¹ W. E. B. Du Bois, “The True Brownies,” The Crisis, Oct. 1919, 286. Katharine Capshaw Smith argues that the Brownies’ Book was “undoubtedly a response to the NAACP's antilynching agenda,” which The Crisis intensified as violence against blacks increased during the “Red Summer” of 1919. Smith, Katharine Capshaw, Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 26Google Scholar. Announcing the advent of the Brownies’ Book, Du Bois notes that, to the editors’ “consternation,” they have “had to record some horror in nearly every Children's Number,” and worries about its effect on the child reader. Du Bois, “The True Brownies,” 285.

² The Children's Number usually contained no more than one story and perhaps several poems or riddles, and also included general articles about race and politics. Capshaw Smith, Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, xix, 2, considers it as a “cross-written” text – a work aimed at both a child and an adult audience.

³ For a discussion of the different meanings and connotations of racial “uplift,” the ideology of self-help particular to educated, middle-class African Americans beginning in the late nineteenth century, see Gaines, Kevin K., Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Ariès, Phillipe, Centuries of Childhood, trans. Baldick, Robert (New York: Vintage, 1962)Google Scholar.

⁵ The figure of the child has been considered in terms of its mutually constitutive role within accounts of physiological and evolutionary development, its status as a figure for “life itself” within scientific and environmental discourse, its indispensable role in Romantic and sentimental culture, its symbolic value in narratives of citizenship and nation building, and its foundational place in psychoanalytic thought and in the construction and policing of adult sexuality. Scholars have also assessed the effects of “the child's” conceptual work on the lives of real children. Equally, the field of children's literature studies continues to boom, moving from the margins to claim a central place in contemporary literary criticism. For a nuanced assessment of the position that childhood studies occupies within the contemporary humanities see the essays collected in Duane, Anna Mae, ed. The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

⁶ Jenkins, Henry, “Introduction: Childhood Innocence and Other Modern Myths,” in Jenkins, ed., The Children's Culture Reader (New York: New York University, 1998), 1–37, 15Google Scholar.

⁷ Levander, Caroline F. and Singley, Carol J., “Introduction,” in Levander and Singley, eds., The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 3–12, 5Google Scholar.

⁸ Stockton, Kathryn Bond, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Bernstein, Robin, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Capshaw Smith draws on Johnson's, DianneTelling Tales: The Pedagogy and Promise of African American Literature for Youth (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990)Google Scholar, the first major critical work to address this material. While African American children's literature of this period has been critically neglected in general, Du Bois's publications for children have started to receive more critical attention. Schäffer's, ChristinaThe Brownies Book: Inspiring Racial Pride in African-American Children (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is the first monograph on Du Bois's children's magazine and presents a detailed summary of the main features of the publication.

¹¹ Capshaw Smith, 1.

¹² “Publishers’ Chat,” The Crisis, Sept. 1912, 251.

¹³ Schäffer, 39. For a discussion of some of the other significances of the name “Brownie,” which also refers to an elf-like creature, see Kory, Fern, “Once upon a Time in Aframerica: The ‘Peculiar’ Significance of Fairies in The Brownies’ Book,” Children's Literature, 29 (2001), 91–112, 96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Bernstein, 3.

¹⁵ Ibid., 4.

¹⁶ Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Howard, Richard (London: Vintage, 2000), 76Google Scholar. The term “index,” which is frequently used to describe the photograph's primary distinguishing quality, derives from Charles Sanders Peirce's distinctions between icon, symbol, and index. While icons operate on the basis of likeness, and symbols on the basis of substitution, the index is the trace of the absent referent.

¹⁷ For important recent interventions in this debate see Abel, Elizabeth, Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blair, Sara, Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Capshaw, Katharine, Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Fusco, Coco and Wallis, Brian, eds., Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003)Google Scholar; Smith, Shawn Michelle, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Smith, , Photography of the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Raiford, Leigh, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Wallace, Maurice O. and Smith, Shawn Michelle, Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wexler, Laura, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Willis, Deborah, ed., Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (New York: The New Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Wexler, Laura, “Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye,” in Hirsch, Marianne, ed., The Familial Gaze (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 248–73, 252Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Dimock, George, “Photographs of Children,” in Fass, Paula S., ed., Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society, Volume II (New York: Macmillan, 2004), 672–76, 672Google Scholar.

²⁰ Barthes, 89.

