The letter would appear the following year in The Brownies’ Book, a new monthly magazine for Black children. Nothing like it had ever existed before. Created and edited by W. E. B. Du Bois—the sociologist better known for his early civil-rights leadership than his work for kids—it aimed to present a new vision of Black American childhood.
As an early adherent of the “New Negro” movement, which agitated for an American Blackness that—in counterpoint to the more quiescent version offered by Booker T. Washington—was prideful, assertive, confident, progressive, and expressive, as well as economically and professionally successful, Du Bois believed that advancing the race was the work of the next generation.
This required that Black children be not just well educated but steeped early on in activism and progressive racial politics. And so in his role as the editor of The Crisis, the house organ of the NAACP, Du Bois had, since 1912, been publishing a special annual issue called “The Children’s Number,” aimed at educating and raising the racial consciousness of Black kids.
But Du Bois had a conundrum. He believed that The Crisis, as a Black news magazine, had an obligation to keep its readers updated on the grim reality of racial violence: the race riots, the beatings, the lynchings. But in 1919—when the “Red Summer” saw white-supremacist riots convulse dozens of cities around the country, killing hundreds of people, most of them Black—those realities had become so grim as to make Du Bois uncomfortable about exposing children to them in the pages of his publication. What hatred, Du Bois asked in a Crisis editorial that October, might reading such reports instill in the young? He quoted with dismay a letter he’d gotten from a 12-year-old “red-bronze and black-curled” girl who wrote, “I hate the white man just as much as he hates me and probably more!”
“And yet, can you blame the child?” he asked.
To the consternation of the Editors of The Crisis we have had to record some horror in nearly every Children’s Number—in 1915, it was Leo Frank; in 1916, the lynching at Gainesville, Fla.; in 1917 and 1918, the riot and court martial at Houston, Tex., etc.
This was inevitable in our role as [a] newspaper—but what effect must it have on our children? To educate them in human hatred is more disastrous to them than to the hated; to seek to raise them in ignorance of their racial identity and peculiar situation is inadvisable—impossible.
His solution was The Brownies’ Book, the seven goals for which he declared would be:
(a) To make colored children realize that being “colored” is a normal, beautiful thing.
(b) To make them familiar with the history and achievements of the Negro race.
(c) To make them know that other colored children have grown into beautiful, useful and famous persons.
(d) To teach them delicately a code of honor and actions in their relations with white children.
(e) To turn their little hurts and resentments into emulation, ambition and love of their own homes and companions.
(f) To point out the best amusements and joys and worth-while things of life.
(g) To inspire them to prepare for definite occupations and duties with a broad spirit of sacrifice.