ABSTRACT
According to Chanta M. Haywood’s research, the origins of African American children’s literature date back as far as 1854, though much of its fi rst samples have been overlooked by the critics since they were published in black periodicals and newspapers, such as the Christian Recorder. Among the early practitioners around the turn of the twentieth-century, mention must be made of Mrs. A. E. Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. DuBois.7 bell hooks’s career mirrors that of DuBois in that not only is she a writer of powerful essays and books but she too has shown her fi erce interest in children. DuBois, as director of Th e Brownies’ Book, and Jessie R. Fauset, as its literary editor, had a program in mind which underpinned their publication: “To inform, educate, and politicize children and their parents and to showcase the achievements of people of color.”8 As Violet J. Harris explains, DuBois fi rmly believed that the achievement of these aims would result in “the creation of
the ‘race men’ and ‘race women’ of the early years of the twentieth century. Such youngsters revered education, exhibited personal and racial pride, and were committed to racial solidarity and uplift .”9 Similarly to DuBois’s periodical for children, hooks’s children’s books are profoundly political and are inspired by the urgency of her “militant spirit of racial uplift .”10
