The Brownies’ Book: A Monthly Magazine for the Children of the Sun, the first major periodical for Black children, had a short but marvelous run between 1920 and 1921.[i] On the 100-year anniversary of its publication, The Brownies’ Book still has much to offer scholars of children and youth. Through poems, images, games, and stories that were by, for, and including Black Americans, The Brownies’ Book wanted nothing less than to decolonize children’s literature. While W. E. B. Du Bois is often credited for being the magazine’s chief architect, The Brownies’ Book was led by a dedicated team.[ii] Augustus Granville Dill was the business manager and had collaborated with Du Bois on a number of research studies. The artistic heart and soul of The Brownies’ was Jessie Redmon Fauset, a gifted writer who lent her talents to The Brownies’ Book and recruited Harlem Renaissance artists to contribute their work to the magazine.
From its very first issue, Brownies’ was a fascinating universe all its own. The magazine captured Du Bois’s affection for mixing genres, as historical facts mingled with propaganda, racial melodrama, and stories of the occult.[iii] Biographical portraits of influential Black Americans were nestled alongside little nuggets describing the achievements of ordinary young people. The March 1920 issue celebrated the achievements of William Cofield, an aspiring actor. “Some boy!” the magazine announced. Many young people contributed original work. A story in the January 1921 issue by 11-year-old Gwendolyn Robinson explained how an old couple’s bickering lives on today in the quarreling between thunder and lightning. W. E. B. Du Bois and Childhood Du Bois wore many hats, but he is not typically viewed as an historian or theorist of childhood. Yet young people were a central concern of his and he wrote about “childhood” in capacious terms: children as a metaphor, as a discrete group with their own needs and desires, as playful, and as future race leaders. Du Bois fought to restore the possibility of “freedom’s child,” the first generations of children coming of age after the end of slavery, but whose potential had been diminished by Jim Crow.[iv] While Du Bois dedicated Brownies’ to Black youth—the “children of the sun”—Du Bois spoke of African Americans as the “children of the moon.” In a poem of the same name from Darkwater, the moon represents the Black Messiah: “Heaven and earth are wings / Wings veiling some vast / And veiled face / In blazing Blackness.” In Du Bois’s interpretation, “Heaven and earth” represented the hypocrisy and failures of white Christianity, whose gospel veiled the immortal youth of Black people. The white supremacy that buttressed white Christianity would ultimately stand in judgment before a Black God who represented “the limitless potential of African Americans.”[v] In his writings, Du Bois blurred the boundaries between adulthood and childhood. The Brownies’ Book made clear that Black youth should not be shielded from racial violence, just as the magazine created a world of fantasy and boundless imagination where children could simply play and live as children. In fact, the magazine spoke to an audience of both youth and adults. Here, Brownies’ employed the “cross-writing” that was an essential strategy of the New Negro literature movement: one that “draws on a construction of a sophisticated and militant Black childhood” where “the child thus becomes race leader.”[vi] The cross-written nature of Brownies’ therefore exemplified Du Bois’s pragmatist sensibilities: affirming various dialectical tensions (adulthood and childhood, race leadership and protectionism) and proposing an action-oriented solution in adapting a children’s magazine for political purposes. Race scholars have documented the systematic exclusion of Du Bois by mainstream sociology in the early 1900s. The field of psychology was also culpable. G. Stanley Hall’s enormously influential text Adolescence (1904) is now regarded as racist and paternalistic because it advanced the notion that the development of white children into adulthood recapitulates human evolution. Less well known is how Hall’s recapitulation theory implicates Du Bois. While Hall was aware of Du Bois and his work, he failed to cite Du Bois in Adolescence. Instead, Hall commends Booker T. Washington’s industrial training program in support of the idea that Blacks were members of an “adolescent race.” Yet Du Bois’s mission was to critique the very foundations of this “racialized modernity”—the contemporary period’s entanglements of racism and colonialism—which nurtured those racist recapitulation theories, and by extension, visions of desirable white futures.[vii] The Legacy of The Brownies’ Book Brownies' is noteworthy for being among the first children’s literature to address violence, trauma, and political activism. The Red Summer of 1919 was the final impetus Du Bois needed to start a children’s magazine, as children were among the many victims of that summer’s race massacre. The riots in Chicago began after 17-year-old Eugene Williams drowned after being pelted with rocks. A digital remake of Brownies' rightfully points out that mass racial violence that harms Black youth continues today in the form of “Stand Your Ground” laws, school surveillance, and mass incarceration.[viii] The Brownies’ Book also helped introduced the fantastic—a genre encompassing the supernatural, the mystical, and the marvelous—to Black youth. In “The Gypsy’s Finger-Ring,” written by Willis Richardson in the March 1921 issue, a group of children meet a gypsy born in Egypt. The gypsy is wearing a ring that allows its holder to see the past, present, and future. One girl wishes to see slavery so that “will urge us on.” Viewed in this light, the magazine’s many fairy tales are deeply political. Through fairy tales and mini dramas, Brownies’ elaborated on Du Bois’s strong interest in the fantastical emerging from African epistemologies and spirituality. More recently, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas has identified these fantastical stories as a predecessor to Afrofuturism and other forms of Black speculation.[ix] Black girls, according to Thomas, are trapped in a cycle of the “dark fantastic” that finds them perpetually endangered. Counter-narratives help to break this cycle and point the way to emancipatory futures. In its brief moment in the sun, The Brownies’ Book urged Black children to imagine these very possibilities. [i] For access to each of the issues, see http://childlit.unl.edu/topics/edi.brownies.html. [ii] Dianne Johnson-Feelings, ed., The Best of The Brownies’ Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). [iii] Susan Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003). [iv] Mary Niall Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery (New York: NYU Press, 2008). [v] Edward Blum, “‘There Won’t Be Any Rich People in Heaven’: The Black Christ, White Hypocrisy, and the Gospel According to W. E. B. Du Bois,” The Journal of African American History, 90, no. 4 (Autumn 2005): 368-386, 383. [vi] Katharine Capshaw Smith, Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), xix. [vii] José Itzigsohn and Karida Brown, The Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line (New York: New York University Press, 2020). [viii] https://www.thebrowniesbook.com/edudaily/2019/8/28/red-summer-of-1919. [ix] Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (New York: NYU Press, 2019). Comments are closed.
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