By Don Valentine
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, was the first Black person to earn a PhD from Harvard. He was a luminary of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, and the father of the N.A.A.C.P. In addition, he created the first magazine especially for Black kids. The New York Times wrote, “… its pages filled with the voices of children and their parents, of poets and college coeds, biographers and advice columnists, schoolgirls and scholars, spinners of fables and gatherers of folk tales, and a panoply of Black figures staking a claim in the history of a country that would rather not acknowledge them…”
The Brownies’ Book was published by Dr. Du Bois and his partner A.G. Dill. They had collaborated on the popular Crisis magazine. It was subtitled “A Monthly Magazine for the Children of the Sun.” –BlackPast.org. The Atlantic Journal published the poignant, introductory note of the first issue of The Brownies’ Book, January 1920 “One day in late 1919, a young boy in Philadelphia named Franklin Lewis wrote a letter to a magazine editor. My mother says you are going to have a magazine about colored boys and girls, and I am very glad. So I am writing to ask you if you will please put in your paper some of the things which colored boys can work at when they grow up.
I don’t want to be a doctor or anything like that. I think I’d like to plan houses for men to build. But one day, down on Broad Street, I was watching some men building houses and I said to a boy there, “When I grow up, I am going to draw a lot of houses like that and have men build them.” The boy was a white boy, and he looked at me and laughed and said, “Colored boys don’t draw houses.”Why don’t they, Mr. Editor?
My mother says you will explain all this to me in your magazine and will tell me where to learn how to draw a house, for that is what I certainly mean to do. I hope I haven’t made you tired, so no more from your friend.”
Dr. Du Bois’ monthly magazine filled in the missing blanks in so many Black kids’ minds. It also turned into a publishing venue for the “Talented Tenth” of the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes was first published there, Nella Larsen, Arna Bontemps and Hilda Rue Wilkinson among them. A poem by Jessie Fauset ran in the inaugural issue served as the new venture’s dedication:
To Children, who with eager looks Scanned vainly library shelves and nook, For History or Song or Story That told of Colored Peoples’ glory.
Unfortunately, the economic downturn of the impending Great Depression stopped publication in 1921. 102 years later there is a book paying homage titled “The New Brownies’ Book: A Love Letter to Black Families” by Karida L. Brown and Charly Palmer.
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