Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance

The Emblematic Black Child: Du Bois’s Crisis Publications

1 The Emblematic Black Child Du Bois’s Crisis Publications Your child is wiser than you think. —W.E.B. Du Bois, Crisis (October 1912); Darkwater (1920) At the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance, intellectual giant W.E.B. Du Bois reinvented conceptions of black childhood and instituted the genre of black children’s literature. A study of the era’s treatment of childhood necessarily begins with Du Bois, since his enormously influential Crisis editorials, annual Crisis Children’s Number (1912–1934), and children’s magazine The Brownies’ Book (1920–1921) spotlighted the special role of the child to the movement for black social progress and artistic distinction. The period’s vital discussions about the nature and responsibilities of black childhood originate with Du Bois, and the variety of artistic responses that constitute the nativity of black children’s literature fan out from debates initiated in the Crisis. In contrast to primitivistic images of black childhood like the pickaninny stereotype of nineteenth-century minstrelsy, Du Bois reimagined the black child as culturally, politically, and aesthetically sophisticated.This new vision was absolutely necessary to the triumph of the New Ne- gro movement, since social change and artistic recognition would come through the work of the progressive younger generation. In image, poem, narrative, and nonfiction, black children populate the pages of the Crisis, proclaiming Du Bois’s faith in the ability of young people to lead the race into the future. Childhood thus takes on heavy iconographic meaning in Du Bois’s publications. As this chapter will discuss, the expectation for a politically savvy and involved child reader allowed Du Bois to use images of children to advance the NAACP’s campaigns against lynching and social injustice. This new vision of black childhood had a profound impact on the literary as well as political realm. Black children’s activism , cultural sophistication, and increasing investment in literacy rendered them an ideal audience for publications under Du Bois’s editorship . Responding to black children’s wisdom and to the community ’s need for race leaders, the early Crisis is heavily “cross written.” To be specific, the cross writing that prefaces the birth of The Brownies ’ Book in 1920 frequently blurs the lines between “adult” and “child” material, a sensibility that demands the child reader’s interaction with adult political and social concerns. Cross writing in the Crisis is particular to the cultural context and to the magazine genre; we will see in chapter 2 that approaches to “dual address” vary in cross written drama since playwrights highlighted diªerent dimensions of the construction of the child as sophisticated. For the Crisis publications , sophistication meant the requirement of black child social activism ; cross writing became a fundamental approach for connecting the child reader with adult political commitments. The home was the space for building new race leaders, according to the Crisis, and parents took on new responsibilities to their progressive children. Black children’s literature as a genre separate from “adult” literature was born out of this emphasis on the domestic sphere and its political eªects, a holdover from uplift ideology ascendant in the 1890s and the early decades of the twentieth century. Contributing to the development of the new generation, children’s literature, then, became a site of intense contest, for writers debated what form personal edification and political engagement through home reading should take. With the general assumption of child maturity and modernity, writers debated the role of prejudice in raising activist children . For some, knowledge of racial bias was a function of child so- -2Children ’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance phistication, and home reading became a means to model responses to the prejudice inevitably encountered outside the home. For others, the worldliness of black children called for a retreat through literature to domestic and natural landscapes unsullied by political contact. For this model, only in a safe space could children develop the confidence and sense of familial stability necessary to build young soldiers for racial justice. Alternately, writers advanced more radical approaches to child protection, including the refusal even to give children life. Further, eruptions of resistance to the notion of child maturity also surface in intensely anxious versions of an insulated black childhood. Such a variety of responses exposes the influence of Du Bois’s construction of black childhood and highlights the role of the Crisis publications as dynamic sites for...