“May We Not Write Our Own Fairy Tales and Make Black Beautiful?” African American Teachers, Children's Literature, and the Construction of Race in the Curriculum, 1920–1945

Abstract

Abstract This article examines children's literature written by African American teachers during the first part of the twentieth century. Drawing on theories of racialization, I analyze children's books written by two African American teachers: Helen Adele Whiting (1885-1959) and Jane Dabney Shackelford (1895-1979). I argue that their books represented more than an effort toward greater Black representation in schools; they also served as a contribution to a larger discourse on Blackness and identity that emerged during the “New Negro” movement. In this view, African American teachers were not mere passive recipients of an outside Black culture, but rather intellectual actors involved in the production of racial identity during the interwar period.