ELLEN BUTLER DONOVAN AND LAURA DUBEK

CHILDREN, TOO, SING AMERICA: ENDING APARTHEID IN AND OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

ELLEN BUTLER DONOVAN AND LAURA DUBEK

On March 2, 2021, National Read Across America Day, the estate of Theodor Geisel, known to millions as Dr. Seuss, announced that it would no longer publish six of the best-selling author’s books, each of which “portray[s] people in ways that are hurtful and wrong” (Dr. Seuss Enterprises 2021). This announcement touched a cultural nerve, attracting the attention of national media outlets and politicians as well as academics and advocates for anti-racist education and greater diversity in children’s books. Articles and op-eds appeared in mainstream publications in and outside the US. Shortly after the announcement, National Public Radio aired a segment on All Things Considered that featured commentary by two English professors: Donald Pease, who holds a position named after Geisel at Dartmouth, and Michelle H. Martin, who teaches children’s literature at the University of Washington. Pease used Geisel’s biography to contextualize the decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to cease mass-producing racist images, noting that Geisel himself “evolved” with regard to race and thereby effectively countering the idea that the decision constituted a threat to childhood from so-called cancel culture. Martin, the author of Brown Gold: Milestones of African

COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 49.3 Summer 2022 Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286 © Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2022

American Children’s Picture Books, 1845–2002 (2004), offered a wider historical context for understanding both the racist stereotypes in Dr. Seuss’s books and the decision to stop publishing them, pointing out that Geisel wrote for a White audience, his popular books responding to a market dominated by “stiff, humorless” books for children, such as the basal readers Martin remembers from her 1960s childhood (Ulaby 2021). While Martin emphasized the changing landscape for children’s books over the last fifty years, with more stories for and about children of color, the publishing industry and the US children’s literary tradition remain predominantly and undeniably White.

Four days after the announcement by Dr. Seuss Enterprises, Congressman Kevin McCarthy took to the House floor to read Green Eggs and Ham, tweeting a video of his performance with the message, “I still like Dr. Seuss.” While many political pundits recognized the minority leader’s stunt as an attempt to deflect attention away from contentious and more serious matters of policy, his scripted performance should also be understood as an insidious example of how White supremacy reconstitutes itself through mass media—in this case via Twitter and books for children. Indeed, McCarthy’s viral video, dismissed as political theater, actually underscores the vexed relationship between children’s literature and the process of reconstructing White American identity. Since the publication of the New England Primer in the 1680s, US children’s literature has functioned pedagogically and with ideological intent, offering readers depictions of “approved” behavior, attitudes, and ideas. Toni Morrison, the most celebrated writer in the African American literary tradition, structured her debut novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), in a way that exposes and indicts the racism of this ideological intent: fourteen-year-old Pecola’s life plays out within the context of the mid-twentieth-century Dick and Jane basal readers, White master narratives that render Pecola both invisible and irrelevant. Whether with conscious intent or not, when Representative McCarthy tweeted his staged reading, he entered a high-stakes debate about race and representation in children’s literature. And by choosing to read a book by Dr. Seuss that did not contain the same derogatory images as those books being withdrawn from the market, he participated in (and, with the full weight of his political office, sanctioned) a centuries-long practice of erasing childhoods other than those that are White and

middle class. The Congressman’s proclamation of support for Dr. Seuss veiled a much darker message, however, one that circulated on flyers following the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia: IT’S OKAY TO BE WHITE.

This latest controversy over Dr. Seuss’s work and legacy brings renewed attention to US children’s literature as a contested site that reveals the contradictions inherent in our nation’s racist history and proclaimed sense of itself. In his provocatively titled Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature and the Need for Diverse Books, Philip Nel makes a strong case for considering children’s literature “one of the most important arenas in which to combat prejudice” because “what we read when we are young shapes us deeply.” Authors who write for children do not need to be convinced of this fact; indeed, Black authors routinely report that they began writing in order to replace derogatory and stereotyped images in stories with depictions that more accurately reflect themselves and others who look like them. Nel, however, in writing to an audience of teachers, scholars, and other gatekeepers, seeks to change critical practices (and attitudes) within academia, schools, libraries, and other institutions committed to youth literacy, by putting children’s literary studies at the center of discussions about (anti)racism. Taking up a provocative term used by children’s author Christopher Myers in a 2014 op-ed for The New York Times titled “Children’s Literature: Apartheid or Just a General Lack of Color?” Nel ends his study by calling these scholars to action: “To dismantle our children’s literature apartheid, we must change the ways we produce, promote, read, and teach literature for young people” (2017, 202). This special issue responds to that call by bringing together critics from fields of study that too often operate independently—African American literary studies and US children’s literary studies. We seek to further the cause of dismantling children’s literature apartheid1 by widening the constituencies actively invested in Black children’s literature as well as literary constructions of Black childhood, whether they appear in books marketed to young readers or adults.

