May Justus (May 12, 1898 – November 7, 1989) was an American author of numerous children's books, almost all of which were set in Appalachia and reflect the traditional culture of her native East Tennessee.
[1][2] Traditional storytelling and major works of literature were both prominent elements in the Justus home, where family members had a regular practice of reading books aloud.
[1] Her first written work grew out of her experiences as a young teacher, as she began to write down the stories that she told to an eager audience of students after they had finished her classwork.
[2] Sometime before 1932, Justus worked as a teacher in a mission school in a remote area of Lee County, Kentucky, together with Vera McCampbell, her long-time companion.
When McCampbell's mother, who was living with them, developed cancer, the two women decided to move to a place where they would have better access to a hospital for medical care.
[2][3] Having lived her entire life in rural Appalachia, Justus had her first encounters with African Americans and became a committed supporter of racial equality through her work with the Highlander Folk School.
Like Justus, Clark was an avid reader, a teetotaller, a teacher from the rural South, and a member of a fundamentalist Christian religious tradition, and the two became friends.
Justus first confronted the reality of racial discrimination under Jim Crow laws when the two women were together at the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Nashville and Clark was denied entry to a "white-only" elevator.
Several of her books include recipes, reproduce the words and musical scores of the songs the characters sing, or provide descriptions of herbal remedies.
[8] A New Home for Billy deals with residential desegregation, telling the story of an African American boy whose family encounters racial discrimination when trying to move to the suburbs from a crowded one-room tenement apartment, but ultimately succeeds in settling in an integrated neighborhood.