Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (review)

Identifying the Harlem Renaissance as the "dynamic point of origin" of African American children's literature, Kate Capshaw Smith offers a definitive study of the early decades of this genre, concentrating on the first forty years of the twentieth century. Smith labels her work "an inauguration" (xxvi), seeking to spark research interest in a marginalized subgenre within an historically marginalized genre. Firmly grounded in both the history and the literary history of the "New Negro Renaissance," Smith offers three apt justifications for this study. First, because Dianne Johnson's Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and Promise of African American Literature for Youth (1990) has long been the only book-length critical study of early black children's literature, this study adds to the development of a "more fully historicized account of black writing for children" (xiii). Such a study also contributes to a richer understanding of the Harlem Renaissance. Furthermore, this project initiates the recovery of many worthy black authors of this era such as Jane Dabney Shackelford, Effie Lee Newsome, and Mary Church Terrell, who either should be but are not a part of the African American children's literature canon or who have faded into obscurity altogether.

Rather than painting a monolithic picture of black children's literature of the Harlem Renaissance, Smith problematizes the genre by illustrating how children served as a site of contestation for many factions who all had a vested interest in helping to shape black youths' ideas about racial amity. Smith's chapters draw clear dividing lines between W. E. B. DuBois, the dramatists, southern writers, Carter G. Woodson's Circle, and the longtime friends and collaborators Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps. Painstakingly researched, Smith's study sometimes resembles detective work because of its level of detail, but it also makes the book a fascinating read that will surely realize Smith's goal of encouraging related research.

The first chapter, "The Emblematic Black Child," focuses on the work of W. E. B. DuBois, including children's literature within the Crisis, the journal of the National Association of Colored People, as well as the Brownies' Book magazine (a monthly journal for black youth, or "Children of the Sun," published in 1920–21). DuBois's belief in the "talented tenth," the idea that racial uplift would occur most effectively through the cultivation of an educated black elite, surfaced in most of the children's texts he wrote and edited, but many disagreed with his idea that adults should prepare children to wage racial battle. Some felt that the home should be a domestic retreat where children could escape the injustices they face daily outside the home, while a small minority felt that the only way to protect black youth from prejudice was to refuse to have children at all. Many of the debates about the role of blacks in American society that occurred in adult New Negro publications also materialized in the Brownies' Book, often highlighting ambivalences that offer a complex and contradictory message to young black readers. Smith dedicates a long section of the first chapter to Effie Lee Newsome, the most prolific black children's writer of the 1920s, who was—along with Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer—one of the most celebrated poets of her time. In her "Little Page," a column that appeared nearly every month in the Crisis from March 1925 until November 1930, she advocated that children make education and spending time outdoors their primary means of combating injustice.

In the second chapter, "Creating the Past, Present and Future," Smith discusses New Negro children's drama, including community and school pageants, history plays, and intimate dramas, which depict "moments of crisis in New Negro education" (97). Smith identifies the factors that contributed to the "reformative educational agenda" of the drama of this era: most black playwrights were teachers whose students would perform their plays; most of the writers lived in the heart of the Little Theater movement, Washington, D.C., which had a prominent black middle...