Black children’s literature, Black publics

African American authors have long included children among their various public audiences. While white children’s literature overwhelmingly misrepresented, degraded, or erased Black children from its materials, Black people’s love and care for the children in their communities shine in their literary history. “Children’s literature” as a category has too often been conflated with a particular format in which only some writing for children has appeared: “children’s books.” But, as scholars of African American literature know, considering the book format alone gives one an incomplete picture of that literary landscape. As early African American scholar Eric Gardner and others have noted, African American literature must be sought out in “unexpected places.”Footnote ⁶ So, too, must African American children’s literature be located in texts and print venues often assumed to be the exclusive purview of adults.

Addresses to children are visible in some of the earliest African American children’s literature, from eighteenth-century authors including Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, and John Marrant.Footnote ⁷ And scholars have recognized an array of nineteenth-century texts meant for Black child readers, from lesser-known authors such as Ann Plato to well-known ones, like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.Footnote ⁸ During the Harlem Renaissance, we see a rise of children’s literature amid this era of cultural “rebirth,” including writing for children by a variety of authors better-known for their writing for adults, including Paul Laurence Dunbar, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, and Langston Hughes.

Much of this African American children’s literature can be found in periodicals—a key site for understanding African American print history, more generally. Scholars of African American literature have recognized periodicals as an essential venue for the work of authors who may be otherwise marginalized from print venues.Footnote ⁹ Although The Brownies’ Book, a children’s periodical that emerged from the annual Children’s Number of the Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP, is often misrepresented as the first periodical to create African American children’s literature, it was preceded by Black children’s periodicals that debuted as early as the 1880s.Footnote ¹⁰ Beyond this, writing for children appeared in early African American periodicals more broadly. Early African American newspapers like the Colored American and the Christian Recorder began including children’s sections in the 1840s and 1850s. The latter was the official publication of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which also published the Child’s Recorder as early as the 1880s. The Crisis included a monthly children’s column called “The Little Page” from 1925 to 1929. And the Chicago Defender began publishing a “Defender Junior” section in 1921.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s stories of Black childhood appeared in at least one venue in which children’s literature—and especially African American children’s literature—might be easily overlooked. She published at least seven of these stories about children in the Chicago Daily News, a white-owned and operated newspaper founded in 1875. A daily newspaper, it was the city’s first “penny paper,” with a broad distribution that made it Chicago’s most widely circulated newspaper leading into the twentieth century. And Dunbar-Nelson published at least one story in a white-edited children’s periodical, The Classmate, a Sunday school publication overwhelmingly associated with white authors and readers. Although white readers have attended almost exclusively to white print venues and white-authored texts, as scholars including Carla Peterson, Nazera Sadiq Wright, Eric Gardner, Daniel Hack, Matt Sandler, and Brigitte Fielder have noted, African American people (including child readers) have always read broadly, with capacious readerly interests that have traversed racial lines.Footnote ¹¹ Black writers have also written capaciously, attending to broad audiences of potential readers. Unlike white authors, they have not excluded Black readers from the audiences they address directly, and in this inclusion, they have not failed (as white authors have, historically) to include Black children among the potential readers of their work. When we include Black children in the broader array of African American readers, we reveal one of the many ways Black intellectuals have attended to children. And, when we consider Black readers (including child readers) of writing published in various print venues, we gain a more complete picture of African American children’s literature.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s child advocacy

Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson was a poet, fiction writer, and essayist whose work spanned the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries into the Harlem Renaissance. She advocated for causes such as women’s suffrage and racial equality, and she supported activism against lynching. A promoter and facilitator of African American literature, her work included editing the A.M.E. Church Review, a publication of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and anthologies of Black speeches, prose, and poetry. She also worked as a journalist, writing columns for the Pittsburgh Courier and the Washington Eagle. Despite her long writing career and the volume and versatility of her writing across multiple genres, she is still under-recognized.

In addition to her writing, editing, and activism, like many notable Black women writers, Dunbar-Nelson was also an educator. She worked as a public school teacher in New Orleans and Delaware and taught at the Hampton Institute in Virginia and at the State College for Colored Students, which would later become Delaware State University. And she taught Black kindergarteners at a settlement house in a poor neighborhood in New York City’s Upper East Side. The White Rose Mission—also known as the White Rose Home for Colored Working Girls and the White Rose Industrial Association—was founded by Victoria Earle Matthews to provide transitional housing and basic education to young Black women and children.

