Remapping Black Childhood in The Brownies’ Book

Abstract

This essay examines the recurring preoccupation with geography in W. E. B. Du Bois’s and Jessie Redmon Fauset’s African American children’s magazine, The Brownies’ Book (1920–1921). Drawing in part on conventions established by early Black periodicals, including an emphasis on the rich global presence of non-Western peoples and places, many of the magazine’s features, from its stories and poems to its images and games, offered Black children a much wider view of their place in the world—both literally and imaginatively—than that provided by typical U.S. schoolroom atlases and geographies, which tended to have little to say (or show) about countries and continents outside North America and Europe. By aiming to develop in its readers alternative forms of geographic and political consciousness, The Brownies’ Book provocatively recast geography as a radical mode of knowledge available to Black children through cultural as well as cartographic forms, in the process remapping Black childhood itself.

1. Introduction: New Cartographies

The outpouring of new work on The Brownies’ Book (1920–1921) in honor of the centennial of its publication has brought not only renewed appreciation for the magazine’s accomplishments but also a clearer understanding of its educational strategies along with fresh pathways for navigating its contents. Scholars of the periodical are now more alert, for example, to the impact of co-editor W. E. B. Du Bois’s longstanding interest in the history and theory of Black childhood (Oeur 2021), and particularly his embrace of transfiguration—“a vision and political activism that saw children as capable and powerful beings” (Webster 2021, p. 347)—on the magazine’s centering of Black children’s voices. We are correspondingly more attuned to the importance of The Brownies’ Book’s insistence on depicting real children rather than “abstract notions of ‘The Child’” (Fielder 2019, p. 162), a realization with implications for our own scholarship as well. We are beginning to recognize the ways that iterative representations of play not only “complicate the magazine’s visual and literary emphasis on uplift” but also amount to “an alternate form of civil rights strategy” (Capshaw 2021, pp. 368–69). And we are in turn newly attentive to the “productive heterogeneity” (Capshaw 2021, p. 369) underlying The Brownies’ Book’s experimental mixing of genres, styles, and approaches. With yet another volume of essays on the magazine scheduled to appear this fall, this is an exciting time to be working on this extraordinary periodical.

My essay builds on this new work by drawing attention to a striking component of The Brownies’ Book’s educational strategy that permeates the magazine but that has not yet been adequately explored: its recurring preoccupation with geography, spatially, literally, and figuratively. From the very first issue, and across nearly all the magazine’s departments—including fiction and poetry, current events and photographs, games and puzzles, even letters from readers—The Brownies’ Book deploys the tools, methods, and materials of geography to offer Black children a much wider view of their place in the world, both literally and imaginatively, than that provided by typical U.S. schoolroom atlases or popular periodicals for children. Drawing in part on conventions established by early African American periodicals, which had long “concerned themselves with world histories and current affairs” (Fielder 2021, p. 422), this turn toward geography provocatively recasts a “deeply conservative” subject (Cain 2015, p. 280) as a radical mode of knowledge available to Black children through cultural as well as cartographic forms, helping them shape powerful new maps of global citizenship and belonging. In what follows, I show how thoroughly the inaugural issue of The Brownies’ Book foregrounds this pedagogy, how the magazine’s approach amplifies strategies common to Black periodicals in order to push explicitly against what children were being taught in U.S. geography classrooms, and how these new cartographies reverberate through the magazine’s two-year run. I also highlight the ways in which the magazine’s incorporation of the social sciences in general and geography in particular differs starkly from the treatment of similar materials in St. Nicholas magazine, sharpening our understanding not only of the contrast Du Bois and co-editor Jessie Redmon Fauset sought to draw with the most influential children’s periodical of the era but also of the “hybrid” texture (Capshaw 2021, p. 371) that makes The Brownies’ Book so distinctive yet also so recognizable within the history of African American magazine culture.1

Through this analysis, I demonstrate how keenly the magazine recognized that to “seek to teach Universal Love and Brotherhood for all little folk” (Du Bois 1919, p. 286) would require the active remapping of both geographic and imaginative space. Not only did The Brownies’ Book invite Black children, as Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (2021) has evocatively argued, to “dream of Afrofutures” by providing them with “tales of otherwheres and elsewhens” (p. 407), it simultaneously encouraged those children to redraw the maps of the world in which they currently lived. It thus tried to undertake, in both real and figurative registers, the necessary (if still barely begun) task that Thomas (2019) calls “rethinking the cartographies of our imagination,” the mental maps “formed and reformed” by the racial imaginary of mainstream Anglo-American culture that perniciously interpellate Black characters (and by extension, persons) as “monstrous, invisible, and always dying” (pp. 282–83). This, too, is the intent of the geographic project of The Brownies’ Book: to teach Black children how to remake the pernicious maps—fictive and literal, past and present—that distort Black places and presences when they are not ignoring them entirely. If The Brownies’ Book had lasted longer—it stopped printing after two years for want of sufficient subscribers, rather than compromise its quality, an outcome all too common in early African American periodical publishing, where structural disparities often led to financial precarity2—perhaps it would have helped redraw some of those maps more successfully. But its thwarted effort to do so does not diminish the significance of the attempt, and it is to that attempt we now turn.

