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  • Introduction: From The Brownies’ Book to Black Lives Matter:
    One Hundred Years of African American Children’s Literature
  • Katharine Capshaw and Michelle H. Martin

This issue of The Lion and the Unicorn pays homage to The Brownies’ Book magazine, initiated one hundred years ago by the editors of Crisis magazine. Published from 1920–21, this magazine was not the first to embrace a black child audience, but it had a national reach and centered the black child in both its literary and visual representation. Its editors, W. E. B. Du Bois and Jesse Fauset, crafted goals for the journal that still resonate today, including the development of racial self-confidence through literature. But rather than calling for essays on The Brownies’ Book itself, particularly given that Dianne Johnson and Jonda McNair have a forthcoming centennial edited collection with this aim, we requested pieces that perform sankofa—essays that look back at The Brownies’ Book to bring its legacy into the twenty-first century. In other words, what has the journal’s legacy been, and what will it continue to be? Do the ideals of the magazine extend into the work of major writers like June Jordan, Walter Dean Myers, Angie Thomas, and more? How are contemporary scholars of African American children’s and young adult literature grappling with and perhaps pushing against this legacy? And what aspects of the goals set out in the first volume of The Brownies’ Book are still aspirational, a hundred years later?

Our issue begins with a Forum on the state of the field with pieces by three African American women scholars at various stages of their careers. The contributors to the Forum think expressly about the relationship of the past to the present, attending in particular to the way scholarship could engage the embodied black child reader. Whether reconsidering Du Bois’s relationship to actual children as does Brigitte Fielder, or engaging the vernacular as does Karen Chandler, or reflecting on the physicality and [End Page v] space of the black church as does B. J. McDaniel, the Forum contributors all insist that our work take seriously the physical, emotional, and intellectual stakes of black childhood. Each of the Forum contributors also calls attention to what we are missing in our understanding of the field. Fielder argues that “children’s literary studies has much to gain from conversations with African American studies, and vice versa” and suggests that we need to turn our attention to racialized readers. Chandler wonders whether the new generation of African American writers of young people’s literature are finding success at the expense of other excellent black writers whose work is going unread. McDaniel, the newest scholar in the volume, raises vital questions about the barriers to success for scholars of color. She employs a metaphor from her church background—the “amen corner”—to show how allyship in certain circumstances can silence divergent voices and thereby narrow the scholarship that gets researched, written, and published. The provocative Forum poses questions that future scholars of African American children’s literature will certainly engage, extend, and complicate.

Our five extended essays work across literary history to spotlight the accomplishments, range, and ambivalences of black children’s and young adult literature. Amy Fish discusses the context of actual young people behind June Jordan’s experimental novel, His Own Where. Reflecting on the Black Arts Movement’s reimagining of urban spaces, Fish asks us to consider this important novel as “an imaginative reservoir of youth history, a place in which today’s readers might dwell in order to contemplate the past, present and future liberation struggles of black and Latinx young people.” Althea Tait’s provocative essay draws together various threads in African American cultural and literary theory in order to call for greater consideration of the practice and implications of empathy. Tait also considers how the physical bodies of black young people figure into discussions that take place about them but rarely if ever include them. She argues that we should pursue the ability “to feel into another’s story without aid from an epistemology of pathology towards the person, to discover a way to extend compassionate empathy as if the loss...

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