That Dunbar-Nelson appears within a tradition of attending to Black children, is no coincidence. She worked closely with Black children in her teaching and racial justice work, which flowed into her promotion of Black literature. In 1922, she penned an essay, “Negro Literature for Negro Pupils,” which appeared in the February issue of the Southern Workman, a monthly periodical published by the Hampton Institute. In this piece, Dunbar-Nelson writes

Dunbar-Nelson writes here of the importance of self-representation in children’s literature and popular culture. She notes the ways Black literature has been diminished—pretended as unimportant and unworthy of study. Being both aware of and a contributor to a rich and wide African American literary history, Dunbar-Nelson does not here describe a dearth of Black literature for children. She acknowledges its existence, making an argument for a curricular shift toward its inclusion in their education—a shift that was already being implemented by Black teachers. The essay goes on to argue that

In this last line, Dunbar-Nelson recognizes the important historical and cultural lessons that African American literature has to offer.

In the spirit of presenting “Negro Literature for Negro Pupils,” Dunbar-Nelson herself wrote literature about—and, we argue, for—children. According to her papers, which are located in the special collections of the University of Delaware Library, in the 1890s, Dunbar-Nelson wrote a set of short stories about children that she planned to publish together as The Annals of ‘Steenth Street. The table of contents Dunbar-Nelson planned for the collection reveals her careful and curious arrangement of the stories. The collection revolves around a poor/working-class neighborhood that faces a myriad of socio-economic problems, from poverty to domestic violence to reformers who could be either helpful or harmful; sometimes they provided a much-needed meal to a family, and at other times they offered unwanted and unneeded attempts at intervention. These stories focus on some of the community’s youngest members, who also attend a local school that is run by educators from outside their community.

As Caroline Gebhard, Katherine Adams, and Sandra A. Zagarell have noted, ‘Steenth Street’s fictional, Pure in Heart Mission is directly inspired by Dunbar-Nelson’s time working with the White Rose Mission.Footnote ¹⁴ While children are at the center of these stories, Dunbar-Nelson includes not only parents but also teachers among her characters, and many of the stories showcase children’s reactions to what their teachers say and do. Following Akasha (Gloria) Hull’s suggestion that Dunbar-Nelson may have written the ‘Steenth Street stories as juvenile fiction, we count children among her intended readership, and here explore their possibilities as children’s literature.Footnote ¹⁵

Although the absence of clear racial markers in some of the ‘Steenth Street stories has caused some scholars to read the characters as white, we approach these as stories about Black children and communities. This reading is, in part, a refusal to set whiteness as a default, to regard literary characters as white unless otherwise marked. Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a Black writer and educator of Black children who almost certainly did not simply construct childhood as white. Given the influence of these stories and Dunbar-Nelson’s complex representations of race in her other fiction, we have more reason to read at least some of the ‘Steenth Street children as Black. Moreover, some versions of some of these stories include more overt references to race, suggesting that she may have revised these with multiple, differently raced ideas of these characters and audiences in mind. “The Revenge of James Brown” provides one such example in which Dunbar-Nelson’s revisions reveal different approaches to race and childhood.

The 1930 Classmate publication of “The Revenge of James Brown” supports our reading of Dunbar-Nelson’s characters as Black, most clearly by including a prominent, centered illustration. The image identifies Dunbar-Nelson’s child characters in its caption, taken from the story (“Jimmy Laughed Derisively: ‘I say, fellers, he’s one o’ de goodies now’”), and the boys are clearly depicted as dark-skinned children (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

James Edwin Jackson, illustration for “The Revenge of James Brown,” The Classmate Vol. 37 No. 46 (November 15, 1930) Caption: “Jimmy Laughed Derisively: ‘I say, fellers, he’s one o’ de goodies now’”.

This illustration, by James Edwin Jackson, a white artist known for popular magazine illustrations, features a group of smiling Black boys conversing outside a building. Most wear flat-brimmed hats and jackets. One sports a scarf. A small boy in the front carries a packet of newspapers under his arm. At least some of these, it seems, are working boys. At the center, in a light striped sweater but no jacket, is a boy who charismatically draws the attention of the others. This seems to be Jimmy. Alongside the inclusion of Dunbar-Nelson’s by then recognizable name, accompanying the story with an illustration of Black boys provides a clear racial framing for this story’s main characters.

