Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance
While African American children’s literature was in short supply at the start of the twentieth century, white American writers published books for children that frequently portrayed black characters negatively (See our collection of Jim Crow children's literature and our collection of Joel Chandler Harris materials.) Negative images of African Americans were pervasive in elementary school readers and textbooks as well. A desire to redress the hurtful representations that black youths encountered in white-authored writing spurred the commitment of black authors of the 1920s to produce a children’s literature of their own.
These authors were working during a time known as the Harlem Renaissance, spanning from about 1919 to about 1935, when black artists, musicians, and writers deliberately set out to produce cultural materials that reflected the varied cultural, historical, and political interests of African Americans. Understandably, one of its chief concerns was creating a literature for children and families that positively depicted black people. Here we have collected several of their efforts.
Background Information
Pre-1900s African American Writing for Children
Sabrina Ehmke Sergeant
Interpretive Essay
The Brownies’ Book and the Roots of African American Children’s Literature
Katharine Capshaw Smith
Further Reading
Further reading on the children's literature of the Harlem Renaissance
Sabrina Ehmke Sergeant
Primary Materials
"The True Brownies"
In this editorial
from the October 1919 Children's Number of The Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois
announces his plans to create The Brownies' Book, "a little magazine
for children—for all children, but especially for ours, 'the Children of
the Sun.'"
The Brownies'
Book
Here we have edited an almost full run of The Brownies' Book, previously available only as selections. The Brownies' Book, running from 1920 through 1921, was
the first large-scale attempt to publish a periodical for children of color.
The Dunbar Speaker and
Entertainer
Collected by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the
prominent Harem Renaissance figure and widow of poet Paul Dunbar, The Dunbar
Speaker and Entertainer offered topical and inspirational selections of
writing mostly by black authors. The book was meant to provide instructive and
uplifting reading and recitation material for young African American readers,
with the foreword (by Leslie Pinckney Hill) explaining, “nothing is more
important to the development of any people than the content of those printed
pages on which they form their youthful minds.” At a time when black authors
were rarely included in mainstream anthologies, Dunbar-Nelson reverses this
imbalance, and includes some selections from white authors, marking them with an
asterisk and making them visibly the minority.
The New Floyd's
Flowers
Silas X. Floyd's New Floyd's Flowers is an
expansion of his earlier Floyd's Flowers or Duty and Beauty for Colored
Children. Floyd, who had worked as an educator and contributed to
various publications, offers a collection of short, uplifting, morally
instructive stories for black children. The book is richly illustrated with
photographs of African Americans by Underwood and Underwood, a popular agency
for news photos that also provided many of the photographs in The Brownies
Book.
Unsung Heroes
Elizabeth Ross Haynes, a sociologist who worked for the Y.W.C.A., wrote Unsung
Heroes in an effort to provide black children with inspiring true stories about
the lives of prominent black historical figures. She writes in the foreword that
these stories, “telling of the victories in spite of the hardships and struggles
of Negroes whom the world has failed to sing about, have so inspired me, even
after I am grown, that I pass them on to you, my little friends.”
By the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, in conjunction with the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.