The Children of the Sun: Celebrating the One Hundred-Year Anniversary of The Brownies' Book

To Children, who with eager look Scanned vainly library shelf and nook, For History or Song or Story That told of Colored Peoples' glory,— We dedicate THE BROWNIES' BOOK. Jessie Fauset, "Dedication" (January 1920) ¹

A little-known history is that W. E. B. Du Bois wished for his celebrated collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), to have a companion volume. Around 1900, Du Bois drafted a table of contents for a book intended for Black children. This shadow book, to borrow Kevin Young's term—a text that never was but "may haunt the very book we have in our hands" ² —is the presence hovering over Souls, as the proposed contents literally adumbrates the spirit and structure of the classic book, with each chapter phrased prepositionally ("Of the …") and the proposed volume bracketed with a forethought and an afterthought. The provisionally titled book To My Dark Little Brothers and Sisters appeared to offer guidance on navigating a life behind a veil that prevented whites from seeing the full humanity of Black Americans. ³

Du Bois would develop these themes through the century's first decade. In the seventy-one prayers he composed in the final year of his first stay at Atlanta University (1909–10), the educator spoke behind the veil to the Black youth who were descendants of slaves and students at the primary and secondary schools housed inside the university. Du Bois's prayers offered moral lessons on the need to work hard, to serve others, and to have pride in one's race. ⁴ When Du Bois left Atlanta to begin his career with the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), he continued to write for and about children as editor of the organization's periodical, The Crisis. In October 1912, the magazine debuted an annual "Children's Number," one of several special issues that covered topics such as women's suffrage and labor. On the cover of the inaugural Children's Number were two small Black girls in white dresses, one holding an opened book; the pages inside were adorned with headshots of more children, including babies. These images of sophistication, uplift, and good health remained central in subsequent issues of the Children's Number. They were intended "to build readers' pride in black beauty and physical vitality, and perhaps as a response to the eugenics movement and to the Progressive Era's interest in health reform." ⁵ By carefully curating these photographs, the magazine used art—the "handmaid of imagination," in Du Bois's words—to build understanding in wider audiences. ⁶ Many of these photos had Bible passages for captions, which resonates with Du Bois's earlier prayers and emphasized for readers both the transcendent quality of childhood and the moral obligation of adults to educate and care for their "brownies." In fact, Du Bois asserted in that first issue of the Children's Number that "all words of a magazine of ideas must point to the child—to that vast immortality and wide sweep and infinite possibility which the child represents." ⁷

The success of the Children's Number inspired The Brownies' Book: A Monthly Magazine for the Children of the Sun, the first major periodical for Black children, which had an all-too-brief but marvelous run between 1920 and 1921. This special issue of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth celebrates the magazine's centennial and helps show how the magazine remains as timely as ever. To be sure, The Brownies' Book was not the first magazine to speak to African American youth. A number of periodicals predated The Brownies' Book , including Amelia E. Johnson's The Joy (1887) and The Ivy (1888), collections of Sunday school stories. Early issues of The Christian Recorder, the longest continuously running Black periodical in the United States, contained parenting and marital advice and columns addressed to young people. The newspaper used language ("there is no subject, at the time of the present crisis, that demands our attention more than the proper...