Lil Free Bird Library
The Lil’ Free Bird Library orients Black children and their families toward the rich canon of children’s literature authored by Black women writers. Grounded in the historical Black women’s literary renaissance of the 1970’s and the informal networks of women who gathered to write and think in sisterhood, Ashley’s collection is composed of vintage books that have been deacquisitioned by public libraries. This grassroots effort decenters institutional libraries as the primary locations of free books for Black children, while honoring the library, and Black librarians, as key to our communities. Thinking with and beyond the library as system, it assembles a hyperlocal archive of books from this Black children’s literary canon not typically available for checkout at the local libraries in the city of Inglewood, Ashley’s childhood library system: 1) Inglewood Public Library, 2) Crenshaw Imperial Branch Library, and 3) Morningside Park Library - which was permanently closed until recently.
Ashley shares these books with Black children and their kin through Lil’ Free Bird Forest Gatherings (founded in 2023) in South LA, anchored during winter and summer seasons when Black folks’ rhythms and traditions of gathering are at their peak. This work is embedded within Ashley’s larger project, Grassroots Morning Garden, which explores: the everyday, place attuned practices of Black children and their maternal kin as a project of Black feminist study. This work at its foundation seeks to explore the multitude of ways Black children, their kin, and their extended networks of care find sanctuary in the landscapes of South Los Angeles, California—the ancestral, unceded territory of the Tongva people.
Since autumn 2018, Ashley has organized forest circles for mothers and babies at sites such as Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area and Stoneview Nature Center. Through the Grassroots Morning Garden project extant models of community based, caregiver supports, which often involve systems of eligibility and compliance, are re-imagined in collaboration with the folks they intend to serve. Better said, this work is part of a larger ecosystem that makes a home for the stories, memories, and traditions that nourish a Black childhood imaginary - past, present, and future.
Why this project now?
In the early 20th century, Black communities could not access books due to lack of investment in their communities, segregated libraries, and the conditions of the deeply rural places they inhabited. Black folks soon took matters into their own hands, though, building networks of care around Black children’s literacy. Examples of their grassroots efforts include, community bookmobiles and book basket drop offs at rural elementary schools.
The Lil’ Free Bird Library builds on this history, which ruptures the present, through a hyperlocal, community based effort in South Los Angeles, CA where gentrification and development are pushing out Black families and Black businesses, while the city invests in library renovation - for who? Thinking with June Jordan’s Life Studies, the Lil’ Free Bird Library sees the possibility outside of the institutional library system, where the streets expand the field, where learning and resistance are cultivated, and where extended kinship systems blossom; we do not wait for somebody to remember us (Jordan 2018). The Lil’ Free Bird Library grounds itself in a Black Feminist ethic of care that foregrounds, and nourishes, Black children’s worldmaking through a literary legacy that views them as capable in their own right, giving care to and developing a rootedness within their communities.
Ashley J. May curates the work of Black women writers for children’s story circles in Los Angeles. Jess makes quilts for mutual aid and grassroots community fundraising. Together they are raising $3,000 with a quilt raffle to fund the Lil’ Free Bird Library for Black children lead by Ashley.
By coming together as an extended community around a quilt, we can create the grassroots fundraising we wish was readily available to folks working with the rich legacies of Black women writers and networks of care for Black children.
Purchasing vintage books by Black women authors deaquisitioned from libraries to continue to build the Free Lil’ Bird collection.
Acquire a book wagon and travel system to increase the mobility and accessibility of Ashley’s work in and around Los Angeles.
A guest fund to program Black women authors to join community gatherings of the Lil’ Free Bird Library.
A long term archival storage solution consisting of acid free book sleeves and boxes for the vintage books to preserve this collection for future work.
Purchasing specific books for Lil’ Free Bird book bundles (view the specific curated bundles below) to distribute to Black communities inorder to embed wider access to these authors beyond the gatherings Ashley can lead.
Travel expenses for Ashley and collaborators to present this work at conferences and to Black communities alongside temporary installations of the library and signature quilt with the names of Black women authors.
Minimal production costs for the custom signature quilt (made by Public Library Quilts and the team of volunteer embroiderers) created to visually and materially mark the names, and stories, of Black women writers in the library collection which will be a key component of Ashley’s community outreach work.
Bringing Stories and Songs to Young Children
Learn More about the Kin Folk Archive Quilt