With a few notable exceptions, calls for integrating these separate fields of study have gone unanswered. In a 2010 interview with The Brown Bookshelf, Dianne Johnson, a literary critic who focuses on writers who have spent their careers producing texts specifically for children, makes clear that “many of the most important writers in [the African American] tradition, such as James Baldwin and

Nikki Giovanni, also produced work for children” (Brown 2010). Twenty years earlier, Johnson had published Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and the Promise of African American Literature for Youth, hoping to encourage scholarly attention to, among other topics, “the interrelationship between Black children’s literature and adult literature” (Johnson 1990, 12). That critical space remains essentially unexplored. In 1998, in their introduction to a special issue of African American Review highlighting Black texts for young readers, Johnson and Catherine Lewis call it “disturbing” that scholars who consider themselves well-read in the African American literary tradition (presumably the readers of AAR) do not know the work of writers such as Virginia Hamilton, Eloise Greenfield, Tom Feelings, Jerry Pinkney, Rosa Guy, Mildred Taylor, and Pat Cummings. Katharine Capshaw makes a similar point with regard to US ethnic literature in her introduction to a special issue of MELUS in 2002, arguing that an “awareness of ethnic children’s literature may open up our approaches to studying and teaching adult texts.” Capshaw’s insistence that we “cannot tell the story of ethnic American writing without the voice of children’s literature” applies as well to US writing writ large and Black children’s literature (Capshaw 2002, 7). In Who Writes for Black Children?: African American Literature Before 1900, Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane present scholars with primary source material intended “to bring two largely separate fields (early African American literary studies and children’s literature studies) into conversation in ways that shift the parameters of both”; by seeking to “unsettle traditional histories and theorizations of children’s literature to permit an expanded appreciation of the investments and accomplishments of black children’s culture,” Capshaw and Duane imagine the possibilities of putting Black children and Black childhoods at the center of a more broadly conceived literary critical practice (2017, x).

We turn our attention to Black children’s literature and literary constructions of Black childhood, in part, to mark the centennial of Langston Hughes’s literary debut in the pages of the NAACP’s dual publications—The Crisis and The Brownies’ Book (a magazine for children). From his debut in 1921 to his death in 1967, Hughes straddled the arbitrary line between children’s and adult literature, producing texts and criticism relevant to both. He included many of his most popular poems in collections marketed to children. Hughes chose to include “I, too,” originally published in a special issue of Survey Graphic (1925), in his first children’s book, The Dream Keeper and Other

Poems (1932). The speaker of “I, too,” echoing Walt Whitman, asserts his place at the table while underscoring the twoness of America: I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare Say to me, “Eat in the kitchen,” Then.

Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed—

I, too, am America. (Hughes 2003, 82)

“I, too” has been invoked throughout its nearly one-hundred-year history. In 2016, at the unveiling of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, President Obama used the final line as a refrain in a speech about the importance of confronting the contradictions of the nation’s history. Near the end of his speech, the “I” becomes “We,” the “darker brother” becoming a choir of voices, dispelling the myth of a single story, not just of America but of African Americans. Hughes’s selection of “I, too” for his children’s collection should remind us that Black children, though often seated in the kitchen when company comes, also sing in that choir.

We invoke Hughes’s poem for reasons particular to each of our academic fields of study: for too long, Black children have been denied a place at the scholarly table. This denial mirrors the inattention to Black children’s concerns in our public discourse and manifests in a dearth of scholarship on Black children’s texts and Black literary childhood. As president of the Children’s Literature Association, Capshaw called for a renewed focus on diversity in her field, describing the current state of scholarship on non-White children’s texts

“bereft” (2014, 238). In African American literary studies, the state of scholarship on children’s texts could be described as minuscule if not nonexistent. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, for example, while including in biographical headnotes the fact that an author also published work for children, contains not one author or illustrator who produced work exclusively for young readers. The most prominent nod toward an author’s work for children amounts to four sentences in the headnote for Lucille Clifton, winner of both the Coretta Scott King Award (for Everett Anderson’s Goodbye in 1984) and a National Book Award for Poetry (for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems in 2000). In Oxford’s A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes, the concluding chapter, “Bibliographic Essay,” contains one paragraph on “Children’s Literature and Juvenile Biographies” and begins with a statement—“Children’s literature is a new area of scholarly study” (Hubbard 2004, 214)—that prompts the question: new to whom? At best, this perspective reflects a separate-and-equal mindset regarding Black children’s literature, a mindset this special issue seeks to challenge.

Framing a call to dismantle children’s literature apartheid by invoking Hughes calls attention to the arbitrary nature of boundaries between fields of study: although he did not identify as a children’s writer, Hughes most certainly participated in both literary traditions. In the most comprehensive overview of the Black children’s literary tradition to date, Free Within Ourselves: The Development of African American Children’s Literature, Rudine Sims Bishop honors Hughes in her title, echoing a phrase from his 1925 manifesto, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Bishop notes that Hughes and Arna Bontemps, the writer Violet J. Harris regards as “the contemporary ‘father’ of Black children’s literature,” were the first Black writers with work for children published by mainstream presses (quoted Bishop 2007, 46). Hughes’s The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, illustrated by Helen Sewell (reissued with illustrations by Brian Pinkney in 1994), and Hughes and Bontemps’s coauthored novella, Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti, illustrated by E. Simms Campbell (reissued by Oxford in 1993), both appeared in 1932. Considered a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes has been the subject of numerous biographies introducing him to young readers as well as the inspiration for a slew of award-winning children’s books that signify on his work; such awards, in part, reflect Hughes’s continued currency within children’s literature.2 Within African American literary studies, Hughes is perhaps second only

to Toni Morrison in the amount of scholarship his work has generated. In 2001 the University of Missouri Press began publishing the sixteen-volume The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, two of which focus exclusively on his work for children. A new documentary, I, Too, Sing America: Langston Hughes Unfurled, introduces the prolific writer to yet another generation of readers and activists.3 The documentary’s teaser features Hughes’s poem “Kids Who Die,” with imagery and dramatic recitations by children that frame Hughes as an ancestor to the Black Lives Matter movement. One hundred years after his literary debut in the pages of The Crisis and The Brownies’ Book, Hughes continues to sing America while Americans of all ages continue to listen and learn from him.