2. The Racialism of U.S. American Geography

Geographic texts have long helped ground racialized notions of American identity. As Martin Brückner (2006) has shown, the “culture of geographic letters”—including maps, textbooks, and other materials—“became staple goods in the American marketplace,” beginning in the colonial era (p. 11). For many, geography not only provided the “gateway to literacy itself” (Brückner 2006, p. 7), it “fostered a sense of national identity” (Brückner 2006, p. 8), while also priming Americans for territorial adventures at home and abroad. By the mid-to-late nineteenth century, notes Susan Shulten (2001), geography was “central” (p. 94) to the schoolroom curriculum of the U.S., but mainstream American publishers and mapmakers routinely gave short shrift to non-Western places and peoples. Africa, in particular, was almost always an afterthought. In Rand McNally’s (1885) popular New Household Atlas of the World, for example, “the entire continent of Africa was reduced to a single page” (Shulten 2001, p. 29) while the U.S. state of Alabama alone received two. When non-Western regions did receive attention, they were frequently described—Africa in particular—as offering nothing of value to Western civilization. The first lesson in the brief section on Africa (at the back of the volume, naturally) in William Swinton’s (1875) Elementary Course in Geography, for instance, begins this way:

LESSON I.

INTRODUCTION.

[For Recitation.]

1. What is the size and rank of Africa?

Africa ranks next to Asia in size, but it is the least important of the Grand Divisions, because it is the seat of no great civilized nations.

(Swinton 1875, p. 121)

As indicated by the bracketed instruction, “For Recitation,” these were not opinions to consider, but facts to be drilled into memory and repeated aloud in the classroom. Typical of the genre, there is little in the rest of the lesson that would make one regard Africa as anything other than uncivilized, even dangerous. While geographies tended to present Europe as “a theater of economic and political power,” Shulten (2001) observes, Africa always looms as the “dark continent” (p. 146), marked by violence and cruelty. The illustrations that accompany Lesson I, “African Warfare” and “Killing the Hippopotamus” (Figure 1), dramatize this convention, as does the final recitation, which declares that although the Caucasian inhabitants of Africa are civilized, “the negro tribes are for the most part in a barbarous or savage condition” (Swinton 1875, p. 121).

Between 1893 and 1910, educational reformers tried to shift school geography away from rote memorization toward the study of “human relationships” (Shulten 2001, p. 122) as part of a wider effort to ground the field in the social sciences rather than the physical and natural sciences. But this only ended up strengthening the environmental and racial determinism that consigned Africa (and other regions populated primarily by Black and Brown people) to the bottom of the socio-cartographic hierarchy. And even though Swinton’s (1875) Elementary Course in Geography had been replaced by other popular textbooks by the time The Brownies’ Book appeared, and the U.S. acquisition of new territories in Asia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean in 1898 led some schoolroom geographies to reconsider the economic (and civilizing) potential of countries such as the Philippines, the “unmodified racialism” of the field—particularly concerning Africa—persisted well into the 1920s (Shulten 2001, p. 115).

Another innovation in geographic pedagogy in the opening decades of the twentieth century—the increased use of visual media—gave this racialism an even firmer footing. Seeking to help an increasingly diverse U.S. student population form clear “‘mental pictures’ of a complex modern world” (Cain 2015, p. 276), geographers identified a set of “select images” (Cain 2015, p. 277) for use in textbooks and stereo-opticon slides. Not surprisingly, these images consolidated rather than challenged the stereotypical depictions of non-Western places that had long appeared in geography classrooms. The illustrations produced from this comparatively small set of “banal and often highly racialized” (Cain 2015, p. 282) images were not only “stubbornly durable” (Cain 2015, p. 277), they were everywhere. Indeed, “thanks to their constant recurrence and circulation,” Victoria E. M. Cain (2015) reports, “children viewed these images as frequently as they did continents on a world map” (p. 282). When these visual stereotypes appeared in the space of the classroom, moreover, they “became an officially sanctioned source of knowing and knowledge,” inscribing “popular typologies with scientific authority” and exerting “considerable, if quiet, influence” (Cain 2015, p. 282)—exactly as the reformers intended. Nor were these images restricted to non-Western locales. Certain U.S. American regions received similar treatment, as in the image of “A southern cotton plantation” that originally appeared in a popular magazine but which was then reprinted in multiple schoolroom geographies (Figure 2). As Cain (2015) notes, this image and its accompanying text naturalize Black labor as a racial trait linked to environmental conditions “rather than the result of an entrenched system of racism” (p. 284). “The climate that is favorable for growing these crops [cotton and rice],” the text declares, “is more oppressive to white people than to negroes. Hence negroes are largely employed to do the field work” (Dodge 1906, p. 94; original emphasis). These are just a few examples of the endlessly recirculating images and ideas that Black children encountered in their classrooms and that The Brownies’ Book was determined to disrupt.

3. The Brownies Push Back

Challenges both overt and subtle to the racialized paradigms of U.S. geography saturate the first issue of The Brownies’ Book. One tactic was simply to bring as many non-Western people and places into view as possible, both visually and textually, to suggest a “map” of the world that welcomes rather than ridicules (or ignores) Black presences. These inclusions usually follow one of two approaches: the validation of Black stature or achievement, or the demonstration of similarities between Black and Brown children around the world and Black and Brown children in the U.S. Fauset (1920b) makes the first of these aims explicit in the dedicatory poem that closes the volume:

To Children, who with eager look

Scanned vainly library shelf and nook,

For History or Song or Story

That told of Colored Peoples’ glory,—

We dedicate THE BROWNIES’ BOOK.

