Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Stories of Childhood

Abstract Inspired by teaching Black kindergarteners at the White Rose Mission in New York City in the 1890s, Alice Dunbar-Nelson wrote 12 stories about children in an urban neighborhood targeted for uplift. Around 1900, she drafted a table of contents for the collection, The Annals of ‘Steenth Street . The collection was never published as such, but some of these stories were published individually in multiple periodicals over several decades. Dunbar-Nelson’s stories center on the neighborhood’s children and their perspectives. This was literature intended, at least in part, for a child audience. Both the content and the publication history of Dunbar-Nelson’s stories raise important points for scholars of African American children’s literature. Our discussion focuses on the story Dunbar-Nelson intended to appear first in her collection, “The Revenge of James Brown,” published in the Chicago Daily News in 1899 and in the Methodist Episcopal Church School Publications’ weekly paper, the Classmate , in 1930. This story extends notions of where we might look for children’s literature of the Harlem Renaissance to include print venues not often examined with Black children in mind. Moreover, Dunbar-Nelson’s revisions of this story allow for complex considerations of her representations of Black childhood. This essay’s authors are co-founders of the Black digital humanities project, Taught by Literature , the work of which includes creating a freely available digital edition of “The Revenge of James Brown” and Dunbar-Nelson’s other ’Steenth Street stories, working with K-12 educators to create materials to facilitate teaching these stories to children in the present.