Hughes’s continued relevance speaks to the as-yet-unrealized “tomorrow” of “I, too”: the “darker brother” remains relegated to the “kitchen,” his beauty unrecognized by a persistent and pernicious “they” that wields power over Black bodies through various means, including within the pages of books marketed to children. Throughout his writing career, Hughes challenged the normalization of Whiteness in the world of children’s books not only by publishing poems, stories, biographies, and nonfiction that documented and celebrated Black life but also by confronting racism in White children’s literature.4 In “Books and the Negro Child,” published in Children’s Library Yearbook, Hughes rebuked purveyors of racist imagery, sounding notes that echo in our most recent reckoning with Dr. Seuss: “The need today is for books that Negro parents and teachers can read to their children without hesitancy as to the psychological effect on the growing mind, books whose dark characters are not all clowns, and whose illustrations are not merely caricatures” (1932, 109). In 1944, Hughes responded to a request to review Ada Claire Darby’s Jump Lively Jeff, writing that he did not expect Black readers to like the book. To support his view, Hughes noted the following: the Black boy’s name is Jefferson Davis; young Jeff eats watermelon; other characters include Aunt Car’line and Mammy; and everyone speaks in “slavery-time comic, antiquated dialect” (Rampersad and Roessel 2015, 259). In 2015, upon the publication of Hughes’s Selected Letters, Kia Makarechi featured Hughes’s response to Jump Lively Jeff in a short piece for Vanity Fair with a title that underscores the poet’s relevance to current debates about race, representation, and racism in children’s literature: “Langston Hughes’s 1944 Rebuke of a Racist Children’s Book Could Have Been Written Today.”

Challenges to racism in US children’s literature—then and now—typically face fierce resistance from White readers blissfully ignorant of, or apathetic to, the ways in which books such as Darby’s Jump Lively Jeff or Seuss’s And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street perpetuate stereotypes of people of color and thus advance the cause of White supremacy. A case in point involves the problematic history of the phenomenally popular The Story of Little Black Sambo, written and illustrated by Scottish-born Helen Bannerman in 1898. Presented as people living in the jungle, Sambo and his parents, Black Jumbo and Black Mumbo, have pitch-black skin and the exaggerated features characteristic of nineteenth-century minstrelsy. In her 1976 study of the book’s history, Little Black Sambo: A Closer Look, solicited by the Council on Interracial Books for Children (CIBC), Phyllis J. Yuill documents twenty-seven versions of the book published in the US between 1905 and 1953, each version welcomed and heralded in a fashion advocates for anti-racist education would likely describe as cringe-worthy. In 1936 The Horn Book Magazine called the publication of a sequel, Sambo and the Twins, “the event of the year among children’s books” (Yuill 1976, 6). Yuill notes the ways in which critics evolved (or not) regarding race by analyzing Selma Lanes’s comments in Down the Rabbit Hole. Lanes assesses Bannerman’s original story about a boy who outwits tigers, animals who then turn into butter that the boy’s mother uses to make hundreds of pancakes for a family feast, giving the book an “A-plus” for teaching White children to consider the humanity of Black people “without feeling either guilty or anxious”:

In loving Sambo, unreservedly, in some way every white had the feeling that he was also accepting the black man as a fellow human being. The nursery bookshelf was integrated, and no prejudice could be said to exist in a home where Little Black Sambo and Peter Rabbit stood side by side on the same shelf. (Lanes 1971, 162) Yuill astutely observes that Lanes’s attempt to explain the appeal of Sambo in terms of a rejection of racism may actually reveal an acceptance of White supremacy as well as “a fascination with the distorted images of blacks” in mass media (1976, 9).5 In “From Little Black Sambo to Popo and Fifina,” Harris cites such fascination to explain Bontemps’s exclusion from the canon of children’s literature: the White reading public, Harris argues, prefers minstrel-inspired depictions of Blacks over Bontemps’s “oppositional images” (1990, 126).6 Hughes responded to Little Black Sambo with scorn, describing

it as written and drawn in the “pickaninny” style, with imagery poisonous to relationships between White children and their Black peers. By Hughes’s death in 1967, the number of Sambo defenders had diminished but not disappeared. The editors of The Anthology of Children’s Literature (Houghton Mifflin), a textbook used in children’s literature courses in schools of education and library science, included the story in its picture book section in 1959, choosing to exclude it from the textbook’s 1970 edition; in 1971, Wilson’s Children’s Catalog also dropped Sambo. But as Nina Mikkelsen argues in “Little Black Sambo Revisited,” her review of Pictus Orbis Sambo, the character lived on, showing up, “like the bad penny,” in “memorabilia of popular culture, canon wars, and new versions” (Mikkelsen 2001, 261). In 1996, Julius Lester and illustrator Jerry Pinkney collaborated to publish Sam and the Tigers, a retelling of Bannerman’s story that replaces racist depictions but retains the folktale elements. An American Library Association (ALA) Notable Children’s Book for 1997, their revision of a racist bestseller won the Children’s Literature Association’s Phoenix Picture Book Award in 2016.7