(“Dedication”, Fauset 1920b, p. 32)

The frontispiece of the first issue fulfills this aim by presenting an image one would be hard-pressed to find in a typical U.S. geography textbook: a portrait of “Her Royal Highness, Zaouditou, Queen of the Kings of Abyssinia, the Empress of Ethiopia.” The photograph not only belies the stereotype of Africa as a “dark continent” populated by barbarous savages, it shows a non-white person wielding extraordinary wealth and power. Strikingly, the image appears to have been licensed by Underwood & Underwood (who are credited beneath the picture), one of the principal commercial providers of photographic images and other visual aids to the publishers of geographic textbooks in the early twentieth century (Cain 2015, p. 280) and thus partly responsible for shaping the “stubbornly durable” (Cain 2015, p. 277) set of anti-Black images that The Brownies’ Book was trying to disrupt in the first place. The presence of this image in Underwood & Underwood’s collections is quite telling. It suggests that there was always visual evidence that Africa and other “dark” regions did not conform to the stereotypes propagated by textbook publishers, but that these images were passed over in favor of those that supported longstanding racial biases. It is even more startling to realize that one of the most radical images in the first issue of The Brownies’ Book, the photograph of Black children marching down Fifth Avenue in New York City in July, 1917, in protest against the deadly East St. Louis riots and pervasive anti-Black violence in the U.S. (“Children in the ‘Silent Protest’ Parade, New York City” (Du Bois and Fauset 1920, p. 26)), was also licensed to the magazine by Underwood & Underwood. It is as though Du Bois and Fauset are deliberately assembling a counter-archive of possibility and purpose from a repository more commonly deployed to objectify Black people.

To advance their second aim—showing similarities between children of color around the world—Du Bois and Fauset (1920) juxtapose a photograph of a “Girls’ School Directed by Nuns, Addis-Ababa, Abyssinia,” with one of “Y. W. C. A. Girls in New York City” (Du Bois and Fauset 1920, p. 22), arranged vertically one above the other. The juxtaposition is meant to speak for itself. The photographs do not accompany a separate story, nor is there any text beyond the joint caption, though the top photo directly recalls the frontispiece, which is also from Ethiopia, thereby broadening the child reader’s view of that country while simultaneously inviting that child to think about what connects children in New York City with children in East Africa. Multiple references to children in other nations appear throughout the issue, further helping Black children reconfigure the mental and literal maps provided by their textbooks.

The Brownies’ Book did not invent these strategies. As Brigitte Fielder (2021) has noted, Black periodicals had long sought to counter racially myopic depictions in mainstream U.S. print culture by “situating African American readers within a larger Black diaspora” (p. 422) that acknowledged the “larger global contexts with which African American people have historically concerned themselves” (p. 421). Nor was The Brownies’ Book the first Black periodical to have a child readership (Fielder 2019, p. 160) or to recognize the importance of “cultivating black children as sophisticated readers” (Wright 2017, p. 148), capable of developing not just knowledge but also political agency.3 What The Brownies’ Book did was center geography as a way of making sense of the world more thoroughly and consistently than previous periodicals, including the magazine that served as its literal inspiration: the Crisis, which Du Bois had helped found in 1910 and which, beginning in October 1912, had published an annual Children’s Number. To the Crisis’s already broad array of content, these Children’s Numbers introduced several genres that would come to feature prominently in The Brownies’ Book, including folk tales from the African diaspora, stories and poems by African American authors, as well as pictures and accounts of Black children from both within and outside the U.S.4 The Brownies’ Book distinguished itself not simply by multiplying these materials but by foregrounding a radical geographic consciousness in several of the magazine’s key departments.

Du Bois’s (1920a) monthly column, “As the Crow Flies,” in which he adopts the persona of a “black and O so beautiful” crow who flies “far above the earth” (Du Bois 1920a, p. 23) reporting on current events around the world, for example, contributes powerfully to this geographic consciousness. The insistently oscillating geography of “As the Crow Flies,” in which Du Bois moves back and forth from the U.S. to other countries around the globe, at once mirrors the “doubleness of double consciousness” (Phillips 2013, p. 603) while also inviting children to see themselves differently—not through the eyes of white supremacist U.S. Americans but through “the eyes of the transnational Crow” (Phillips 2013, p. 603). Like the juxtaposition of photographs described above, this movement also invites cross-cultural connection. As Fielder (2021) observes, “The Crow positions himself as a Black figure moving throughout the world in order to connect the African American child readers of The Brownies’ Book to the larger global contexts with which African American people have historically concerned themselves, while also noting their specific diasporic condition and history in the United States” (p. 421). Du Bois (1920a) even conducts his first column, in part, like a geography lesson, directing readers to “Take your atlas” (Du Bois 1920a, p. 23) when the Crow begins his flight. Moreover, the sheer volume of place names invoked in Du Bois’s column—in the first issue alone, the Metz; the Rhine; Paris; Haiti; Europe; the Imperial German Republic; Austria; Poland; Czecho-Slovakia; Hungary; the kingdom of Serbs and Jugo-slavs; Jerusalem; Italy; France; Belgium; Japan; China; the United States; Ireland; India; the British Empire; Egypt; Russia; the Balkans; New York City; Chicago; the South; South Dakota; the Atlantic Ocean; Abyssinia; Liberia; Spain; Washington; Omaha; Mexico; Longview, Texas; Phillips County, Arkansas—implicitly shapes a map in which Africa and Asia (and in later columns, South America as well) are as important as North America and Europe. This abundance of place naming does not simply bring the whole globe “home,” encouraging transnational solidarity (though it certainly does that). It also helps ground the pointed critique of U.S. geographic pedagogy that the issue undertakes.5

Du Bois’s method in “As the Crow Flies” also highlights how differently The Brownies’ Book represented the wider world within its pages than its chief competition, the long-running St. Nicholas magazine, which by 1920 was nearing half a century in print and was by far the highest circulating children’s periodical in the world. Despite the international reach of its contents—even the very first issue, in November 1873, put readers in contact with Spain, Germany, China, Africa, and the Pacific—St. Nicholas tended to perpetuate many of the same racialized presumptions found in U.S. geography textbooks, contributing in its own powerful way to the distorting cartographies of real and imagined spaces both abroad and at home.6 Laura E. Richards’ (1878) poem, “Tommy’s Dream; or, the Geography Demon,” which appeared in the January 1878 issue of St. Nicholas, gives an early hint of this tendency. Tommy, who hates geography because it is a jumble of “nonsense and names” (Richards 1878, p. 213), has a terrifying dream, in which a “great horrid monster” (p. 213)—the Geography Demon—abducts Tommy from bed and forces him to fly around the world. Their itinerary is chaotic, blurring countries and climates in a phantasmagoric rush that leaves Tommy not just anxious for his sanity but fearful for his life as the demon urges them on:

Hie! hie! rise and hie

Away to the banks of the Yang-tze-ki!