This illustration differed from the vast majority of illustrations of Black people in children’s publications in its evasion of the usual derogatory racial stereotypes. These children are not caricatured, but illustrated as if to align potential readers with the happy-looking boys depicted, providing a subtle yet meaningful avenue for potential identification.Footnote ¹⁶ This visual choice establishes the characters at the center of Dunbar-Nelson’s story as Black, resisting potential whitewashed readings of the story and framing Blackness in a way that resists the most prominent degradations present in white-authored and edited children’s literature of the time. Beyond the implications for white readers of the paper, this framing of Dunbar-Nelson’s characters also suggests the possibility of Black readers of the story in this venue. Nevertheless, even without this illustration, Jimmy might be read as Black, as this editor and/or illustrator likely did in their initial imaginings of this scene. Dunbar-Nelson’s own workings and reworkings of race in the story serve as reminders that the absence of racial markers does not necessarily denote whiteness, and even language around race might be used in various, racialized ways. Her other revisions suggest opportunities to consider and reconsider how she represents these racialized characters.Footnote ¹⁷

Writing and re-writing boyhood, agency, and race: “The Revenge of James Brown”

In “The Revenge of James Brown,” thirteen-year-old Jimmy Brown, a leader among his peers, initially stands up for his neighborhood by rejecting help from outsiders, but by the story’s end, he has chosen to find a job to help provide for his family. Although the narrative centers on Jimmy’s perspective, his mother plays a pivotal role throughout. She intervenes when necessary, but allows Jimmy to make his own decisions and wisely remains silent when he seeks a way to punish her by choosing to work rather than seek help from the Mission. As Jimmy navigates his relationships with his peers, his mother, and the mission reformers, Dunbar-Nelson stresses both his immaturity and his determination. The story challenges the adultification of Black boys by showcasing Jimmy’s fierce but limited vision; he thinks he is getting revenge on his mother when he is, in fact, doing exactly what she hopes he will do. The title itself is an ironic invitation to acknowledge Jimmy’s status as a young adolescent, since it is the only time in the story he is called by his formal given name. By titling the story “The Revenge of James Brown” instead of “The Revenge of Jimmy Brown,” Dunbar-Nelson dignifies her young protagonist. Yet once the nature of his revenge becomes clear, his endearing lack of judgment makes it impossible to judge him—and his cherished revenge—by adult standards.

The story begins with the narrator declaring, “It was a great day in ‘Steenth Street,” then contrasts the “great rejoicing” of wealthy patrons inside the Mission with the distrust and scorn expressed by the neighborhood outside (136).Footnote ¹⁸ Thirteen-year-old Jimmy Brown holds the Mission in such contempt that he participates in the harassment and attack of other children who go there for food or warm clothes. But when his youngest brother gets chicken pox while his father is out of work and neglecting his family (drinking in the 1899 version and at a political club in the 1930 version), Jimmy’s mother reaches her limit, and insists that Jimmy go to the Mission for help. When he refuses, she spanks him. Jimmy, humiliated, submits to his mother’s will and solicits help. His brother’s health improves as a result. But Jimmy resolves to defeat the Mission and his mother both—by getting himself a job. Dunbar-Nelson’s narrator explains Jimmy’s ironic thought process: “Like a flash, he comprehended a scheme. He would find some means of keeping his mother from accepting its bounty; he would disgust her, and through her, others, and the mission would fail ignominiously because it would cease to be called upon for aid. The idea of work, a new one, by the way, entered his mind. He would be revenged upon his mother for her weakness” (144). Here, Dunbar-Nelson lifts up Jimmy’s immaturity—he does not understand that his mother, herself, would rather not need the Mission’s help—while also celebrating his agency: he is determined to express his own independence and value.

At the story’s end, Jimmy is delighted with his “revenge” even though the neighborhood boys beat him for his reversal. The narrator notes, in closing, that his mother “did not enlighten Jimmy as to her opinion on the subject” (145). Jimmy ends up working, but he is not an adult, and Dunbar-Nelson’s story insists on his fundamental immaturity, even as it dramatizes his charisma, imagination, and capacity for work. This ironic tale of belligerent leader of a “gang” of children turned family provider introduces virtually all of the collection’s central themes: the lofty, often out-of-touch aspirations of Christian reformers; the agency and resistance of children; and the intellect and power of women and girls.

