from Part II - Experimenting with the New Negro
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2021
This chapter explores the variety of literature available to young people during the Harlem Renaissance, paying specific attention to the contributions of W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Effie Lee Newsome, Langston Hughes, and Arna Bontemps. Children’s literature took shape through periodicals, community theatre, black-owned publications, and mainstream publishing houses with an interracial audience. Texts embraced a new vision of African American childhood as sophisticated, capable, knowledgeable, and courageous, because literacy rates for young people often outmatched those of adults, children were imagined through texts as cultural leaders who would help reinvent the black community. Writers also employed children’s literature as a site of community galvanization, drawing together adults and children through the veneration of black history and identity. Children were imagined as politically invested and deeply aware of the racist culture that surrounded them. Children’s literature aimed to develop readers’ racial sensibility in order to propel social change.
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