There the giant mountains of Oshkosh stand,

And the icebergs gleam through the falling sand;

While the elephant sits on the palm-tree high,

And the cannibals feast on bad-boy pie.

(Richards 1878, p. 214)

After another stanza in which Tommy is told “the kettle boils and waits for thee” (p. 214), he screams and then wakes up. “Do you blame me for hating my lesson?” he asks (p. 214). Though clearly intended as comic, the humor in “Tommy’s Dream” merely exaggerates the anxieties fostered by geographies and atlases that consistently depicted non-Western people and places as inscrutably Other or savagely violent. And while every location Tommy is forced to visit in his dream is disorienting, including those in the U.S., he is only menaced by persons of color. The question Tommy asks when he wakes up is thus, of course, rhetorical. No reader of St. Nicholas—educated in the same curriculum—would blame him for hating such a lesson.

Whether Du Bois actually read “Tommy’s Dream,” it is not difficult to see how his conception of “As the Crow Flies” is diametrically opposed to the ethos of the St. Nicholas poem. Rather than a forced flight of terror, Du Bois’s (1920a) young readers are invited to imagine the exhilaration of soaring with the Crow, “happy and free, high up in these wild spaces” (Du Bois 1920a, p. 76), developing knowledge instead of fear. “As the Crow Flies” also seems designed deliberately to counter the geographic parochialism of St. Nicholas’s own current events column, “The Watch Tower.” First appearing in September 1915, roughly one year after the start of the First World War, “The Watch Tower” was described to readers as “a special Department in which American boys and girls can learn month by month much about the great things that are happening in all parts of the globe” (Forman 1915, p. 963), which chimes with the general aim of “As the Crow Flies.” But unlike Du Bois, neither S. E. Forman nor his successor, Edward N. Teall, spent much time looking for “great things” in places other than Europe or the U.S.7 The illustration that accompanied every installment of “The Watch Tower” (Figure 3) makes this ironically clear, showing a spotlight illuminating a distant globe in which only the western hemisphere is visible, with the rest of the world in shadow. And even though Europe would get plenty of time (metaphorically speaking) in the sun, “The Watch Tower’s” beacon rarely swept over Africa or Asia.

Du Bois’s Crow signifies on St. Nicholas’s tower in other ways as well. Where the Crow is constantly in motion, traveling from place to place, the tower stands still, waiting for the globe to turn. A specially commissioned frontispiece that accompanied the inaugural installment of “The Watch Tower” (and that appeared again when Teall wrote his first column in 1917) makes this distinction fully clear: it shows two white children enclosed within a similar tower, looking out through their window at the world below (Figure 4). One holds a large, open book, perhaps an encyclopedia or even a geography. Markers of Western culture and civilization surround the children, including a second globe, which is not only also turned to the western hemisphere, but which shows clearly only North America. It is a rich environment, but also an isolated one. Indeed, whether or not Du Bois was familiar with “The Watch Tower” (though it is reasonable to presume that he was)8, it seems fair to say that the larger aim of The Brownies’ Book—in contrast to St. Nicholas—is to bring its child readers out of their metaphorical towers and into the world. Rather than present the non-Western world as spectacle, in other words, to be looked at from a safe (and implicitly elevated) distance, The Brownies’ Book invites its readers to imagine themselves as part of the peoples and places they meet in the magazine’s pages.

The Brownies’ Book accomplished this aim in part through an innovative blend of disciplinary approaches that foregrounds geography while also recalling the practice of early Black periodicals, which frequently drew their materials from a variety of genres (Wright 2017). As Ivy G. Wilson (2013) notes, for example, the Anglo-African Magazine offered readers “pieces as seemingly disparate as sheet music and articles on astronomy” (p. 24) alongside its regular treatments of world events, politics, and culture. For its part, The Brownies’ Book was particularly successful in interweaving social scientific materials in general and geographic discourse in particular with the more usual children’s fare of stories, pictures, and games, thereby making the social sciences, broadly considered, a crucial partner with literature and the arts in the shaping of the magazine and its readers. Du Bois’s guiding presence was surely a factor in this approach, given not just his sociological training but also the multidisciplinary eclecticism of his own work, most notably in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Indeed, “As the Crow Flies” is a good example: it combines journalistic reportage with historical, economic, and socio-political analysis that is then presented through the globe-spanning figure of an imaginary talking animal. As Fielder (2021) has persuasively argued, the Crow is at once realistic and fantastical—social scientist and storyteller, we might say—drawing on the Black storytelling tradition of the Flying African not merely to deliver the news but to tell a story “of hopeful and fantastical future-making” (p. 431). Although other periodicals, including St. Nicholas, sometimes incorporate materials from the social sciences, too, they do not do so nearly as often as The Brownies’ Book, or across as many departments.9 Readers of The Brownies’ Book were as likely to encounter a social scientific perspective in a given issue’s photographs, frontispieces, games, and stories as they were in more explicit forms, such as the historical accounts of Black history and achievement that appear nearly every month. I do not mean to downplay the importance of other elements distinctive to the magazine, such as the canny significations of its Afrocentric folk tales and fairy tales (Kory 2001), or the “uplift photographic portraiture” (Capshaw 2021, p. 368) that populates “Little People of the Month”—though each of these, too, might be said to have a social scientific (and even geographic) dimension. But recognizing how strongly the incorporation of geography and the social sciences shapes the texture of The Brownies’ Book, particularly in contrast to its competitors, adds depth to our sense of what critics have insightfully termed the magazine’s “cross-written nature” (Oeur 2021, p. 337), its use of “multisemiotic” discourses (Young 2009, p. 18), and its “productively hybrid” admixture of texts (Capshaw 2021, p. 371). The Brownies’ Book’s commitment to integrating the study of human behavior into virtually every component of the magazine deserves more attention in this regard than we have so far given it.10