The question of Jimmy’s race in this story reveals Dunbar-Nelson’s ambiguities and revisions. Reading Jimmy as a Black boy makes more sense when we take into account the archival evidence of Dunbar-Nelson’s revision process, in which she experimented with racial markers that suggest Jimmy as a member of an explicitly racially diverse neighborhood. Beyond its illustration, the 1930 version provides racial markers omitted in the 1899 version. Via these racial references, the narrator repeatedly characterizes ‘Steenth Street as explicitly multiracial, describing the Mission’s celebratory opening as “packed to overflowing with humanity in various stages of poverty and wealth, in assorted colors and races.”Footnote ¹⁹ In the 1930 The Classmate, a skeptical neighborhood resident who observes the opening of the Pure in Heart Mission, questions, “what do they be setting up a mission fur?” and reasons, “Sure it’s not for the likes o’ me but for n—‘s and poor folk what wurrks out wot needs it (3).”Footnote ²⁰ In the autograph manuscript, this slur is crossed out, and the line reads, “Sure it’s not me, but them wot wurrks out wot needs it.” The same vague, defensive assertion appears in the Chicago Daily News version.

In the Classmate Jimmy disparages the Mission to his friends through anti-immigrant and anti-Black slurs to describe it as “A Joint where dey gives hand-outs to [Irish, Jewish, Italian, and African Americans] (3).” After using racial and ethnic slurs to characterize these recipients of the Mission’s help, he spits, “as he expressed his ultimate disgust to the gang. He was the leader of that gang of underprivileged youngsters of whom it was variously said that they were ‘bound for the Island or the chair (3).’” The narrator curiously follows Jimmy’s disparagement toward these groups with an extended description of how proud he is to be known as part of a neighborhood that was “notorious as the resort of vice and poverty (3).” It is impossible, however, to take Jimmy’s supposedly budding criminality seriously; although the story describes a boy who swaggers and gets into fights, he is mostly talk. This, too, calls into question his use of these slurs, as the accompanying image makes one wonder how we are to understand this. It is quite possible that Dunbar-Nelson may have had no hand in or knowledge of this image before the story’s publication. And it is unclear whether the illustrator read the story or was simply given a prompt for his creation, based on a summary of this scene and Dunbar-Nelson’s by then recognizable name. But the image also speaks to how readers would have experienced the story in this print venue, complete with its prominent accompanying image of Black children.

A variety of language explicitly referring to Black people recurs in other parts of the unpublished manuscripts and the Classmate version. In these, when Jimmy’s mother is trying to convince him to seek help at the Mission, she tells him that a nurse had already come by to check on their sick baby: “She’s a nice colored girl, an’ she washed Buddy, an’ give him some medicine–an’ she said he needs soup an’ milk– (3)” At this point, Jimmy interrupts his mother and uses a racial slur to describe the source of their family’s help: “Where you goin’ to git it from? Another n—at de mission, huh? (3)” And his mother replies, “Well, they helps.” Jimmy’s use of this language and his mother’s defense of Black people (“they helps”) as she also continually names the nurse’s race could position his family as white in these versions (3). Notably, Jimmy seems to express anti-Black sentiments, though his mother contradicts him. But if we read Jimmy and his family as Black in light of the Classmate’s illustration of a group of dark-skinned boys, readers may have taken this language differently, perhaps reading this as an in-group repetition of the slur, and possibly signaling a similar in-group critique of participation in the mission’s work. This reading aligns with the boys’ critiques, which extend not only to the Mission’s outsiders but also manifest in an attack on one of their peers. They assault Scrappy Franks for having “deserted” the group by accepting the mission’s help, the evidence for which is the new woolen comforter he wears around his neck.

Ultimately, Mrs. Brown’s view wins out in all versions of the story, since Jimmy’s ultimate “revenge” evidences his mother’s parenting success. The 1930 Classmate also includes a final line with a racial marker omitted from the 1899 Chicago Daily News and autograph versions. After the narrator concludes, “As for Mrs. Brown, she was a wise woman, and said nothing to Jimmy of her innermost feelings,” the Classmate’s ending continues: “But her heart breathed a prayer of blessing upon the little colored nurse who had cleared the path before them (3).” This revision then, quietly celebrates not only Jimmy’s mother’s tactical success, but also her gratitude toward the Black woman who made it possible for her family to receive help. In these versions of the story, it is difficult to tell whether Jimmy and his family are best understood as set in contrast to the neighborhood’s Black, Irish, Jewish, and Italian residents or among them. And, although the 1899 Chicago Daily News version omits these discussions of race and ethnicity, this absence of racial markers does not simply signal whiteness, but also allows the possibility of Jimmy’s belonging to any of the marginalized groups that comprise the neighborhood—including the possibility of Jimmy being read as Black.

