Number 4

Summer 2004

African American Children’s History and the Problem of Race: A Review of the Literature

Moira Hinderer

"What does it mean to be a problem?" W. E. B. Du Bois asked this question in The Souls of Black Folk, as he traced his own racial awareness to a moment in a Massachusetts schoolyard. In this moment of realization he ceased to be simply a child and began his life as a "black boy.” This configuration of the problem of Black childhood is quite different than the one common to American popular culture, where Black children so often appear in stories of violence, addiction, abuse, poverty, and failure. In these stories Black children no longer have a problem, they are a problem. In turn, this shift presents a series of problems for historians. There is the problem of balancing the agency and humanity of children with attention to the forces that shape their lives. There is the problem of the curious place of Black children in American society, so often pushed to the margins, while also so central to the intellectual, social, political, and economic projects of the nation. And there is the burden Black children carry as the representatives of a raced childhood. This last issue is particularly tricky for historians: how do we study a group called the Black child while taking seriously the shifting and contingent nature of race? This question suggests that Black childhood must always be examined in the context of larger issues of race and childhood. If we are to know Black childhood we must also understand the process by which all children come to know and reproduce race.

A quick browse of any bookstore reveals that educators, sociologists, psychologists and journalists rather than historians write the bulk of scholarly books specifically about African American children. Despite this imbalance, the broad narratives of American childhood increasingly include Black children, as historians emphasize the diversity of childhood experience. Books like Priscilla Clement's Growing Pains: Children in the Industrial Age, 1850-1890 (1997), David McLeod's The Age of the Child: Children in America, 1890-1912 (1998), Jacqueline Reinier's From Virtue to Character: American Childhood, 1775-1850 (1996), and Elliott West's Growing Up in Twentieth Century America (1996) include African American children's experiences of family, labor, education, and play. Joseph Illick takes this narrative of diversity as his central organizing theme in his recent book American Childhoods (2002), dividing his chapters along lines of race, class, and space. This emphasis on diversity of childhood is not entirely new; Robert Bremner's Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History (1970) includes documents on a wide range of African American child experiences including slave and free black children, family, education, youth movements, and delinquency theory. Bremner's collection shares with more recent monographs a struggle for balance, exploring both the special burdens of black children and the shared childhood experiences of labor, education, familial affection.

Children found a place in the expanding field of African American history in the 1970s, in response to both the theories and methods of social history and the broad political and social concerns of the times. Herbert Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (1976), made these latter connections most transparent, stating in the book's introduction that it was intended in part as a response to Daniel P. Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965). In the years before Gutman's book, historians had already begun to write about slave children and families in an attempt to understand the lives slaves lived. Chapters on slave children appear in Eugene Genovese's Roll Jordon Roll (1972), George Rawick's From Sundown to Sunup (1972), and John Blassingame's The Slave Community (1972), to name just a few. This scholarship points to the dual experience of slave children, on one hand chattel, laborers even from birth, without the legal sanction of family, denied the education and protection of the petted sentimental child, and on the other hand, beloved members of families and communities who did their best to protect and educate, who often retained sentimental attachments despite separations by death or selling.

Wilma King's Stolen Childhood (1995) carries forward the theme of familial affection, while also describing enslavement of the young as a much harsher experience that that seen in earlier historical work. The analysis in King's work, as well as in Marie Schwartz's in Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (2000), is particularly useful for historians of childhood, because these authors pay such close attention to the meaning of childhood. As they examine whether slavery and childhood are concepts that can be reconciled, they ask valuable questions about what childhood is. Also of interest are David Wiggins' article "The Play of Slave Children in the Plantation Communities of the Old South, 1820-1860" in Growing Up in America: Children in Historical Perspective (1985) and Peter Bardaglio, "The Children of Jubilee: African American Childhood in Wartime," in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (1992).

Mary Niall Mitchell's article "'Rosebloom and Pure White,' Or So It Seemed," American Quarterly (September 2002) also deals with slave children; however Mitchell takes the white-looking slave child as a lens to examine the reproduction of race. Mitchell is careful not to take race as a given; instead she tracks the production of race through children. Little historical work exists about childhood as a site of making race, which makes Mitchell's forthcoming "Raising Freedom's Child" particularly anticipated. Although separated by time and space, Shawn Michelle Smith’s work shares with of Mitchell an emphasis on visual culture and the production of race in American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (1999).

While historians of the United States have studied the experiences of slave children and families, we have less work of the kind done by Hugh Cunningham in Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood Since the Seventeenth Century (1991). Cunningham explores the intersection between ideas of slavery, child labor, humanitarian sentiment, and their effect on debates over child labor.