Let us turn back to the first issue again to see two more examples of this integration at work. The first, “Over the Ocean Wave,” is both “A Geography Story” (as it is described in the Table of Contents) and a political story, one that uses geographical knowledge to help children challenge the stories they may have heard about Black and Brown people around the world—in this case, what they may have heard about Filipinos.11 In the story, two children, Betty and her younger brother Philip, go to the movies with their Uncle Jim. At the movies, they see a picture of “two young colored girls” (Over the Ocean Wave 1920, p. 9) from the Philippines who are now enrolled as students at the University of Chicago. Walking home afterward, the children ask Jim to tell them about the two girls—“Where did you say those girls came from?” “Were they really colored?”—and Jim explains that although the girls are “colored” (“that is, their skin is not white”), they belong to the “brown, or Malay race,” rather than the “black, or Negro race” (p. 9). He then tells them where the Philippines are, but since they are still walking home and he cannot pull out an atlas, he calls on their existing knowledge to draw a picture in the air:

“Well,” said Uncle Jim, “let me see if I can make you see them plainly without the map. Do you know where China is?”

“Yes,” said Philip, “it’s in Asia, right on the Pacific Ocean.”

“Good,” said his uncle; “now the Philippine Islands are a large group of islands lying in the Pacific Ocean, south and east of China, directly east of French Indo-China, and north and west of Borneo. The China Sea is on the west of these islands, between China and the Philippines, and to the north and south and east lies the wonderful Pacific Ocean. Do you get the picture, Betty?”

“Yes,” said Betty, “I do.”

(Over the Ocean Wave 1920, p. 9)

The children then ask him why one of the girls was described as the daughter of a “bandit” (Over the Ocean Wave 1920, p. 10). Jim explains that she is actually the daughter of “a great Filipino leader” who, resenting U.S. rule in the Philippines after 1898, “waged warfare for a long time against the Americans. He was finally captured and banished by the new-comers in authority,” Jim explains (p. 10). He pauses, then continues: “‘Of course, according to them he was a bandit, or outlaw, —a person who breaks the laws. But in the eyes of his own countrymen he was probably regarded as a patriot. It all depends,’ said Uncle Jim, ‘on how you look at it’” (p. 10). Jim’s impromptu lesson turns out to be a “Geography Story” about questioning the dominant culture’s geography stories.

“How you look at it,” one might say, is also the focus of the second piece, an illustrated poem by Fauset that appears near the end of the issue. “After School” (Fauset 1920a) sets an actual schoolroom scene, in which the speaker, a young girl, describes hating school and wanting it to be over from the moment she arrives, only to discover that as soon as school is out—and the teacher is gone—she wants to stay and “work her sums” on the board (p. 30). In the second half of the poem, she describes a classmate who feels exactly the same, only about geography:

And Billy Hughes is just like me,

He stays back just as regularly!

He’s always hunting out strange places

Upon the globe, and then he traces

A map with towns and states and mountains,

And public parks with trees and fountains!

And this is what’s so queer to me—

Bill just can’t get geography

In school-time, and I’m awful dumb,

I cannot do one single sum.

But just let that old teacher go—

There’s nothing Bill and me don’t know!

(Fauset 1920a, p. 30)

It is not simply that learning flourishes when figures of authority leave the room, it is that their absence provides an opportunity for someone like Billy—who does poorly in geography at school (he “can’t get” it)—to resist what he has likely been taught and to search out the knowledge that the teacher will not give him. That seems clearly to be the significance of the accompanying illustration (Figure 5), which shows Billy not just peering at the globe, but turning it specifically to Africa, sizing up the continent that his geography—and his teacher—have probably told him “is the least important of the Grand Divisions,” filled with “barbarous” people (Swinton 1875, p. 121). Billy is going to see for himself. The student standing to Billy’s right, who is not mentioned in the poem but who looks on in fascination as Billy turns the globe, suggests that this kind of radical re-learning is contagious. The stick-figure aesthetic of the illustrations by Laura Wheeler, who would go on to become one of the most prolific contributors to The Brownies’ Book and an important shaper of the “visual vocabulary” (Kirschke 2014, p. 85) of the magazine, moreover, recalls the kinds of drawings young children themselves might make, perhaps to imply that it is one of the students who has memorialized this counter-lesson in pen and ink. That the children’s heads are drawn like miniature globes seems deliberate as well, reinforcing the new connection between geography and identity that Billy discovers once he begins to teach himself.12