Although these revisions deal with specific racial markers, race is not always made apparent in Dunbar-Nelson’s fiction. While this has led some scholars to assume whiteness in the absence of clear racial indicators to the contrary, we emphasize the context for understanding Dunbar-Nelson’s writing (including the African American periodical publication contexts of some of her writing) to read her characters, rather, who might be read as Black—reflections of the children Dunbar-Nelson herself taught and observed. Scholars including Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Elizabeth Ammons, Kristina Brooks, Pamela Glenn Menke, Elizabeth West, and Thomas Strychacz have acknowledged the more nuanced racial complexity of Dunbar-Nelson’s stories.Footnote ²¹ And elsewhere, Brigitte Fielder and Jean Lutes have discussed the relevance of race to understanding boyhood and masculinity in another of her ‘Steenth Street stories, “His Heart’s Desire.”Footnote ²² Moreover, Dunbar-Nelson herself centers Blackness in editorial practices that diverge from others’ practices of making whiteness the default, assumed position. In her 1920 collection The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, she marks whiteness, rather than Blackness in her Table of Contents, noting that “The names marked with an asterisk are the names of members of the Caucasian race”.Footnote ²³ This speaks to the racial publics Dunbar-Nelson knew the volume would engage, particularly bearing the name of the early century’s most prominent Black poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar. In explicitly Black print venues like this volume and the AME Church Review, Blackness might be easily taken as the standard, rather than the exception. Dunbar-Nelson’s own name (either as “Mrs. Paul L. Dunbar” in the Chicago Daily News or as Alice Dunbar-Nelson in The Classmate) might also prompt readers of a piece by a known Black author to similarly center Blackness, rather than to assume the whiteness of her characters when race was not mentioned.

As Caroline Gebhard puts it, Dunbar-Nelson does not simply erase race but “mutes racial markers” in many of her published stories, choosing not to explicitly describe her characters’ racialization in many instances.Footnote ²⁴ The later revisions of “The Revenge of James Brown” offer insight into that process of muting. In the Classmate, the Mission is interracial, “packed to overflowing with humanity … in assorted colors and races.” Jimmy expresses disgust for the Mission by using ethnic and racial slurs for Irish, Italian, and Black people. A “little colored nurse” from the Mission plays a key role by reaching out to Jimmy’s mother. After we learn that Jimmy’s mother keeps her pleasure over his new job to herself, the narrator adds a final line: “But her heart breathed a prayer of blessing upon the little colored nurse who had cleared the path before them.” None of these racial markers survives in the 1899 published story. Nor does the fuller vision of “The Revenge of James Brown,” which acts as a gateway to ‘Steenth Street, an imagined place that revels in the ironies of childhood in an unjust world. But Dunbar-Nelson was not finished shaping this story, and the published version is not the only context for understanding these characters.

While Dunbar-Nelson planned to open her volume with “The Revenge of James Brown,” a fairly light-hearted story about the neighborhood’s reaction to the arrival of the Mission, her Table of Contents reveals intentions to close it on a rather grim note, with “Witness for the Defense,” a story about a wife who stabs her abusive husband to death while her young daughter looks on, a traumatic incident that nevertheless inspires celebration, not consternation, in the neighborhood. In between these bookends, readers would have stories about an array of the neighborhood’s children, treated with similar attention to the nuances of childhood and children’s perspectives. The writing that surrounds “The Revenge of James Brown”—both the 11 stories Dunbar-Nelson wrote to follow it and the story’s published and unpublished variants—portray Black children with subtlety and grace. The ‘Steenth Street stories imagine children in multiple, often contradictory roles: They dote on toys, work for pay, play with friends, care for siblings, angle for attention, learn to sing, get in fights, adopt pets, seek adventure, protect their families, rebel against their families, testify in court, make mistakes, and change their minds. Dunbar-Nelson’s stories resist the adultification that has so often harmed Black children, even while they portray the family responsibilities children shoulder and the challenges they face when the adults in their lives cannot provide food, shelter, and stability. In these stories, readers encounter an array of children’s experiences and perspectives that constitute evidence of Dunbar-Nelson’s attention to children and the consideration of which shifts predominant notions of “early” African American children’s literature. Recovering them for a new readership affords the opportunity for useful conversations about the genre and predominant, persisting assumptions about it.

