Dorothy Sterling, a significant figure in 20th-century children’s literature for her well-researched portrayals of historical black Americans written decades before multi-culturalism became mainstream, died Dec. 1 at her home in Wellfleet, Mass. She was 95.

A self-described accidental historian, Sterling wrote more than 35 books, among the best known of which is “Freedom Train: The Story of Harriet Tubman.” Published in 1954 and still in print, it was one of the first full-length biographies of a historical black figure written for children.

The author drew attention to more obscure but important figures in “Captain of the Planter: The Story of Robert Smalls” (1958), the first children’s biography of the slave who captured a Confederate gunboat during the Civil War. “The Making of an Afro-American: Martin Robison Delany” (1971) helped stir interest in the little-known abolitionist, Harvard-educated physician and early proponent of black nationalism.

Sterling “was a major figure in the development of 20th-century children’s literature because she was one of the first people to insist upon the representation of African- Americans in that literature,” said Julia Mickenberg, an American studies professor at the University of Texas, Austin.

Minorities in books

In the mid-1960s, Sterling testified before a congressional committee headed by Adam Clayton Powell Jr., D-N.Y., on racial bias in textbooks and helped form the Council on Interracial Books for Children, which worked to improve the portrayal of minorities in children’s books.

She also wrote for adults in “We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century” (1984), an anthology of voices drawn from diaries, letters, literature and other records that The Christian Science Monitor said “read better than fiction and have the vividness of poetry”; and “Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery” (1992), about a white abolitionist and social reformer who influenced suffragettes, including Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone.

“The title of that book, ‘Ahead of Her Time,’ is the perfect description of Dorothy,” said Mary Helen Washington, a professor of African-American literature at the University of Maryland, College Park, who knew Sterling for more than two decades. “She was the most extraordinary researcher I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Sterling, who was white, developed an interest in black American history after reading the works of radical historians such as Herbert Aptheker and W.E.B. Du Bois. In the 1940s, she was a Communist; later she said socialism was her long-term goal.

“I learned about black history from the Left, and then I pursued it,” she told Mickenberg in the book “Learning from the Left: Children’s Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States.”

Born Nov. 23, 1913, in New York, Dorothy Dannenberg was a descendant of German Jews who came to the United States in the 1850s. As the daughter of a lawyer and a schoolteacher, she grew up in comfortable circumstances, entered Wellesley College when she was 16 and graduated from Barnard College in 1934.

She had wanted to become a botanist but switched to philosophy after a professor told her that the opportunities for a female botanist were extremely limited.

Her first job after college was writing reviews for Art News, a weekly magazine. When a new owner replaced all the women on staff with men, she joined the Federal Writers Project, a Depression-era work relief program. It was a life-changing experience for Sterling, who for the first time “met people who did not share my sheltered, middle-class background,” including aging Yiddish playwrights, Greenwich Village poets, black novelists and journalists.

Among the latter was her future husband, Philip Sterling, a newspaper writer who had lost his job early in the Depression. They were married from 1937 until his death in 1989.

In 1941, Sterling began to work at Life magazine, first as a secretary and later as a researcher. She became an expert sleuth on a wide range of subjects, from helicopters to ballet, but was not allowed to write the stories. In those days, she recalled in an essay for Contemporary Authors, “All writers were he. All researchers were she …”

She rose to become assistant chief of Life’s news bureau, but when her female boss was fired and replaced by a man, she decided to move on.

Her first published book, “Sophie and Her Puppies” (1951), chronicled the birth and development of a litter of dachshunds. It launched her on a series of notable books that explored science and the natural world, including books on caves, caterpillars, nocturnal creatures, mushrooms and ferns.

A new direction

By 1953 she had published five books, but her years at Life had ingrained in her the notion that she was still only a researcher, not a writer. She decided that her next book would be a biography of a heroic woman “who would say to girls, ‘You are as strong and capable as boys.’” Someone suggested that she consider writing about Tubman.

“I was excited but also bewildered and angry,” she recalled some years ago. “Why had I never heard of Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass or William Lloyd Garrison?” With “Freedom Train,” she felt she had arrived as a writer. She wrote of the former slave as “a human being and a free woman.”