4. Ongoing Reverberations

This preoccupation with geography and (and as) counter-pedagogy is not unique to the first issue. Repeatedly, in forms both familiar and new, Black children were invited to remap their place in the wider world. Du Bois’s “As the Crow Flies” column, for example, which appeared in every issue, continued to bring readers in contact with an extraordinary range of peoples and places, almost always occupying two full pages and typically highlighting thirty to forty different news items from across the globe, and their corresponding locations. Jim, Betty, and Philip also make a repeat appearance in the March 1920 issue, in a sequel of sorts to “Over the Ocean Wave” called “A Strange Country.” Although “A Strange Country” (1920) is not specifically listed in the March 1920 table of contents as “A Geography Story,” it certainly qualifies as one. In the story, Philip comes home from school singing a rhyme about the “Island of Yap” (A Strange Country 1920, p. 87), which he has heard another boy sing and which he is convinced is not a real place. But Betty insists that it is. “I saw something about it once in a book,” she says (p. 87). They ask Jim to referee, and Jim affirms not only that Yap is a real place, but that it is near the Philippines. “‘Do you remember that day I told you about the Philippine Islands?’” (p. 87), Jim asks, alluding to their earlier conversation in “Over the Ocean Wave.” Both Betty and Phillip nod a “vigorous” yes (p. 87). Jim then describes to them, once again without an actual atlas, the location and shape of the Caroline Islands, of which Yap is the largest. Jim also gives them a geopolitical history of the competition to own the island, a strategic naval base in the mid-Pacific, between Portugal, Spain, and Germany. He ends the story by explaining that Yap is now back in the news because the United States wants to buy the island from its current owner, Germany, as a cable, radio, and trading base between San Francisco and Hawaii, one of the U.S.’s other recent island acquisitions. Whereas at the start of the story, Yap was for Philip simply a source of rhyming silliness, by the end of “A Strange Country,” the children recognize Yap as a site of U.S. expansion and imperial desire—providing them another way of thinking alternatively about what they hear in school, or in the news. The hand-drawn map (Figure 6) that appears as an illustration near the end of the story (also contributed by Laura Wheeler) is never actually referenced in the story—we are not told who draws it, for example—and it is almost literally an alternative geography, since the Philippines and the Carolines are not as close to each other as they are proportionately depicted. But what the map does do is give Yap a different scale, one appropriate to its geopolitical importance and that links it with the U.S. involvement in the Philippines and the Pacific more broadly. That is the lesson “A Strange Country” might bring home to readers like Philip and Betty.13

In August 2020, The Brownies’ Book published another mixed-genre “Geography Story,” Julia Price Burrell’s “The Quaintness of St. Helena.” Burrell’s (1920) story offers a different kind of alternative pedagogy to “Over the Ocean Wave” and “A Strange Country.” Despite the emphasis on “Quaintness” in the story’s title, Burrell, a resident of St. Helena, which is part of the Carolina Sea Islands and a thriving center of Gullah culture, offers a straightforward, insider’s guide to the foodways and folkways distinctive to the region and its inhabitants, nearly all of whom are Black. (Only fifty out of “about seven thousand,” she notes, are white (Burrell 1920, p. 245)). Burrell was not born on the island—she had arrived there as “a mere girl” (p. 246) some years earlier—and she occasionally punctuates her descriptions of the “native” (p. 246) residents with exclamation points (“Old people here seem so alone—so desolate—and always sick!” (p. 247)), but her tone seems intended to convey fascination rather than ridicule, and ultimately works to lessen the distance between the magazine’s young readers and Burrell’s fellow Islanders, instead of holding the latter picturesquely at arm’s length. The paragraph that includes the comment about the old people seeming “always sick,” for example, begins by noting “Here’s a picture of a dear old couple” (p. 247). Burrell’s affection, in other words, is evident—these are her neighbors and friends, after all—and she clearly hopes that readers of The Brownies’ Book will want to learn more about them.14 A much more respectful introduction to a predominantly African American community than children were likely to find in their textbooks, Burrell’s story helps readers imagine what geography written by and for Black people might look like.

These stories even inspired at least one young Black reader—Du Bois’s daughter Yolande—to write a geography tale of her own. Likely composed in 1920, “A Curious Geography Lesson” centers on Minnie and Dickie, twin children “in the same geography class in school” whose “present trial was learning the countries of Africa by name and location” (p. 1). Frustrated by the task, they complain to their mother, “if only we didn’t have to study this old geography, it’s so uninteresting” (p. 1). Their mother expresses surprise: “why I should have thought that geography would be the most interesting of all, especially Africa where all the little children are brown like you” (p. 1). When she asks what they know about Abyssinia, for example (which Dickie thinks “sounds awfully silly” (p. 1)), it quickly becomes clear that the children have been taught only the most rudimentary facts about each country—its name, what part of Africa it is in, and the other countries it borders—and nothing at all about the people or place itself. “Oh, my dears,” their mother exclaims, “there are really many interesting things to learn about Abyssinia” (p. 2). In the remainder of the story, she tells them about the history, religion, and politics of the country, highlighting the role of the emperor Menelik in securing Abyssinia’s independence (“Have you ever heard his name before? No?” she asks (p. 2)). She also reminds Minnie and Dickie that the current ruler, Queen Zaouditou—whom, she notes, they should remember “from the picture in the first BROWNIES’ BOOK” (p. 1)—is “only a little girl like Minnie“ (p. 4). The reference to The Brownies’ Book itself is particularly telling. It not only suggests that Yolande may have hoped her story would be published there; it also underscores the multiple ways “A Curious Geography Lesson” consciously advances the geographic counter-pedagogy the magazine has been developing. For in addition to invoking the frontispiece of the first issue, Yolande’s story (which remained unpublished, though she would later contribute a fairy story to the December 1921 issue of The Brownies’ Book)15 also recalls Fauset’s “After School”—like Billy, Minnie and Dickie must learn outside the classroom what their instructors will not teach them about Africa—as well as “Over the Ocean Wave” and “A Strange Country,” in which an adult family member provides children with historical and geopolitical contexts missing from their Western-centric atlases. Clearly, the magazine was teaching some readers new ways of mapping that “uninteresting” subject, geography.

