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  • Constructing a Shared History:Black Pageantry for Children During the Harlem Renaissance
  • Katharine Capshaw Smith (bio)

In 1926 W. E. B. Du Bois called for a new kind of theater for African Americans, composed of dramas that were "about us, by us, for us, and near us" ("Krigwa" 134). Alongside the Krigwa and little theater movements,1 which answered Du Bois's call, one must place pageantry for children, since African American pageants during the 1920s and 1930s responded to the young population's desire for a drama that represented black lives and black history with dignity and virtue. Staged in schools, community halls, and churches, pageants for African American children touched audiences of various' ages, classes, and educations. These productions often addressed a specific community's needs, celebrating local anniversaries and confronting regional economic or racial tensions. The child was, of course, a topic of dramatic interest during the "New Negro," or Harlem, Renaissance. The plays for adults by Georgia Douglas Johnson and Angelina Weld Grimké, for example, depict despairing mothers unable to protect their children from the violent threat of a racist society. Pageants of the period directed at children, however, offer a contrasting depiction of the possibilities of black childhood. By revealing to children their race's past accomplishments, and by constructing the child as intelligent and capable in the face of racist social structures, the period's pageants are infused with the new life and sense of potential commonly associated with the black literary renaissance. African American pageant writers believed that the "New Negro" would ultimately arise from the young Negro and that building black nationhood and a new cultural identity depended on the education of the younger generation.

Du Bois imagined that the innovative black drama would address racial conflict and represent heroic black figures and their contributions to mainstream American society.2 With these ideals in mind, Du Bois was able to proclaim famously in "Criteria of Negro Art" (1926), "I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda" [End Page 40] (296). Most of the children's pageants of the period adhere to Du Bois's didactic paradigm, since many of the pageant writers, often schoolteachers who were disenchanted with racist constructions of history, found that Du Bois shared their overtly educative perspective. In "The Drama Among Black Folk" (1916), Du Bois articulated the goals of his own pageant, "The Star of Ethiopia," in didactic terms: "to teach on the one hand the colored people themselves the meaning of their history and their rich, emotional life through a new theatre, and on the other to reveal the Negro to the white world as a human, feeling thing" (171). Pedagogic and propagandistic, and often directed at a dual audience of both blacks and whites, most African American pageants written for children in the 1920s and 1930s followed Du Bois's model.

The Harlem Renaissance arose during the great age of American pageantry (1905-25), a movement linked to the Progressive Era's sense of democratic optimism (Prevots 1). During a period marked by massive immigration and urban migration, pageantry unified communities around shared stories of their city or town, presenting in dance, song, pantomime, and verse images that would invest the audience in the life of their community and enable them to share dreams of a city's progress and reform. Performances required extensive local participation; for example, Boston's 1910 Cave Life to City Life brought together more than 1,200 local organizations in a pageant that reflected the community's cultural diversity and also inspired a shared vision of urban improvement (Prevots 29). But however inclusive and democratic the pageant effort purported to be, in the early part of the century virtually every citywide pageant excluded black participation. For example, of the 7,500 participants in the 1913 St. Louis pageant, only one African American appeared (Prevots 17). Certainly many of the pageant movement's ideals appealed to Harlem Renaissance thinkers. Urban black populations in the 1920s were far from homogeneous; migration from the country to the city and West Indian immigration created local populations with disparate educations, social customs, and economic backgrounds. Pageantry offered communities...

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