Recovering The Annals of ‘Steenth Street

The necessity of African American women’s literary recovery is clear. It reveals a view of American literary history otherwise obscured. Eric Gardner and Joycelyn Moody explain how “recovering black histories—and especially histories integral to print—offers us a much richer and a more honest sense of American literature and history”.Footnote ²⁵ Recovery projects involving African American women intellectuals, in particular, reveal continuities in discussions of activism, education, and childhood. “The Revenge of James Brown” is just one example showing how Black writers, Black educators, and Black education advocates have refused to ignore Black children’s interests and needs. The nuanced picture Dunbar-Nelson paints of her young protagonist shows just one of the ways she (like other African American writers) refused to erase or degrade Black children (as they too often were in popular white representations) but instead treated her young characters with particular attention and care, noting their youthful innocence as well as their intense emotions and aims. This example defies more prominent passive-voice claims that Black children were simply ignored or denigrated and shows instead how they were cared for, empathized with, carefully observed, and loved.

The Taught by Literature team is currently working on a project to recover the ‘Steenth Street stories as a group and to make them freely available with resources for teaching in classrooms for both children and adults. We’ve decided to work on this digital edition of Dunbar-Nelson’s stories in order to collect them together as we believe she intended. And because we regard these stories about childhood as African American children’s literature, we want to make them available and accessible for teaching in a variety of educational contexts.

As we work to recover Dunbar-Nelson’s stories specifically as a Black digital humanities project, we are carefully considering these stories within an ethics of care framework. This includes assessing our own notions of responsibility, which raise questions of both who is doing this work and how. To create our digital edition, we have been considering how Dunbar-Nelson’s story collection might be made available, in which revised versions, and also for whom we recover these stories. Because we intend children—including Black children—to be an audience for Dunbar-Nelson’s work, both in her historical moment and our own, we are working to prioritize this audience in our recovery project. To that end, we are working with educators at the School District of Philadelphia to facilitate professional development sessions on early African American women writers as we work toward the goal of creating a curriculum to accompany Dunbar-Nelson’s Steenth Street stories.

Taught by the Literature’s recovery project has led to a broadening of the project’s mission. While we began with a question (who are we recovering these stories for?) that would inspire us to create a Black digital humanities project, our process for doing this work led us to additional interventions, partnering with K-12 educators and creating additional resources and professional development trainings to make early Black women intellectuals more available and accessible to educators, work that would become the bedrock of our project. Beyond recovery, Barbara McCaskill advocates for a focus on how “the investigative process itself reveals about how to frame and then pursue questions … how to interpret what we find, and, in the first place, why these mechanisms matter”.Footnote ²⁶ Knowing how several of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s stories originally appeared in periodicals aimed at broader publics informs our project’s interest in making these similarly available to twenty-first-century audiences beyond academic institutions. Moreover, these appeared in a decades-long historical context in which Dunbar-Nelson’s writing was not singular, but emerged from a longer history of Black women’s intellectual contributions. Recovering Dunbar-Nelson’s stories for our contemporary audience is part of a larger project to make Black women’s intellectual contributions more visible and accessible.

Dunbar-Nelson left behind one of the most extensive archives of any Black woman of her era, thanks in large part to the loving, meticulous work of her niece, the pioneering librarian Pauline Young, who preserved her aunt’s papers. These archival riches are held by the University of Delaware’s Special Collections. But for archives to grow in meaning and value, they have to be not only created and maintained and used, but also supported, resourced, and promoted. The existence of Black women writers’ archival records alone does not easily translate into their becoming household names among other U.S. literary figures. In a world in which both whiteness and maleness have been and continue to be over-represented, Black women writers are still undervalued and obscured in our literary history. Dunbar-Nelson and her ‘Steenth Street stories present one example of the need to attend more to Black women writers and the ongoing, collective project of recovering their work for our contemporary moment.

