Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance

Introduction

Introduction A wartime cover of Crisis magazine (August 1916) presents an elegant visual statement of the African American child’s national significance. Embraced by the flag, the image recorded in the mirror and on the page, the baby basks in his or her role as an icon of an unmistakably black American identity. By interacting with W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous description in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) of African American “double-consciousness,” the image decidedly takes control of public black identity, replacing bifurcation (“an American, a Negro” in Du Bois’s terms) with a spirited statement of black childhood’s integral connection to nationhood. Positioned at the cusp of the New Negro Renaissance,1 this image encapsulates several of the period’s ideological concerns: It self-reflectively and self-consciously erects a new image of black America and positions the child as one who will project ideals of cultural progress into the future. The child, the youngest of New Negroes, will bear the mantle of change. Children’s literature played a crucial role in the reinvention of black childhood in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The major writers of the time were deeply invested in the enterprise of building a black national identity through literary constructions of childhood: Du Bois launched The Brownies’ Book, issued annual Crisis Children’s Numbers , and sponsored the magazine’s monthly Little Page; Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps collaborated on several children’s books; and despite economic stresses, Carter G. Woodson’s Associated Publishers issued the Negro History Bulletin for schoolchildren and children ’s books written by female educators. Through plays, pageants, magazine pieces, dialect poems, picture books, poetry collections, anthologies , biographies, and novels, New Negro writers famous and obscure asserted their commitment to childhood as a means of cultural production. Previously unexplored by scholars of children’s literature and literary historians of the Harlem Renaissance, this body of work invites critical study as the dynamic point of origin of African American children’s literature. In this project I employ a critical methodology that attempts to historicize the texts, exposing their roots in the fundamental ideological and historical junctures of the day. As a book of literary criticism, the August 1916—Crisis cover project attends to nuanced representations of black childhood, evoking their historical resonance by exploring publishing contexts, writers ’ philosophical and educational ideologies, relationships between editors and authors, diverse audiences, and biographical and contextual information elided by literary history. This book is by no means comprehensive, for it does not aim to survey every New Negro children ’s text. Instead, it limns the features of early black children’s literature in order to oªer a sense of its participation in the era’s dialogue about black cultural identity. By focusing on the incarnations of New Negro ideology within black-authored children’s texts of the first four decades of the twentieth century, the project addresses facets that connect to the movement, like ambivalent visions of Africa, enslavement, and the folk voice, as well as the controversies surrounding children’s proper education and the role of race leaders. Naturally these rich texts could be viewed through multiple lenses, and my hope is that this study will initiate future work by scholars from a variety of disciplines and critical perspectives. Children’s literature of the Harlem Renaissance emerged from the program of racial “uplift” that took hold in the 1890s. Kevin K. Gaines explains the tensions between popular conceptions of uplift emerging from emancipation that stressed “collective social aspiration, advancement , and struggle” and the black elite vision of uplift based on “class stratification as race progress” (xv). As Gaines describes, configurations of uplift ideology were multiple and at times self-contradictory; for a discussion of early black children’s literature, central tendencies in elite approaches to progress are especially salient. Elites advocated the creation through education and cultural edification of a higher class of individuals that would then serve the black masses, a paradigm that anticipates Du Bois’s concept of the “talented tenth.” The existence of this ennobled class would demonstrate the potential for black cultural improvement to a white public and would thus eliminate racial bias. An important precursor to the New Negro emphasis on children was the dominance of the domestic sphere within uplift ideology.The bourgeois values of the elite were resolutely patriarchal, and in fact female domestic identity demonstrated...