercup?’
The tears and the truth fall.
‘Alison won’t come to our house because her mom said Main Street isn’t safe!’
I wait for Mama to make it right, but all she says is, ‘Oh.’”
Over the fifty years since the publication of THE POWER BROKER–Robert Caro’s 1,200+ page biography of Robert Moses–I’ve read and reread it with great personal interest. Having grown up on Long Island, where racism and redlining were rampant during the post WWII/formative years of us Boomers, Caro’s Pulitzer prize-winning masterpiece explains so well and so much, of what I personally observed as a child relating to that underlying racism: One nearby house in our then-rapidly growing neighborhood was firebombed twice, while under construction, because of the color of the family that had purchased it. Another house, a couple of blocks in the other direction, was the subject of a hateful petition drive for the same reason.
Robert Moses was a pivotal figure in government- and quasi-government actions supportive of those underlying prejudices. He was responsible for such stratagems as designing parkways with overpasses sufficiently low enough to prevent buses from the City from ever employing those parkways for transporting those people out to the beautiful State Beach parks that Moses designed on L.I.
It leads to my having a great interest in, and being extremely supportive of, this elementary school-level picture book about redlining.
In this picture book tale, Olivia’s sharp, old neighbor Ms. Effie shares the story of her parents’ struggle to obtain a bank loan to buy their house. She shows Olivia a redlined map and explains how the blue and green-colored neighborhoods on the map were places where laws and rules were “made to help our faraway neighbors who were White and wealthy.”
The clear focus on and explanation of the one historic societal issue, coupled with the book’s engaging illustrative style, makes MAIN STREET one that many relatively-young elementary students will be willing and able to digest and contemplate.
I encourage educating young people and thereby promoting a more equitable and harmonious society by purchasing this one for your kids or for your collection.
Richie Partington, MLIS
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