Why did it take a century for Sam to rise out of the ashes of Sambo? Addressing this question requires attention to three mutually reinforcing factors that create and maintain apartheid in US children’s literature: (1) a White-dominated publishing industry, (2) the pervasiveness of racist stereotyping as well as the policing of representations of Blackness, and (3) the association of childhood with innocence and thus Whiteness. We offer a brief discussion of each factor in order to provide a sense of the strength and persistence of the forces preventing a place at the table for a diverse chorus of Black writers whose works center Black children and Black childhoods.

THE ALL-WHITE PUBLISHING WORLD

Visible at several different levels—editors, agents, and reviewers— the Whiteness of the publishing industry serves the interests of White supremacy by controlling what stories get told and in what way. Zora Neale Hurston tackled this issue in 1950, in an essay for Negro Digest appropriately titled “What White Publishers Won’t Print.” Employing her signature sardonic wit, Hurston first declares herself “amazed by the Anglo-Saxon’s lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes” before presenting this indifference as a threat to “national coherence and solidarity.” Lack of knowledge, Hurston argues, “cannot fail to bar our understanding.

Man, like all the other animals fears and is repelled by that which he does not understand, and mere difference is apt to connote something malign” (1979, 169). Well aware that publishers print what sells, Hurston puts the blame for the “gap in the national literature” on a White public averse to any literary or visual representation of Black people that does not reinforce racist stereotypes. Hurston could have easily provided examples of White-preferred caricatures of Black people, given their ubiquity in US popular culture. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s phenomenally popular 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, for example, features the asexual, docile Tom and the unruly, unkempt Topsy. Both caricatures reappear in the form of Mammy—asexual and completely devoted to her White owners—and the mischievous Prissy in Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer prize-winning Gone With the Wind, the film version of which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1940 and a Best Supporting Actress Award for Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy. The first Black actor to win an Oscar, McDaniel sat at a segregated table for the awards ceremony, a requirement that clearly illustrates the complicity of the movie industry in maintaining Jim Crow via its artistic productions as well as its institutional practices. That same year, Richard Wright’s Native Son became the first Book-ofthe-Month Club selection by a Black writer, the novel introducing readers to Bigger Thomas, an unrepentant murderer and rapist just barely out of reform school. A significant moneymaker for Wright, Native Son drew fire from Hurston and, more famously, James Baldwin, who disparaged the novel as participating, alongside Stowe’s nineteenth-century bestseller, in a protest tradition that distorted and debased Black experience, “surrendering to those forces which reduce the person to anonymity” (Baldwin 1998, 34).

Hurston’s astute analysis suggests that without some kind of intervention, the White publishing industry will not challenge entrenched notions of Blackness. Scholars point to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act as examples of political forces affecting publishing practices. In her keynote address at the Children’s Literature Association conference, Capshaw noted a “surge in children’s book productivity” following mid-twentieth-century civil rights legislation, the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and the establishment of the Council of Interracial Books for Children (CIBC), calling the 1970s “a special moment” for Black children’s literature (2014, 241). In his op-ed for the New York Times, “I Actually Thought We Would Revolutionize

the Industry,” multiple award-winning young adult author Walter Dean Myers remembers this historical period similarly: “Things were looking up. I believed that my children and their contemporaries would not only escape the demeaning images I had experienced but would have strong, positive images as well.” For Myers (1986), revolutionizing the industry meant “bringing it to a quality and dimension that would raise the standards of all children’s books.” But what Myers hoped would be a turning point for the next generation of young readers turned out to be a window of opportunity that opened ever so slightly and then slammed shut. Put another way, the “all-white world” of children’s books that Nancy Larrick documented in her landmark study, published in 1965, proved to be incredibly adept at accommodating calls for more diversity while continuing to support and uphold White supremacy.

Richard Jean So’s research does for our current era what Larrick did for hers—it draws attention to significant racial inequality in publishing by using data analysis. In Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (2020), So documents the all-White world of adult fiction over a seventy-year period. His findings reached a general audience via a New York Times op-ed cowritten with journalist Guy Wezerek, “Just How White is the Book Industry?” The answer is, even Whiter than we academics imagined. So demonstrates that even as multiculturalism made a demonstrable difference in what college students read (measured by Norton anthologies, curriculum, and syllabi), the situation in the college classroom does not reflect any measurable change in the Whiteness of the publishing industry. A professor of English and Cultural Analytics, So mentions both Hurston’s 1950 essay and Morrison’s tenure at Random House in his op-ed,8 seeking to make connections between his data and the material conditions Black writers continue to face in a racist marketplace. Though adult fiction published by five mainstream presses comprises his dataset, So highlights contemporary Black young adult writers receiving rejections from publishers who wonder aloud why they would publish The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas when they already publish books by Jason Reynolds: apparently, one Black young adult writer is enough. So’s op-ed responds directly to a hashtag originating with L.L. McKinney, a Black fantasy writer, who sought to call attention to racial disparities in advances paid to writers: #PublishingPaidMe would document just how much publishers value (or not) Black stories at a time when these same corporations issued statements of support in

