The Brownies’ Book, April 1920, letters from readers
Date: April 1920
Caption: Readers of The Brownies’ Book - Black children who lived around the United States - wrote back to the magazine about their lives, their hopes, and what the magazine meant to them.
The Brownies’ Book included different kinds of writing, visual art, and photography by adults. But it also included letters from readers. Black children from around the United States who read the magazine sometimes wrote back.1 What they chose to write about tells us what The Brownies’ Book meant to them and what was happening in their lives.
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Anna Holmes, “The Magazine That Helped 1920s Kids Navigate Racism,” The Atlantic, February 2021, 1–21, https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/02/how-w-e-b-du-bois-changed-black-childhood-america/617952/. Thanks to Holmes for pointing out one of the letters on this page. ↩︎
Categories: K-12 organizing, national, community activism
Tags: Black people, curriculum, photography, imagery, and visual representation, joy, childhood, NAACP, newspapers and the media, autonomous educational spaces, student writing, the arts
This item is part of "The Brownies’ Book" in "Joyful Struggle"
Item Details
Date: April 1920
Creator: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
Source: Library of Congress
Copyright: Public domain
How to cite: “The Brownies’ Book, April 1920, letters from readers,” National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in New York City Civil Rights History Project, Accessed: [Month Day, Year], https://nyccivilrightshistory.org/gallery/brownies3.
Questions to Consider
- Where do you see joy in these letters? Where do you see struggle?
- What about the children’s lives here is similar to your own? What seems different?
- What did The Brownies’ Book mean to these young readers?
- Is there a Brownies’ Book in your life? In other words, what are the places where you read about news, people, and ideas in a community that matters to you?
References
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