The 12 ‘Steenth Street stories are not easily accessible to readers today. Five of them were included in the three-volume Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, edited by Akasha Hull in 1988. This remains the most complete collection of Dunbar-Nelson’s work to date. These volumes were published by Oxford University Press as part of the extensive Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. These volumes are costly (each is listed from $115 to $150 on the Oxford University Press website), and used copies have only limited availability. Only some of Dunbar-Nelson’s short fiction is available in other accessible forms, such as via the African American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century Digital Schomburg collection. While this digital collection includes some of Dunbar-Nelson’s published work, the ‘Steenth Street stories are not available here. To our knowledge, the entire collection has not been gathered anywhere. We began work on the ‘Steenth Street Project because we want to make these stories more widely available and to put them into closer conversation with one another in the ways that Dunbar-Nelson herself seems to have intended.

Our work is part of a larger project to “recover” early African American women’s literature—to make this writing available to our own contemporary audience. Efforts to recover both women writers and African American writers have been ongoing projects for scholars of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literary history. Although far too many scholars have done ground-breaking recovery work for us to name them here, the work left to be done is massive. It is also a pressing and exciting scholarship, though not without challenges. As scholars, including Karen Kilcup, Pattie Cowell, Jean Lutes, Andreá Williams, Susan Tomlinson, and Michelle Burnham have noted, even writings that get recovered are often obscured again. Writers who are made visible are often re-abandoned. Anthologists may not incorporate them while prioritizing a white, male canon; editors may not recognize a viable market for the republication of academic or trade editions of their work; academics and other educators may not do the work of incorporating unfamiliar texts into our courses. Hull’s three-volume collection was an incredible undertaking, and these have been very important for generations of researchers. But much of Dunbar-Nelson’s work has still not been known and available to a wider readership.

The difficulties of recovery work are not simply evidence of individual failings but indicative of systemic challenges. Lacking the support of white publishers, many nineteenth-century African American writers self-published their work. Much of early African American literature was circulated in Black periodicals, which often struggled financially, not having the same scale of economic support as those that were backed by white wealth. Even as they themselves created literature, Black authors—including Alice Dunbar-Nelson—often had to build and maintain the infrastructures to make this literature available to the public. Black literary recovery projects are extensions of the work that Black writers have, collectively, done all along.

Additionally, the recovery of Black women writers cannot be divorced from histories of devaluing their work under the influence of both racism and sexism. It is common to see this work deemed unimportant; these writers are dismissed because they are not already more widely known. Erasing early Black women writers becomes easier when periodization for popular notions of African American literature far too often begin with the Harlem Renaissance that emerges in the 1920s. Black women writers are also subjected to appropriation rather than responsible engagement. For example, a recent project that attempted to reclaim some of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s fiction was fraught with factual errors resulting from sloppy research and a seeming failure to engage responsibly with library archivists and content expert scholars.Footnote ²⁷ Recovering African American women writers requires expertise and is fairly impossible without collaboration among researchers and across fields and institutions.

Even when recovery projects are responsible and successful, this work is still under-recognized and underfunded in our academic institutions. Even some colleges and universities that claim to care about the public humanities often fail to offer training to graduate students who want to pursue such projects or to encourage faculty by adequately recognizing this work for tenure and promotion. As a result, this work may be relegated to the status of an extra side project that scholars may do only after they have accomplished other, more transparently acknowledged and rewarded work. This makes recovery projects difficult for scholars to pursue unless they hold exceptionally secure positions, which are increasingly rare. Among these systemic challenges, we want to acknowledge the exceptional material conditions of our work, which we are grateful to have supported in these early stages and which are necessary for its continuation. Our first significant source of support for our project was the Idol Family Fellows Program of the McNulty Institute at Villanova University. We note the need for more programs like this one, which is specifically designed to support collaborative work that engages stakeholders outside the academic community and seeks to make a broader social impact. More recently, we received funding via a planning grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the National Archives. We acknowledge the significance of this kind of federal research support for digital humanities projects like ours.

We need this kind of public humanities work now more than ever. Our current era is experiencing general defunding of the humanities, widespread and dramatic cuts to federal research funding, attempts to disallow research that centers people other than white men, attempts to remove or ban books from school curricula and libraries, and ongoing attacks on Black studies education and—effectively—on Black children. Dunbar-Nelson’s stories evidence the long history of African American attention to children. As we make these stories available to future generations of readers, we honor the work of Black women educators, and we affirm the hope Dunbar-Nelson made manifest in the ‘Steenth Street stories, which portray Black children and their families with courage, imagination, and care.