conjunction with Black Lives Matter. Not surprisingly, So’s research proves the disconnect between public relations rhetoric and whose/ which stories get told. His study, briefly summarized in the op-ed and discussed at length in his book, concludes that the publishing industry is 95 percent White.9 Data collected by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center reveals the same lack of access to authors of color and lack of diversity in children’s books.10 While So remains optimistic that once publishers understand the scope of the problem, they will find effective ways to address it (such as hiring more people of color as editors), McKinney, speaking from experience as a Black writer of fantasy fiction, rejects both the ignorance defense and the idea that publishers simply respond to market forces: “They’re doing it because of tradition. And the tradition is racism” (So and Wezerek 2020).11

POLICING REPRESENTATIONS OF BLACKNESS In her assessment of the current state of Black children’s literature, published in The Lion and the Unicorn in 2019, Karen Chandler echoes the concerns of Hughes’s 1926 manifesto. In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes rejects the idea that Black artists should cater to expectations that reflect White middle-class attitudes and values, whether such expectations come from Whites or Blacks. Hughes references the “racial mountain” in “I, too,” an oft-ignored aspect of his famous poem: the “they” sending the “darker brother” to the “kitchen” include Black Americans adhering to White middle-class notions of beauty and respectability and rejecting the forms and values of Black artistic expression (such as spirituals, the blues, and folklore) that Hughes championed. In her survey of the current moment, Chandler comes to a similar conclusion: while Black writers for young readers seem to be in vogue, enjoying both popular and critical success, institutional practices continue to limit the range of Black representation by ignoring the work of previous generations of groundbreaking Black authors and by the persistent stereotypes that still populate books about Black experience.12 Like Hughes, Chandler worries that the rich diversity that constitutes a distinct Black cultural history is in danger of being distorted, if not erased, and she wonders what effect this erasure will have on children:13 I feel unsettled by some of the representations of black identity, and I wonder what they may contribute to children’s understanding of

black and American cultural foundations and also how they may influence children’s vision of the past, present, and future. I see a diverse, multigenerational group of black authors engaging with necessary questions about identity and social belonging, but worry that some of the most progressive and critical voices are being prematurely silenced. (Chandler 2019, 172) Whereas Chandler puts the burden of responsibility on institutional practices, McKinney explains such silencing in terms of White investment in Black pain, relating the lack of diversity in Black books to the film and television industry in which Black actors win awards for portraying drug dealers, gang members, addicts, and maids, characters “steeped in stereotypes about the struggle, ready-made for non-Black consumption” (McKinney 2020). McKinney notes that books for younger readers suffer a similar fate when cultural gatekeepers (such as agents, editors, reviewers, teachers, and librarians) choose to highlight so-called “issue” books over texts that offer diverse alternative representations. Just as damaging is how genre polices representation. Nel devotes an entire chapter in Was the Cat in the Hat Black? to the industry’s focus on Black trauma through its preference for realism, historical fiction, and nonfiction. McKinney makes a similar argument, countering the “trauma porn” favored by the industry by offering a list of contemporary Black fantasy novels that present young Black protagonists as heroic adventurers.14

(WHITE) CHILDHOOD AND INNOCENCE The construction of childhood as innocent and therefore White, or as White and therefore innocent, manifests in discussions that transcend disciplinary boundaries and typically take place within the context of concerns about racial (in)justice. For example, research consistently demonstrates racial disparities in disciplinary practices in public schools as well as arrests and various forms of abuse (including murder) of children by law enforcement. A product of the nineteenth century, “childhood innocence” has tremendous political power, Robin Bernstein (2017) calling it “a cultural formation that has proved, over and over, to be one of white supremacy’s most potent weapons.” The author of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011), Bernstein explains in “Let Black Kids be Kids” that understanding violence against Black children requires remembering that slavery dehumanized Black people, denying them agency and adulthood, constructing

them as perpetually undisciplined children so as to rationalize and justify keeping them in a state of perpetual bondage. Consequently, though Black people were denied agency and adulthood, they were also denied the affordances that were assigned to White childhood—innocence and, therefore, protection. The influence of “childhood innocence” as an element of White supremacy on the material conditions of Black lives is clearly destructive.15 Yet the concept survives, often as an unexamined assumption. Writing nearly fifty years apart, both Broderick (1973) and McKinney (2020) make explicit the idea that unexamined assumptions about (White) childhood, on the part of cultural gatekeepers, impede accurate representations of other kinds of childhood, often retrospectively rationalized with comments like “Black people don’t read” or “Black people don’t buy books.”

The concept of childhood innocence also shapes children’s reading via often heated discussions about age-appropriate content. While such discussions typically draw attention to textual elements such as vulgar language or scenes with implicit or explicit sexual references, they more often than not mask a more fundamental objection to a book’s ideological perspective. For example, the American Library Association’s list of the ten most challenged books in 2020 includes seven works intended for children, three of which are authored or coauthored by a Black writer and address racism: Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You; Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely’s All American Boys; and Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give. 16 Though the content that attracts efforts at censorship shifts in response to cultural anxieties, often undergirding the anxiety about books by Black writers is the notion that (White) children should be protected from content that unsettles the (racist) status quo. When White supremacy is threatened, cultural forces coalesce to defend White children.

