A fleeting magazine from 1920 still resonates

The Brownies’ Book, launched by W.E.B. Du Bois for Black children, is revisited in new anthology

The first magazine created especially for Black children, The Brownies’ Book was published in January 1920, its pages filled with the voices of children and their parents, of poets and college coeds, biographers and advice columnists, schoolgirls and scholars, spinners of fables and gatherers of folk tales, and a panoply of Black figures staking a claim in the history of a country that would rather not acknowledge them. It brimmed with playful illustrations, photographs, and travelers’ sketches. On the cover was a portrait of an adolescent ballet dancer, pearls at her neck, a crown on her head, arms aloft, a picture of self-confidence and elation.

Subtitled “A Monthly Magazine for the Children of the Sun,” The Brownies’ Book was conceived by W.E.B. Du Bois, who named writer Jessie Redmon Fauset literary editor. It was a spinoff of the annual Children’s Number of The Crisis, the powerful and widely read house organ of the NAACP that Du Bois had edited since 1910, and it had a strong message to send into the headwinds of racial prejudice and post-Reconstruction violence in early 20th-century

America: “to make colored children realize,” as Du Bois wrote, “that being ‘colored’ is a normal, beautiful thing.”

Langston Hughes was first published there, along with other writers and artists of the nascent movement that would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen, Arna Bontemps and Hilda Rue Wilkinson among them. A poem by Fauset that ran in the inaugural issue served as the new venture’s dedication:

To Children, who with eager look

Scanned vainly library shelf and nook,

For History or Song or Story That told of Colored Peoples’ glory …

Yet despite its groundbreaking mission and cultural consequence, once The Brownies’ Book ceased publication at the end of 1921 in the wake of a nationwide depression, it languished largely forgotten by a wider public, referred to occasionally in exhibitions, in scholarly books on Black children’s literature, in children’s literature courses or in research into early Black journalism.

Now a growing interest in the historical moment exemplified by the magazine has focused wider attention on its pages, making its mission and message resonate in new ways. Karida Brown, a professor of sociology at Emory University and co-author of “The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois,” has compiled — with

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PHOTOS A page from a copy of The Brownies’ Book, the first magazine created especially for Black children. The original Brownies’ Book was dedicated to children who “scanned vainly library shelf and nook, for History or Song or Story that told of Colored Peoples’ glory.” Right: Covers from The Brownies’ Book.

The anthology, which combines new work with selections from The Brownies’ Book — launched by W.E.B. Du Bois — is bringing its mission to bear in the current national context.

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