In the summer of 1988, Paul Miles watched helplessly from a chair as two of his toddlers rolled a ball across the carpet of the unfinished garage he’d converted into a playroom before the accident. His skin underneath his cast itched. He’d broken his hip at work, sandblasting a bridge.
His wife had just walked out the door of the small house they rented in Virginia Beach, leaving him with their four children, all under the age of 6, until she got back from her own job. He wanted to do something fun with his kids, but it hurt to move. He picked up a piece of paper and a pencil.
He’d been spending a lot of his recovery time going through the three-volume set of the Ebony Pictorial History of Black America and became fascinated by the number of historical figures he’d never known about. He started to sketch a homemade coloring book for his kids, drawing likenesses of the people in the history series.
Now, 35 years later, Miles has written, illustrated and self-published over 50 coloring books — meticulously researched and well-illustrated, educational stories that focus primarily on lesser-known Black men and women who made positive contributions to American history.
Each book in his Ourstory Books series profiles a person. One is about murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers, while another focuses on the life of entertainer Josephine Baker. Other books’ characters range from U.S. Navy hero Doris “Dorie” Miller to astronaut Robert Lawrence and from race car driver Charlie “The Negro Speed King” Wiggins to the Tuskegee Airmen. Over the years, he’s handed them out to friends but he’s sold relatively few.
“My family for years has always told me, ‘Man, you got to get these out there. You got to get them out there,’ and I think the primary reason for the lack of sales is the promotion part,” Miles said. “I’ve never been good at promoting.”
But he’s recently found help in Rodney Jordan, a Norfolk School Board member and nephew of one of Norfolk’s favorite sons.
Rodney Jordan recently sent Miles’ latest book to government officials across the state, school board members, the state Board of Education, the governor’s office and legislators in Richmond. He’s made sure that every library in Norfolk has a copy; next, the plan is to mail copies to federal officials in Washington, he said.
“People need to see this.”
The book is about the late Joseph A. Jordan Jr., the former Norfolk city councilman, vice mayor, General District Court judge, civil rights activist and attorney who worked to dismantle the state’s poll tax in a 1966 landmark case that argued the tax set unconstitutional hurdles for Black people to vote and hold office. It went to the U.S. Supreme Court and had an impact beyond Virginia.
Joseph A. Jordan was Rodney Jordan’s uncle.
Miles and Rodney Jordan met in 2020. Jordan was on the state’s Commission on African American History Education, which was charged with examining the state’s Standards of Learning. Miles attended one of the listening sessions.
At the meeting, then-Gov. Ralph Northam said he supported more Black history in classrooms.
Miles sent an email to Jordan: “I wanted to offer my series for consideration.”
They began to correspond about the possibility, but eventually realized that it was not going to be the right time for the Ourstory Books series to be introduced into Virginia curriculums. Still, Rodney Jordan never forgot about the series; they reminded him too much of a cherished line from one of his uncle’s letters, sent in 1989:
North American and African Slavery notwithstanding, we are the beneficiaries of an immensely proud African Heritage, and we are duty bound to do all we can to help enhance that Heritage, not merely for our good, but for the good of all mankind.
Rodney Jordan believed the book series could enhance that heritage.
He commissioned Miles to create a book about his uncle, who died in 1991, in commemoration of what would have been his 100th birthday in June.
Long before he was ever familiar with the name Joseph Jordan, Miles learned he had an artistic gift. He was about 8. His younger sister had a birthday coming up. She wanted a Disney-themed party, but their mother couldn’t afford posters featuring famous cartoon characters for the walls.
“Maybe your brother can draw some Disney characters to put up for you,” Miles remembered his mom saying. “I didn’t know I could draw. I didn’t really know how to draw.”
He started with Goofy.
“They said, ‘Wow, that came out pretty good.’”
Then he tried Mickey and Donald Duck.
“That is my fondest, earliest memory — creating things for people, they actually recognized.”
A few years later in school, his class was assigned to write reports about presidents and draw their likenesses. Miles’ rendering of Ulysses S. Grant was good and his classmates got such a kick out of its quality that his teacher allowed him to draw about 10 more that were assigned to others.
“That’s when I knew I had something.”
But becoming a professional artist never seemed realistic and for the past 30 years, Miles has worked as a driver for various companies including FedEx. He works on the books in the evenings, researching and piecing together the lives of the people he plans to profile.
He spent about nine months on his book about Joseph Jordan. It begins with an explainer:
This series was created to highlight men and women of different races, ethnicities and cultures who have positively affected our race.
A fictional narrator, a librarian named Oneil, who works at the real library that is named in honor of Joseph Jordan, the Jordan-Newby Library in Norfolk, asks readers to follow her into a gateway that will transport them to the past.
A man in Army fatigues is pictured driving a jeep. Joseph Jordan was a member of the “Red Ball Express” in World War II, which transported supplies to the front lines. In 1945, his jeep struck a mine; it left him paralyzed from the waist down.
… he overcame whatever obstacles he had to and he never looked back. This time in America was not that good for Blacks, and Joseph A. Jordan, Jr. knew he had to do something.
The war hero is next seen holding a diploma while seated in a wheelchair as the book tells about his graduating from Brooklyn Law School and later studying labor law at New York University around 1960.
An image of a man drinking from a water fountain with a sign that reads “Colored” illustrates the segregation of the time, and the book then explains that Jordan won several anti-segregation lawsuits through 1961 and 1964, including the end of the poll tax.
The law stated that every voter had to pay a tax to be eligible to cast a ballot. The poll tax was an added barrier to voting and made it difficult for poor families to vote.
The book details how Joseph Jordan helped to open greater political opportunities for Black people. He was elected to the Norfolk City Council in 1968, becoming the first Black person to hold the seat since 1889; he became vice mayor in 1972.
Miles wishes his books could make it into schools.
If his books make it into the hands of children who can learn from them, he said, “it’ll be a dream come true.”
Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8139, [email protected]