A (CRITICAL) FAILURE OF IMAGINATION This Special Issue draws attention to yet another factor that supports and upholds apartheid in and of children’s literature: the relative lack of scholarly attention to Black children and childhood. In the one hundred years since Hughes made his literary debut, scholarship centering the Black child has been produced primarily, but not exclusively, by a handful of Black scholars in children’s literary studies and (multicultural) education.17 A notable and early

exception, Dorothy M. Broderick’s The Image of the Black in Children’s Fiction (1973) surveyed one hundred forty years of children’s books (1827–1967), Broderick concluding with an indictment of her White colleagues for failing to recognize that so-called neutral content supports the status quo, perpetuating the production of books that do little to represent authentic Black experiences. In his review of Broderick’s book for The Library Quarterly, Spencer G. Shaw foregrounds his own response to what he calls a “penetrative work”: It is fascinating to see several starred and double-starred titles from the Children’s Catalog critically lacking in an honest portrayal of black people. It is disturbing to find so few titles in children’s fiction which would help a black child gain any sense of identity or self-esteem. It is equally disheartening to note the subliminal effect some of these titles have had in perpetuating among white children a false sense of superiority and intolerant tolerance. (Shaw 1975, 441) Given that we began our discussion of apartheid in and of children’s literature with the recent decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to cease publication of six books that contain racist imagery, and the White backlash that immediately followed, we must conclude that in the nearly fifty years since Broderick’s study, not much has changed. As Shaw notes in his review, Broderick herself acknowledged that “a ready-made solution is not available magically to change fiction about blacks for children” (441). We can, however, choose to change our perspective on the value and purpose of literary inquiry into Black childhood. We can decide to center Black children and childhoods in our classrooms and our scholarly work, whether we approach that work from the field of African American literature or US children’s literature or from an interest in material/popular culture, racial justice, or antiracist education.

The essays in “Children, Too, Sing America” address this critical failure of imagination by centering literary constructions of Black children and childhood in a wide range of texts, published since Hughes’s debut and up to the present. Seohyun Kim and Holly Blackford Humes offer readings of fictional texts by Black women writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance. In “Vexation or Joy: Respectable Motherhood and the Trope of Childhood in Nella Larsen’s Passing,” Kim offers an original reading of Larsen’s novel that focuses on the protagonist’s relationship with her sons as well as her complicated fascination with her friend Clare’s childhood, aspects of the text often ignored by critics.18 In “Isis as Little Red:

Illuminating Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Drenched in Light,’” Humes shows how Hurston, early in her writing career, signifies on the folktale of Little Red Riding Hood by casting her young protagonist in the titular role and surrounding her with wolves. Humes makes a compelling case for Hurston’s continued investment in the European folktale by reading Tea Cake as the wolf and Janie as an older Little Red in Hurston’s best-known work, Their Eyes Were Watching God. In “‘Mature Themes’: Childhood in the African American Literary Scene of Encounter,” Maude Hines reorients our understanding of childhood innocence in her examination of the literary treatment of young Black children’s often traumatic recognition of racial inequity. In a variety of texts, from DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to James Baldwin’s recently reissued book for children, Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976), Hines reflects on the meaning and value of literary representations of Black childhood. Two essays focus on joyful depictions of Black girlhood in picture books published between 1991 and 2002. Ewa Kleczaj-Siara profiles the work of an artist known primarily for her story quilts: “In Search of Faith Ringgold’s Picture Books” argues for reading Ringgold as a “counter-storyteller” who offers her intergenerational audience not only revisionist history that focuses on Black agency but also images of Blackness that emphasize joy and possibility. E. Gale Greenlee argues for reading feminist cultural critic bell hooks within the context of her oft-ignored stories for young children in “A Blueprint for Black Girlhood: bell hooks’s Homemade Love.” Greenlee’s analysis highlights hooks’s ability to reformulate her feminist theory into an aesthetic and affective experience for young readers (and the adults in their lives) by means of a picture book—a fitting and timely tribute to hooks’s legacy. KaaVonia Hinton highlights YA writer Jason Reynolds’s recent collaboration with Ibram X. Kendi in “Jason Reynolds’s Stamped: A Young Adult Adaptation for All Ages.” Hinton discusses Stamped within a tradition of Black nonfiction that includes Julius Lester’s To Be a Slave and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, giving us a glimpse of an African American literary tradition that underscores the commitment of both youth and adults to the freedom struggle. By taking up a critical stance at the intersection of African American literary studies and children’s literary studies, each essay challenges apartheid in and of children’s literature.

