African American women writers of children’s and young adult literature

Abstract

There was a time when an entry on children's and young adult literature (both encompassed under the term “children's literature”) never would have been included even in a volume such as the Cambridge Companion to African American Women's Writing . This was the case because, for a very long time, African American children's and young adult literature has been triply marginalized. There are several reasons for this marginalization - first because it was designed for an audience of children, second, because it is created by African Americans, and third because it has been considered largely women's work. Fortunately, there is a growing group of committed, reputable scholars, both African American and non-African American, and largely female, who are making it their life's work to document the literary history of the long-standing body of children's and young adult literature produced by African American women writers. Rudine Sims Bishop's Shadow and Substance: Afro American Experience in Contemporary Children's Fiction (1982) is now a classic. In 1998, African American Review , one of the leading scholarly journals in African American literary studies, devoted an issue to children's literature. Michelle Martin's Brown Gold: Milestones of African- American Children's Picture Books, 1845-2002 is one of the more recent literary histories of this genre. Still, there is little scholarly work that focuses exclusively on black women's writing for children. The history of black women writing children's literature begins at least as far back as 1887 when Mrs. Amelia Johnson founded an eight-page monthly magazine for children called The Joy . In addition, she published the children's novels Clarence and Corinne , or God's Way in 1889 and The Hazeley Family in 1894. The protagonists in these books, apparently, were European American. These books were published by the white-owned American Baptist Publishing Board.