The Brownies’ Book also provided space for readers to articulate the trauma—and rage—that the insistent racialism of contemporary geography books could engender. As Elinor Desverney Sinnette (1965) first observed, the letter “from a young girl in Philadelphia” that appeared in June 1920 in “The Jury,” the monthly installment of correspondence from child readers, “points out the bitterness that smoldered in the hearts of Negro children as a result of many painful school experiences” (Sinnette 1965, p. 140). “Sometimes in school I feel so badly,” the young girl, named Alice Martin, writes:

In the geography lesson, when we read about the different people who live in the world, all the pictures are pretty, nice-looking men and women, except the Africans. They always look so ugly. I don’t mean to make fun of them, for I am not pretty myself; but I know not all colored people look like me. I see lots of ugly white people, too; but not all white people look like them, and they are not the ones they put in the geography. Last week the girl across the aisle from me in school looked at the picture and laughed and whispered something about it to her friend. And they both looked at me. It made me so angry. Mother said for me to write you about it.

(Martin 1920, p. 178)

This is as clear a statement of the impact of the routine and repetitive visual denigration of Blackness in U.S. geography textbooks as one could imagine. Although no response is offered in “The Jury,” which typically did not comment on the letters it printed, it may be no accident that Burrell’s “Geography Story” (1920) about the Sea Islands’ West African-influenced Gullah culture appeared so soon after Martin’s letter. And there was more to come. Indeed, “what better reply could there have been” to Martin’s frustration, Sinnette (1965) suggests, “than the short article by Kathleen Easmon written for the June 2021 issue entitled, ‘A Little Talk About West Africa’ [that] included a full-page photograph of West African students posing proudly outside their school much in the same way as high school students in Philadelphia” (p. 140). Once again, The Brownies’ Book helps picture—literally—an alternative geography that takes Black subjects seriously.

Though Fauset, who supervised “The Jury,” did not respond directly to Alice Martin in that space, she may also have had her letter in mind the following year when Fauset (1921) devoted several consecutive installments of her regular (though unsigned) column, “The Judge,” to the reading, writing—and influence—of geography. (“The Judge” is another of The Brownies’ Book’s strategically multidisciplinary spaces, one in which Fauset, as the Judge, conducts semi-Socratic dialogues with a group of fictive Black children about moral, ethical, philosophical, and social questions). The sequence to which I refer begins in the April 1921 issue, when Billy, the second youngest of the children, complains about having to go to school. The Judge notes that while some children do not need to attend school, most will regret it “if they haven’t a certain amount of training and knowledge” when they get to be older (Fauset 1921, p. 108). Sometimes knowledge can be gained through experience, the Judge allows, much as the children’s friend Maude knows all about geography because of the many places she and her parents have traveled, even though “she had never been to school” (p. 108). (“‘Oh,’ says Billy in surprise, ‘is that the way history and geography are made? I never thought they had anything to do with people that you know about.’”) But not all children can “get their training like [Maude] by visiting new people and places,” explains the Judge, “so that is the reason why they must learn them from books, which are short cuts to the knowledge gained by actual experience” (p. 108).

Although the next installment (May 1921) does not appear to address geography at all, it subtly dramatizes the negative impact (and stubborn persistence) of the kinds of racial and cultural stereotypes—one might say, “short cuts”—that mainstream geography textbooks all too commonly pursue. The discussion once again focuses on Billy, who laughs when Billikins, the youngest of the group, recounts his abuse of “Hong Loo,” a neighborhood laundryman: “‘Such fun!’ [Billikins] pants. ‘A lot of us fellers [...] teased him and called him names. He got so mad that he started to throw something at us, and chased us half-way down the street. Oh it was great!’” (Fauset 1921, p. 134). When the other children express their disapproval, Billy waves them off. “‘What difference does it make?’ Billy queries, open-eyed, ‘he’s only a Chinaman, ain’t he?’” (p. 134). The Judge spends the rest of the column helping Billy see that his presumption of national superiority (“aren’t you ‘only an American’?” the Judge asks Billy (p. 134)) and Billy’s mockery of the way the Chinese man dresses (“I don’t wear a funny, loose jacket and wide pants and slippers—think of wearing slippers on the street!” (p. 134) exclaims Billy) blind him from recognizing the essential equality of all persons regardless of their superficial differences. “Think of the world as a huge desert island,” proposes the Judge, employing geographic synecdoche, “and all the people just wrecked on it. Hasn’t each one of us a right to everything on the island—joy, light, love, ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’?” (p. 134). Even Billy cannot disagree.

In her June 1921 column for “The Judge,” Fauset next turns to the role of schoolroom geographies in the perpetuation of misinformation specifically about Africa. At the start of the column, Billikins announces, “My teacher wants to know which is the greatest continent” (Fauset 1921, p. 168). The other children quickly nominate their candidates—America, Europe, and Asia each get a vote—and when asked by the Judge to justify their choices, each child falls back on facts they have clearly memorized in school. (Billy, who had nominated America but cannot seem to remember anything specific about what makes it the “greatest,” can only reply “O, well—it just is, everybody knows that” (p. 168).) But the Judge has other ideas:

“And I,” said the Judge, “would say Africa.”

They all stared at him.

“Are you joking?” asked Billy.

“No.”

(Fauset 1921, p. 168)

The children insist that he cannot really mean it.

“I suppose,” pouted Wilhemina [one of the older children], “that you’re just saying Africa because we are all of African descent. Of course—”

“Do I usually lie?” asked the Judge.

“No-o oh no!—but how on earth can you say that Africa is the greatest continent? It is stuck way in the back of the Atlas and the geography which Billy uses, devotes only a paragraph to it.”

“I say it because I believe it is so. Not because I want to believe it is true—not because I think it ought to be true, but because in my humble opinion it is true.”