The backmatter features twenty-eight profiles of Dream Keepers, twentieth-century Black writers and illustrators whose literary and/or visual representations of Black childhoods deserve more

scholarly attention. Many have established reputations as writers for adults, with entries in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature that may mention but not discuss in any meaningful way their work for children. As the essays in this issue illustrate, attention to the work produced for children enriches our understanding of a writer’s oeuvre. Other Dream Keepers write or illustrate works for children and so may be known only by scholars who specialize in children’s literature. Arranged alphabetically, these selected artists form a canon of sorts, one that does not separate texts or authors according to intended audience and that recognizes that sometimes the audience includes readers of all ages. These Dream Keepers carry on the work of Langston Hughes, giving us the opportunity to hear (and celebrate) Black children singing America.

NOTES

The editors would like to acknowledge the financial support of Middle

Tennessee State University’s Office of Research and Special Projects, which provided a Faculty Research and Creative Activity Award, and

MTSU’s English Department’s Richard and Virginia Peck Trust Fund.

We would also like to thank the following colleagues and graduate students for their participation in a writing workshop for essay contributors: Lois Bennett, Laura Black, Sidney Blaylock Jr., Harlow Crandall,

Carline Encarnacion, Kimberly Feher Cerchiaro, Sekou Franklin, Martha Hixon, Alfred Lutz, Christy Lynch, OlaOmi Amoloku, Leslie Taylor, Cheryl Torsney, Christopher Weedman, Laura White, and Jericho

Williams. For providing feedback on this introduction, we thank Alfred

Lutz and Mischa Renfroe. 1 Christopher Myers and Philip Nel both use apartheid to refer to the systematic separation of Black texts from the canon of (White) children’s literature. We use this term similarly—to call attention to racist practices that foster and sustain a system wherein Whiteness dominates US children’s literature—but also to refer to the marginalization of Black children’s texts within the African American literary tradition, writ large. 2 Award-winning books marketed to youth that celebrate and/or signify on Langston Hughes in the last twenty years include Lesa Cline-Ransome’s Finding Langston (Coretta Scott King [CSK] Honor Book 2019);

Jacqueline Woodson’s brown girl dreaming (National Book Award 2014;

Newberry Medal 2015; CSK Award 2015); Bryan Collier, Illustrator of

I, Too, Am America (CSK Illustrator Award 2013); Charles R. Smith Jr.,

Photographer, My People, text by Hughes (CSK Illustrator Award 2010);

E. B. Lewis, Illustrator of The Negro Speaks of Rivers, text by Hughes (CSK

Illustrator Award 2010); Benny Andrews, Illustrator of Poetry for Young

People: Langston Hughes, edited by David Roessel and Arnold Rampersad (CSK Illustrator Honor 2007); Bryan Collier, Illustrator of Visiting Langston, written by Willie Perdomo (CSK Illustrator Honor 2003). 3 As of this writing, the documentary has not yet been released. 4 In addition to Dream Keeper and Other Poems and Hughes’s collaboration with Arna Bontemps, Popo and Fifina, other selected works explicitly for children include the First series of books (1952–1964) that cover topics such as jazz, rhythm, the West Indies, and Africa, and Black Misery (1969).

Hughes’s efforts to reach Black audiences beyond New York elites, such as his lecture and reading engagements tour through the US South in 1931 and 1932, prompted an inexpensive reprint of selections from The

Weary Blues and the compilation The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations, works he considered appropriate for the intergenerational audience of Black “teachers, students, and townspeople” who attended these events (Rampersad 1986, 233; quoting Hughes’s March 5, 1932, letter to the Rosenwald Fund that sponsored the tour). 5 Writing in 1975, children’s author Eloise Greenfield described the images of Blacks that pervaded the culture, focusing specifically on television:

“The mirror that they hold up for children is a carnival mirror, a funhouse mirror, reflecting misshapen images, exaggerated or devaluated as the needs of situation comedy demand” (1975, 626). The prevalence of such distortions and the effect they might have on her own children prompted Greenfield to turn her attention from writing for adults to writing for children. 6 Violet J. Harris defines an oppositional text as “one in which the author, consciously or unconsciously, creates a text that contradicts traditional portrayals of an ethnic, religious, linguistic, or gender group. In the process of creating the text and making it available to the public, the author engages in a cultural process that might alter the group’s status, or at least, change some perceptions of the group” (1990, 110). 7 The Phoenix Picture Book Award “recognizes an exemplary picture book that conveys its story (whether fact or fiction) through the synergy between pictures and text, or through pictures alone if there is no text. . . . [The] award will be given to the author and/or illustrator . . . of a book for children first published twenty years earlier that did not win a major award at the time of its publication but which, from the perspective of time, is deemed worthy of special attention” (Children’s

Literature Association 2021, 106). 8 From 1967 to 1983, Toni Morrison served as the first Black female editor at Random House, shepherding to publication works by Angela Davis,

Toni Cade Bambara, and Gayle Jones (among others) as well as what she considered her greatest editorial achievement: a stunning collection of

artifacts illustrating Black history that amounted to a clarion call for a second renaissance in Black arts and letters. Published in 1974, The Black

Book offered Black writers a wealth of primary materials from which to draw inspiration. An 1856 news clipping about a slave mother named

Margaret Gardner, for example, inspired Morrison to write her Pulitzer

Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987). 9 Richard Jean So used WorldCat to generate a list of book titles within an established set of parameters—fiction in English, published between 1950–2018 by one of the five major publishers, held by ten or more libraries, and in digital format. These parameters yielded a dataset of 8,004 books and 4,010 authors. So then eliminated books for which the race of the author could not be established and concluded that the industry is 95 percent White. He estimates that for genre fiction—romance and fantasy, for example—the publishing industry is closer to 98 percent

White. 10 In 2019, the year for which the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) collected the most recently available authoritative data, of the 3,717 books received by the CCBC from US publishers, only 451 books featured Black or African content and only 224 books were written by

Black or African authors. Just over 12 percent of books made for children featured a Black main character or Black experience, and barely 6 percent of books were written or illustrated by a Black or African author.