²¹ For a powerful account of African American children and photography within the documentary tradition see Capshaw's Civil Rights Childhood. Capshaw's book examines how children's photobooks in the civil rights era drew on the 1930s documentary tradition and used the “material, evidentiary appeal for a nascent civil rights movement” (ibid., 66). Furthermore, Capshaw describes how, despite their appeals to the documentary style, the books she considers still play with the “truth-value” of the photograph (ibid., xx).

²² Du Bois compiled three large albums of photographs – Types of American Negroes; Georgia, USA (3 vols.) and Negro Life in Georgia, U.S.A. – for the “Negro Exhibit” in the US pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Du Bois's second photographic project was conducted at Atlanta University, and was published as The Health and Physique of the Negro American in 1906. For detailed discussion of these projects see Smith's authoritative American Archives and Photography of the Color Line.

²³ Sekula, Allan, “The Body and the Archive,” October, 39 (Winter 1986), 3–64, 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ Abel, 66.

²⁵ English, Daylanne, “W. E. B. DuBois's Family Crisis,” American Literature, 72, 2 (June 2000), 219–319CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ Smith, Photography of the Color Line, 2.

²⁷ Ibid., 65.

²⁸ Ibid., 61–62.

²⁹ W. E. B. Du Bois, “Our Baby Pictures,” The Crisis, Oct. 1913, 299.

³⁰ W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Slaughter of the Innocents,” The Crisis, Oct. 1918, 267; Du Bois, “Shadows of Light,” The Crisis, Oct. 1918, 286.

³¹ Hammonds, Evelynn M., “New Technologies of Race,” in Terry, Jennifer and Calvert, Melodie, eds., Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 107–22, 110Google Scholar.

³² Trachtenberg, Alan, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 4Google Scholar.

³³ Bourdieu, Pierre, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, trans. Whiteside, Shaun (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 77Google Scholar.

³⁴ W. E. B. Du Bois, “About Pictures,” The Crisis, Oct. 1918, 268.

³⁵ Ibid.

³⁶ Morse cited in Sekula, Allan, Photography against the Grain (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 5Google Scholar.

³⁷ W. E. B. Du Bois, “Photography,” The Crisis, Oct. 1923, 249–50, 250.

³⁸ Ibid., 249.

³⁹ Jennifer González, “Morphologies: Race as a Visual Technology,” in Fusco and Wallis, Only Skin Deep, 387.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ “Over the Ocean Wave,” Brownies Book, Jan. 1920, 9.

⁴² Ibid.

⁴³ Mavor, Carol, Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (London: I. B. Tauris 1996), 3Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Miles Orvell discusses this function of the portrait in American Photography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 26–27Google Scholar. For discussions of the child's role in supporting American bourgeois culture see Blumin, Stuart, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Degler, Carl, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and Ryan, Mary, The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 68, claims that uplift discourse drew on studio portraiture in particular “to infuse the black image with dignity, and to embody the ‘representative’ Negro by which the race might more accurately be judged.”

⁴⁶ Higgonet, Anne, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998), 71, 73Google Scholar, my emphasis.

⁴⁷ Hirsch, Marianne, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 7Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 33.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 55.

⁵⁰ Schäffer, The Brownies’ Book, 201. Schäffer does not connect the depiction of childlike black adults with that of de-childed black children.

⁵¹ “A Is for Alligator,” St. Nicholas, May 1922, 713.

⁵² Schäffer, 194.

⁵³ Alice Burnett, “The Wish,” Brownies’ Book, June 1920, 91.

⁵⁴ “Shadows in Light,” The Crisis, Oct. 1916, 286.

⁵⁵ Phillips, Michelle H., “The Children of Double Consciousness: From The Souls of Black Folk to the Brownies’ Book,” PMLA, 128, 3 (2013), 590–607, 595–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁶ Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life among the Lowly (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 401Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Scott, Clive, The Spoken Image: Photography and Language (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 49, 47Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ “Little People of the Month,” Brownies’ Book, Jan. 1920, 29.

⁵⁹ “Little People of the Month,” Brownies’ Book, June 1920, 175.

⁶⁰ Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 23. One of the most obvious examples of this might be the Victorian habit of photographing dead children as if they were still alive: these images in the Brownies’ Book function as strange echoes of the “postmortem” genre.

⁶¹ Kincaid, James R., Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 68Google Scholar.

⁶² “Juvenile Court,” The Crisis, Oct. 1913, 292.

