His crayon is purple – but is Harold a black boy?

Is Crockett Johnson’s Harold from “Harold and the Purple Crayon” a coloured child?

If you will have purchased any of the “Harold” books published within the last 25 years or the brand new film with Zachary Levi As an adult, Harold, your answer might be no.

In 1998, HarperCollins published a brand new edition of the “Harold” books – seven picture books by which the title character stands on a blank page and draws the world and his adventures in it together with his purple crayon.

The printed copies of the brand new editions are larger, and the publisher has modified the covers. For example, he modified the colour of Harold's sweater from white to blue and adjusted Harold's original tanned skin color to a light-weight peach—although Harold continues to be tanned contained in the books.

Her decision probably influenced the makers of “Harold and the Purple Crayon” TV showwhich aired on HBO from 2001 to 2002, used similar colours for Harold's skin tone, likely prompting the makers of the brand new film to solid a white actor within the role of Harold.

In other words, the light-skinned Harold of 1998 has change into the usual portrayal.

Fifty years ago, once I was a bit of white boy, I read Harold as white too. When I saw the brand new covers in 1998, I didn't think that they had modified Harold's race. Now, nonetheless, I'm not so sure.

As Johnson’s biographer and a scholar of kids's literatureI began fascinated with Harold's race once I was researching: “How to Draw the World: Harold and the Purple Crayon and the Making of a Children's Book Classic”, which will probably be released in November 2024.

I discovered that not everyone saw Harold as white—perhaps not even Johnson himself. When cartoonist Chris Ware, who can also be white, was a young boy, he read Harold as black. When picture book creator Bryan Collier, who’s black, was a boy, he read Harold each as Black and “imagined he was Harold.”

They are usually not the one ones.

So is Harold black? And what wouldn’t it mean if he was?

Printing inks within the Nineteen Fifties

Unlike other picture books of the Nineteen Fifties, which usually used three or 4 colours, Harold and the Purple Crayon used only two colours: brown and purple.

The Offset color lithography printing process The colours used for picture books on the time required that every color be added in a separate phase: within the case of “Harold,” a purple and a brown phase.

Johnson made two versions of every double-page spread. On one, he traced the trail of the purple crayon and wrote “PURPLE” to point that the black lines ought to be printed in purple.

On the opposite sheet of paper, he wrote “BROWN” for the outline of Harold’s body and the text he had glued to every sheet.

Finally, he painted Harold's face and hands with a blue watercolor. And he wrote “10% BROWN ON BLUE” to point that a light-weight brown could be printed over the blue areas via a filter that will filter out 90% of the brown.

If the printer applied each of those colours in two separate steps—one for purple, one for brown—the ultimate page would show a boy with brown skin and brown outlines drawing with a purple crayon.

Harold is a brown-skinned child within the truest sense of the word. But skin color isn’t race. And it's possible that Johnson limited himself to 2 colours to maintain costs down.

But as a cartoonist and comic historian Mark Newgarden told me that it was unusual to make use of 10% brown to create “Caucasian 'flesh.'” Back then, white skin would have been created using a magenta screen. Within Johnson's two-color printing plan, Newgarden continued, “paper white and 10% of that violet (close to pink) is more visually consistent with the typical depiction of Caucasian 'flesh'” in children's books of the Nineteen Fifties.

The alternative subsequently deliberately fell on brown.

The rarity of using 10% brown suggests that by making a toddler of color the important character of his Harold books, Crockett Johnson could have been on the forefront of mainstream American children's literature. He created a black protagonist nine years before Ezra Jack Keats' book “The snowy day”, the primary title with a black protagonist to win the Caldecott Medal, the annual award for the “most outstanding” children’s picture book published within the United States

Subtle messages of racial equality

There are other reasons to consider that Harold's skin color was intentional.

Johnson fought for civil rights for the reason that Forties. In a cartoon from 1940made Johnson satirized the racist propaganda of Gone with the Wind – just six weeks before the film won eight Oscars. In 1944, Johnson allowed the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax to make use of a three-strip sequence of his comic stripBarnaby” which takes aim on the racist tax. And in 1945 Johnson had joined the Committee to End Jim Crow in Baseball.

In 1943, Ursula Nordstrom – Johnson’s editor at Harper’s – rejected an anti-racist children’s book written by Johnson’s wife. Ruth KraussIt was an anthropological take a look at prejudice that, she hoped, would educate children concerning the dangers of fascism and anti-Semitism.

Krauss and Maurice Sendak nevertheless managed to smuggle a message of racial equality into their 1956 book:I need to color my bathroom blue“In one scene, Sendak draws the child's friends in a rainbow of colors, which, as Krauss later said, was “a transparent statement on racial integration.””

Since Sendak and Krauss were working on “I Want to Paint My Bathroom Blue” while Johnson was working on “Harold,” it’s quite possible that their efforts inspired him to make a relatively subtle political statement by coloring Harold brown.

But contemporary reviewers did not notice the tan of Harold's skin. Perhaps excessive subtlety is in charge. Or perhaps the reviewers are usually not a representative sample of the book's enthusiastic readers. Within a month of its publication, Harold and the Purple Crayon sold the primary edition of 10,000 copiesand the publisher ordered a brand new edition of seven,500 more copies. Surely a few of those 1000’s of readers saw Harold as black.

A color that gives political protection

Ambiguity may also be politically useful.

Johnson wrote the story while under investigation by the FBI. In the early Nineteen Fifties, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover thought Johnson was a “hidden communist”, but in 1954 he thought he is perhaps a loyal enough citizen to change into an informant. Hoover assigned two FBI agents to approach Johnson. For a couple of months they sat in a automotive outside his Connecticut home and watched him; he refused to return out and confer with them, and eventually they gave up, 4 months before the discharge of “Harold and the Purple Crayon.”

Since advocates of racial equality within the Nineteen Fifties risked being branded “communists,” the subtlety of 10% Brown could have given Johnson and his publisher political backing. Given what Johnson was going through on the time, a subtle political statement would have been a sensible alternative.

It can also be a powerfully inclusive alternative. Racial ambiguity makes it easier for readers of any race to discover with Harold. I don't know if the longer term musical genius Prince or the longer term U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove read Harold as a coloured child, but each said that “Harold and the Purple Crayon” was their favorite childhood book. Harold was the rationale Prince adopted Lila as its characteristic color.

Because Harold's race is ambiguous, adults or children of various backgrounds may discover with Harold and examine him as a member of their racial or ethnic group.

Harold's crayon is the embodiment of imaginative possibilities. And Harold is whoever you would like him to be.