the brownies’ book: du bois e a construção de uma referência literária para identidade negra infanto-juvenil

In the period from January 1920 to December 1921 a cooperation between Jessie Fauset, Augustus Dill and W.E.B. Du Bois resulted in the publication of a periodical called “The Brownies’ Book” (TBB) the first publication for North American black, and not white (colored people) children and young people. The creation of “The Brownies' Book” (TBB) was a pioneering event in African American literature in general and, more specifically, in the field of African American children's literature, as it was the first periodical composed and published by African Americans for black children who, until then, searched in vain for material that included a perspective on their experience and history. This article argues that the TBBs were one of the harbingers of the movement called the Harlem Renaissance, constituting a children's literary materialization of the path towards the emergence of what the philosopher Alain Locke called the New Negro. What was being formulated was both the deconstruction of stereotypes associated with blacks and the active projection/creation of a positive identification with their local and ancestral community. This paper seeks to identify the post-WWI discursive strategies and practices of de-racialization proposed for “the children of the sun”, as W.E.B. Du Bois called them, in order to stop seeing themselves “through the eyes of others” (Du Bois, 1903).

A Library in Progress

Libraries function as more than just repositories of information: they produce knowledge, and they create and fill absences worthy of examination. This chapter explores the early history of the Moorland Foundation Library at Howard University and the absences that this collection was designed to address. The Moorland Foundation started as the personal library of Howard trustee Jesse Moorland, who accumulated books, pamphlets, pictures, and other items about African diasporic history. Moorland used this material for his own private study, but Howard professors Kelly Miller and Alain Locke saw the potential for a research collection and comprehensive bibliography that would respond to needs on campus and in their respective fields. Although it would take the hiring of librarian Dorothy Porter to fulfill these professors’ ambitions, the three distinct ideas behind this one collection demonstrate the versatility of Black thought and the motivations behind Black collecting.

Becoming Barthé

This chapter covers the decisive six years, in Chicago, when sculptor James Richmond Barthé (1901-1989) became an artist and a contributor to racial uplift. His faith in racial integration is reflected in work that merges European tradition with African American bodies. Barthé used the accessibility of naturalism to highlight the dynamism of blackness in his era. In 1927, The Negro in Art Week, Barthé’s professional debut, was organized by the Chicago Woman’s Club, the Chicago Art League and The Art Institute of Chicago. This exhibition introduced Barthé to his peers, competitors, African art, and his mentor Alain Locke. His figure, Tortured Negro, an unprecedented black male nude, was the first of Barthé’s many beautiful and coded sculptures. He invented himself and his art in Chicago.

The Black Creole Vision of Archibald J. Motley Jr.

This essay explores how Archibald J. Motley Jr. developed into the successful, notably iconoclastic, artist he became. In 1918, Motley announced his aesthetic independence, his embrace of “art for art’s sake,” in a manifesto in the Chicago Defender -- a significant precursor to later debates associated with an artistically-inclined New Negro movement dominated rhetorically by W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Unlike such Chicago peers as William Farrow and Charles C. Dawson, Motley pursued his exceptionalist path without artistic, social, or financial support from Chicago's Black elite. Motley also described himself as a black Creole, or "French Negro." This unique ethnic heritage, his racially-exclusive associations within the art world, and his residence in the overwhelmingly white Englewood neighborhood amplified his sense of uniqueness.