Mae Makes a Way: The True Story of Mae Reeves, Hat & History Maker

This picture-book biography traces Mae Reeves’s path from a Georgia childhood, where she created plays and designed and sewed clothing for dolls, to teaching in a one-room school as a teenager. After moving to Chicago during the Great Migration, she studied millinery and later established a custom-hat business in Philadelphia. Her customers included Marian Anderson, Ella Fitzgerald, local workers, and churchgoers. The book also explores the place of hats in African American history and notes that Reeves’s shop was recreated for a Smithsonian museum exhibit.