The Business of Black and Interracial Children's Literature

Abstract

Abstract:This essay investigates how racial progressivism intersected with the production of children's literature in the U.S. over the first seven decades of the twentieth century, by using a variety of archival materials preserved in Muriel Fuller's manuscript collection at Hunter College. Fuller, the first literary agent of the African American popular novelist Frank Yerby, was a typical yet very well-connected editor in the juvenile sector from the late 1930s. She was also a leading member of the Children's Book Council (CBC) in the mid-1940s and was just one of dozens of white women charged with shaping the direction of "juvenile literature" as this business consolidated over the middle decades of the twentieth century. At midcentury, the CBC's vacillations between embracing and resisting the reform of racial and ethnic depictions dovetailed with much-older, black and interracial attempts to reform children's books. The CBC's rejection of the censorship of children's books that were deemed racially prejudiced, and of collectivist efforts more generally, illuminate the limits of postwar racial reform.