The CCBC tracks other minority content and representation, including

Asian, Indigenous, Arab, Latinx, and Pacific Islander. As problematic as the statistics are for Black/African authors and content, other ethnic and/or racial minorities fare even worse. 11 L.L. McKinney’s indictment of American cultural production as a tradition of racism in contrast to So’s more optimistic conclusion was anticipated by research published as early as 1973. In her study examining Black representation in children’s books, The Image of the Black in

Children’s Fiction, Dorothy M. Broderick argued that more diverse and accurate depictions of the Black experience will require wider access for

Black writers and illustrators to publication, autonomy over their subject matter, and more informed reviewers, insisting they “be experts in the fields in which they review and be made to demonstrate when dealing with a fiction title about blacks that they have read widely in the adult materials considered standard in the field” (1973, 182). 12 Children’s literature, in conjunction with its sister fields of childhood literacy, classroom pedagogy, and librarianship, tends to focus on immediately contemporary texts. Because young readers exist as children in a particular and specific historical moment, scholars tend to focus on contemporary books. A contemporary title may enjoy momentary attention, only to be set aside within five years as new trends and titles appear. The

average lifespan of publication of a children’s book is two years, though books that win major awards such as the Caldecott and the Newbery have a longer life (Kidd 2007,168). Attention to recently published texts discourages the kinds of scholarship that define a literary tradition. 13 In The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas uses the phrase “imagination gap” to describe the effects of “the diversity crisis in children’s and young adult media” (2019, 5). How will children imagine different possibilities for themselves if media consistently portrays them in limited if not stereotypical roles? 14 Genre is simply the next iteration of cultural representations of the

Black experience that serve White supremacy. Broderick noted that children’s books of her own era served White readers: “This distortion [of Black experience] took the form of imposing white middle-class values upon black people and teaching the doctrine of ‘we are all alike’ to the white readers for whom the books were obviously intended” (1973, 3). She concludes that the books articulate “what the adult white establishment wished white children to know about black people” (6). She is just as forthright about the likely message Black readers would receive from these books: “If the authors of the sample books intended their books to reach a black audience, it seems fair to conclude that they were intending to help the blacks accept the lowly status assigned to them within society” (7). 15 In their op-ed rejecting “adultification” as an explanation for violence against Black children, Stacey Patton and Toby Rollo conclude: “How, then, do we protect Black children, when the designation of childhood innocence itself invokes the spectre of slavery and provokes so much coercion and violence in white society?” Their answer is to reject “the white supremacist hierarchy which privileges and protects adults over children” while also “asserting a radical Black challenge to white conceptions of childhood” (Patton and Rollo 2021). 16 Of the remaining titles on the list, two titles address racism: Sherman

Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Marianne

Celano, Marietta Collins, and Ann Hazzard’s Something Happened in Our

Town: A Child’s Story About Racial Injustice (illustrated by Jennifer Zivoin).

Two others, Alex Gino’s George and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, both specifically for children, do not have race as a central feature. Three titles on the list are also often read by young adults, two of which have racial themes: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. 17 In addition to the titles referred to in this introduction, other booklength literary criticism that focus on representations of Black experience include Rudine Sims, Shadow and Substance (Urbana: NCTE, 1982);

Osayimwense Osa, ed., The All-White World of Children’s Books and African

American Children’s Literature (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1995);

Donnarae MacCann, White Supremacy in Children’s Literature: Characterizations of African-Americans, 1790–1900 (New York: Garland, 1998);

Katharine Capshaw, Civil Rights Childhoods: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2014); Nancy D. Tolson, Black Children’s Literature Got De Blues: The Creativity of Black Writers and Illustrators (New York: Peter Lang, 2008); Neal

A. Lester, Once Upon a Time in a Different World: Issues and Ideas in African

American Children’s Literature (New York: Routledge, 2007); and Nicole

King’s forthcoming Black Childhood in Modern African American Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022). Other recent notable work that centers Black children has been published by Roberta Price

Gardner and Michelle P. Phillips. 18 The 2021 film adaptation of Passing (directed by Rebecca Hall) also ignores this aspect of Nella Larsen’s novel.

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ELLEN BUTLER DONOVAN is a Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University where she teaches courses in children’s and YA literature. Her research focuses primarily on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American children’s literature. Her most recent essay focuses on the link between print culture and definitions of boyhood.

LAURA DUBEK is a Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. She specializes in African American literature and popular culture. She has published essays on Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Malcolm X, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and Spike Lee. Her scholarship in children’s/YA literature includes an essay on David F. Walker’s graphic narrative, The Life of Frederick Douglass, and Toni Morrison’s commemorative photobook, Remember: The Journey to School Integration. She is the editor of Living Legacies: Literary Responses to the Civil Rights Movement.