14 Facts About Tom Feelings

Tom Feelings was an artist, cartoonist, children's book illustrator, author, teacher, and activist.

Tom Feelings focused on the African-American experience in his work.

Tom Feelings was the first African-American artist to receive a Caldecott Honor, and was the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1982.

Tom Feelings was born on May 19,1933, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York.

Tom Feelings studied cartooning at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School from 1951 to 1953 and, after serving in the Air Force working in the Graphics Division, returned to New York to study illustration at the now-renamed School of Visual Arts from 1957 to 1960.

In 1960 Tom Feelings illustrated The Street Where You Live, a four-color comic for the NAACP's pamphlet on voter registration.

Tom Feelings moved to Tema, Ghana, in 1964 and served as illustrator and consultant for the African Review, a magazine published by the Ghanaian government, until 1966.

In 1967, Tom Feelings illustrated Crispus Attucks and the Minutemen, the third in Bertram Fitzgerald's Golden Legacy series of comic books about black history that eventually included sixteen volumes and was published until 1976.

Crispus Attucks, the first casualty of the American Revolution, was one of the historical figures that Feelings included in the Tommy Traveler comic strip.

Tom Feelings was married to fellow children's book author and his frequent collaborator Muriel Tom Feelings from 1969 to 1974.

Tom Feelings was an artist in residence and professor of art at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC from 1990 to 1996.

Tom Feelings died aged 70 on August 25,2003, in Mexico, where he had been receiving treatment for cancer.

Tom Feelings was a 1972 Caldecott Medal Honor recipient with his wife Muriel Tom Feelings for their book Moja Means One: Swahili Counting Book.

In 1979, Tom Feelings won his first Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award for Something on My Mind.