(Fauset 1921, p. 168)

The Judge then provides seven detailed reasons for this opinion, each full of information that the children have clearly never encountered in any geography they have ever been assigned. Given how radically this information is intended to revise the common understanding of Africa circulating in U.S. classrooms, how central this lesson is to the larger project of geographic counter-pedagogy in The Brownies’ Book that we have been tracing, and how emphatically the Judge presents this information, all seven reasons are worth recounting in full:

“First: Africa was the only continent with a climate mild and salubrious enough to foster the beginnings of human culture.

“Second: Africa excels all other continents in the variety and luxuriance of its natural products.

“Third: In Africa originated probably the first, certainly the longest, most vigorous, human civilization.

“Fourth: Africa made the first great step in human culture by discovery the use of iron.

“Fifth: Art in form and rhythm, drawing and music found its earliest and most promising beginnings in Africa.

“Sixth: Trade in Africa was the beginning of modern world commerce.

“Seventh: Out of enslavement and degradation on a scale such as humanity nowhere else has suffered, Africa still stands today, with her gift of world labor that has raised the great crops of Sugar, Rice, Tobacco and Cotton and which lie at the foundation of modern industrial democracy.”.

(Fauset 1921, p. 168)

It is a tour de force presentation, to be sure. The younger children are mostly nonplussed (“‘Don’t understand,’ wailed Billikins” (p. 168)), but the older children quickly see the implications of what the Judge has told them. Wilhelmina then poses the question that The Brownies’ Book has been priming readers to ask from the very first issue:

“I was just wondering,” mused Wilhelmina, “who the guys are that write our histories and geographies.”

“Well you can bet they’re not colored,” said William.

“No—not yet,” said the Judge.

(Fauset 1921, p. 168)

Imagining that future is the focus of the next column. In the July 1921 installment of “The Judge,” in which the children ask about the lost civilization of Atlantis (a place that William, to his frustration, cannot find in any atlas), the children ultimately decide that they will write a new geography, one that incorporates all that they have learned, along with whatever they might discover by visiting Africa themselves—especially after the Judge tells them that some have theorized Africa as Atlantis’s home. Indeed, they will not just write this new geography: recognizing the power (and the danger) of the visual stereotypes they have encountered all their lives in their own geographies, they will also provide the images. “‘I’ll do the illustrating,’” announces Wilhelmina. “And instead of these uncanny types that I learned of, when I was a child, as the people of Africa, we’ll put in beautiful, mysterious faces” (Fauset 1921, p. 202). By the end of this column, Black children are exactly where the magazine has wanted them to be: in charge and ready to write the kinds of “geography stories” they have been denied for too long.16

5. Conclusion: No Apologies

The Brownies’ Book lasted twenty-four issues. Although glowing testimonials from readers to the importance of the magazine appeared in every installment of “The Jury” (“I wish to let you know how much I enjoy reading The Brownies’ Book every month,” began one typical encomium from an eight-year-old reader (Washington 1921, p. 298), subscriptions never rose above 5000 per year, far below the rate to maintain publication. In the back pages of what turned out to be the penultimate issue in November 1921, Du Bois and Fauset (1921) pleaded with readers to save the enterprise: “In order to keep the magazine at its present high standard—as we are determined to do—we must have at once 12,000 subscribers. Won’t you help us now to reach that figure?” (Du Bois and Fauset 1921, n.p.). When the support did not materialize, the magazine ceased publication. On the cover of the final issue, instead of an illustration, the editors printed a farewell (Figure 7):

This is the last Brownies’ Book. For twenty-four months we have brought Joy and Knowledge to four thousand Brownies stretched from Oregon to Florida. But there are two million Brownies in the United States, and unless we got at least one in every hundred to read our pages and help pay printing, we knew we must at last cease to be. And now the month has come to say goodbye. We are sorry—much sorrier than any of you, for it has all been such fun. After all—who knows—perhaps we shall meet again.

(Du Bois and Fauset 1921, n.p.)

It is a farewell that both celebrates and scolds. It also looks ahead to a possible future in which the magazine would begin printing again, although that never came to pass. Fauset devoted her final column for “The Judge” to a conversation about the economics of printing The Brownies’ Book, which the children are disappointed to learn will stop appearing. “It’s never too late” (Fauset 1921, p. 341) to get more people to subscribe, declares the Judge optimistically at the column’s end. But it was.

The farewell also expresses regret for the end of the magazine—“We are sorry”—but makes no apologies for the innovative mixture of materials and disciplines that made up every issue and that remade the genre of the children’s periodical for those readers who had for too long been ignored or belittled by mainstream publications such as St. Nicholas. “No apologies” could indeed have been The Brownies’ Book’s motto, as made clear by a letter from a teacher that Du Bois and Fauset excerpt in an early, full-page advertisement for the magazine that appeared on the inside cover of the June 1920 issue. The ad is divided into three sections—one for parents, one for children, and one for teachers—proposing reasons that each group might want to encourage others to start their own subscriptions. The section addressing teachers asks, “Are you in the same class with that teacher who wrote us the other day?” and then quotes their letter: “I am anxious to find a magazine which I can place in the hands of my children without feeling that I must apologize for the pictures and the stories; one whose pictures and stories will be an inspiration to my boys and girls” (Du Bois and Fauset 1920, n.p.). Although the teacher is likely referring to magazines like St. Nicholas, they could easily have been describing the supposedly scientific geography textbooks they also had to put into their students’ hands, and for whose pictures and stories one might also feel the need to apologize. What Du Bois and Fauset are really sorry for at the end of The Brownies’ Book is the lost opportunity to continue to provide materials in all genres that are unapologetically suitable, if not inspiring, for Black children yearning to redraw the cartographies of their imaginations.