After the destruction of slavery, childhood for former slaves retained features of both affection and deprivation. Leon Litwack's Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979) shares with studies by historians of an slavery attention to the agency of slaves and the struggle to define the nature of freedom. The records of the Freedman's Bureau and the extensive work of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (http://www.history.umd.edu/Freedmen/ )have provided a wealth of documents that map the struggles of freed families to reunite. The selection of documents in Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African American Kinship in the Civil War Era (1997), edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie Rowland provides a good introduction to the issues that have shaped the field. Julie Saville's, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborers in South Carolina, 1860-1870 (1994), examines the role of kinship and family strategy in the post-war struggle over labor. The battles waged by freed parents to keep their children out of the hands of their former enslavers are examined in Barry A. Crouch's "'To Enslave the Rising Generation': The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Texas Black Code," in The Freedman's Bureau and Reconstruction: Reconsiderations (1999) and Rebecca Scott's, "The Battle Over the Child: Child Apprenticeship and the Freedmen’s Bureau in North Carolina," Prologue (1978). The history of black family strategy in slavery and freedom continues to be one of the strongest areas of study of black children, with such recent books as Elizabeth Ann Regosin’s Freedom’s Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation (2002), Wilma Dunaway’s, The African American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (2003), Noralee Frankel’s Freedom’s Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi (2003), and Dylan Penningroth in The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (2003).

With the end of Reconstruction, historians have examined the lives of African American children less systematically. Women's history is one area of study that crosses over into the study of children. In work like Tera Hunter's, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After The Civil War and Jacqueline Jones' Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present (1985), scholars address children as part of a broader focus on women and labor. Histories of reform are another area where race and childhood appear, including Linda Gordon’s Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935 (1994), Anne Knupfer’s Toward a Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood : African American Women's Clubs in Turn -of-the-Century (1996) and Elizabeth Lasch Quinn's Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945 (1993). Shelley Sallee’s recent The Whiteness of Child Labor Reform in the New South (2004) examines the role of race and racism in the push for child labor reform.

In his essay, "'We Are Not What We Seem': The Politics and Pleasures of Community" in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (1994), Robin Kelley calls for more attention to child socialization as a site of black working class formation. While Kelly focuses primarily on the urban south in the 1930s and 1940s, the questions he asks are broadly useful for the historical study of race and childhood. And certainly this project of race-making is not limited to African American children. Jennifer Lynn Ritterhouse's forthcoming "Learning Race: Racial Etiquette and the Socialization of Children in the Jim Crow South" will offer further study of this process. Two recent collections of oral histories that also point to the rich possibilities for this type of research are, Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South edited by William Henry Chafe (2001) and Timuel Black’s Bridges of Memory: Chicago’s First Wave of Black Migration (2003).

The power of contemporary images that connect black children with urban poverty and violence make urban history an important area for historians. Carl Husemoller Nightingale's On the Edge: A History of Poor Black Children and their American Dreams (1993), is one of the few books specifically devoted to this subject. Husemoller combines history and recent ethnography in an attempt to put the lives of children in historical perspective. Several scholars who study urban migration in the twentieth century have also examined the lives black children. James Grossman's Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration includes a chapter that focuses on migrant children and schooling, while Cheryl Lynn Greenburg's "Or Does It Explode?" Black Harlem in the Great Depression (1991) looks at children in the context of family strategy and institutional projects. From a different perspective Children, Race, and Power: Kenneth and Mamie Clark's Northside Center (1996) by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner traces both the ideas and philanthropic efforts that shaped the study of black children. The attention paid to Kenneth Clark's work in Brown v. Board makes this study particularly intriguing. While not exclusively about children, Daryl Michael Scott's, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996 (1997), also includes an examination of research and analysis by social scientists about black children and youth.

Challenging images that present Black youth as the perpetrators of violence are two books for a more popular audience that explore the historical relationship between African American children and racial violence. James Goodman's Stories of Scottsboro (1994) examines both the national dialogue about the Scottsboro case and the experiences of the accused youths. Mamie Till-Mobley's, Death of Innocence: the Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America (2003) is account of the murder of Emmett Till by his mother. Both books illustrate the strategies used by African Americans communities to bring these stories before the world, and to use black youth victims as a symbol of the horror of America's racial regime.

A forthcoming work that will respond to the need for a narrative history of African American children is Wilma King's "Africa's Progeny: Black Children in American History, 1600-2000." That King's book will be the first of its kind suggests there is much work left to be done as we write the history of African American children. Perhaps sadly, the question "How does it feel to be a problem?" can still provide a framework for this work. As historians we cannot control the lives children have lived, but we do have some measure of control over the definition of the "problem." Reworking the problem means challenging a seemingly self-evident world of race with the rich, complex and contrary experience of lives lived.

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