⁶³ Ward, Geoff K., The Black Child Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In its concern with the way in which the juvenile justice system has mirrored racial inequalities, Ward's book responds to a critical tendency to neglect of the issue of race within this field of studies. The foundational work in the field is, of course, Platt's, Anthony M. influential The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969)Google Scholar, a major early contribution to childhood studies. Platt's book, which focusses on the white child, indeed argued that the juvenile-court system itself helped create a new, diminished, category of young person – the delinquent.

⁶⁴ “Juvenile Court,” 293.

⁶⁵ Ibid.

⁶⁶ Ibid.

⁶⁷ “An Orphan Home,” The Crisis, Oct. 1912, 278–79.

⁶⁸ Tagg, John, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), 85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The before-and-after format was also a feature of African American children's conduct literature, as Katharine Capshaw Smith discusses in “Childhood, the Body, and Race Performance: Early 20th-Century Etiquette Books for Black Children,” African American Review, 40, 4 (Winter 2006), 795–811Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Zelizer, Viviana, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 11Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Levander and Singley, “Introduction,” 5.

⁷¹ Pinney, Christopher, “Introduction: ‘How the Other Half …’,” in Pinney, Christopher and Peterson, Nicolas, eds., Photography's Other Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 1–14, 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷² Poole, Deborah, “An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 34 (2005), 159–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷³ Doane, Mary Ann, “Temporality, Storage, Legibility: Freud, Marey, and the Cinema,” Critical Inquiry, 22, 2 (Winter 1996), 313–43, 313CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁴ W. E. B. Du Bois, “Childhood,” The Crisis, Oct. 1922, 250.

⁷⁵ Phillips, “The Children of Double Consciousness,” 603.

⁷⁶ Ibid.

⁷⁷ Capshaw Smith, Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, 44.

⁷⁸ Knoepflmacher, U. C. and Myers, Mitzi, “‘Cross-Writing’ and the Reconceptualizing of Children's Literary Studies,” Children's Literature, 25 (1997), vii–xvii, viiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁹ “Junior Crisis,” The Crisis, Oct. 1929, 356.

⁸⁰ Kincaid, Child-Loving, 5, original emphasis.

⁸¹ The Crisis, Oct. 1916, 271.

⁸² Du Bois, “Our Baby Pictures,” 298.

⁸³ Brownies’ Book, April 1920, 110.

⁸⁴ Lillie Buffam Chace Wyman, “Brave Brown Joe and Good White Men,” Brownies’ Book, Nov. 1921, 318–20.

⁸⁵ “Perfect Children,” Brownies’ Book, April 1920, 116.

⁸⁶ “Little People of the Month,” Brownies’ Book, Aug. 1920, 254.

⁸⁷ Ibid.

⁸⁸ Ibid.

⁸⁹ See Capshaw Smith, Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, chapter 1.

⁹⁰ “Distinguished Descendants,” The Crisis, Oct. 1923, 267; “Men of the Month,” The Crisis, Oct. 1918, 284.

⁹¹ Castañeda, Claudia, Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 2-3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹² Capshaw Smith, “Childhood, the Body, and Race Performance.”

⁹³ Felix J. Koch, “Little Mothers of Tomorrow,” The Crisis, Oct. 1917, 289.

⁹⁴ See Capshaw, Civil Rights Childhood, chapter 4.

⁹⁵ Castañeda, 1.

⁹⁶ While I underline a contrast between the child's futurity and the photograph's record of the past, others have made convincing arguments for the structural and semiotic parallels between the child and the photograph by focussing on their shared temporal dimensions, such as the loss, longing and nostalgia provoked by both. For examples of such work see Mavor, Pleasures Taken, and Sánchez-Eppler's, KarenDependent States: The Child's Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), chapter 3Google Scholar.

⁹⁷ Smith, Photography of the Color Line, 71.

⁹⁸ Ibid.

⁹⁹ Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 14.

¹⁰⁰ W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of the Giving of Life,” The Crisis, Oct. 1912, 287.

¹⁰¹ W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Immortal Children,” The Crisis, Oct. 1916, 267.

¹⁰² Ibid., 268.

¹⁰³ Barthes, Camera Lucida, 77.

¹⁰⁴ Maxwell, Anne, Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics 1870–1940 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2008), 226Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁵ Williams, Robert W., “W. E. B. Du Bois and Positive Propaganda: A Philosophical Prelude to His Editorship of the Crisis,” in Kirschke, Amy Helene and Sinitiere, Phillip Luke, eds., Protest and Propaganda: W. E. B. Du Bois, the Crisis, and American History (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2014), 16–27, 16Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁶ Williams, 20.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid.

¹⁰⁹ W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” The Crisis, Oct. 1926, 296.

¹¹⁰ Ibid.