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W. E. B. Du Bois’s blueprint for an alternative global democracy—“the fourth dimension”—finds its fullest articulation in the aftermath of two world wars. In Darkwater and Dark Princess, Du Bois outline for socioeconomic and governance reform squarely locates the politically marginalized and colonized “colored world” at the center of a new global democracy. A proponent of republicanism, Du Bois rejects a “tyranny of the Majority,” and celebrates meaningful political participation by every member of society irrespective of race or gender. Du Bois’s critically cosmopolitan vision acknowledges the interrelation between intranational race conflicts and colonial and imperial projects practiced throughout the world. Addressing the primacy of race within domestic and international debates over national security, employment, resources, poverty, and health, Du Bois cites global democracy as a predicate for sustainable peace. Both governance strategy and critique, Du Bois’s “fourth dimension” revises the concept of citizenship and civil obligation, focuses on hinges on educational reform and the wellbeing of (black) American children. Prefiguring the arguments of mid and late 20th-century political philosophers, Du Bois insists that the disenfranchisement of one community within a society (specifically black Americans in the U.S.) risks the well being of the entire polis.

This chapter examines how deprivation became an accepted etiological factor for intellectual disability, appearing in all the major classifications of the time and readily adopted by psychiatrists. It suggests that theories of deprivation helped shift the focus from the profoundly disabled to the large group of children who were diagnosed at the time with “mild mental retardation”. It also examines how theories of deprivation provided the scientific framework that enabled the diagnoses of a disproportionately large number of African American children as “mildly mentally retarded”.

This chapter examines the child welfare situation in the Midwest, including the transition of care from poor farms to children-only institutions. Beginning in the mid-1870s but increasing considerably during the 1880s and 1890s, poor farms were used less frequently for children, as counties, states, and charities opted to build children's institutions. Putting children from county-poor farms in institutions marked an important step in efforts to increase farm placement. This chapter first considers how indentures were made between county infirmaries and local residents before discussing the various concerns that arose from the construction of county children's homes. It also explores the changes made in the terms of an indenture contract; the placement of African American children; how religion and ethnicity affected child placements; the role of the institutional manager in finding a suitable family for a child; and the problems of institutional life. The chapter concludes by explaining what happened after placement parents got a child.

This chapter describes the efforts of Harlem's African Americans residents to strengthen their community by providing guidance outside the family to African American children and young adults. African Americans and their allies capitalized on a web of church, professional, and personal relationships to bring resources to the black children and young adults that approximated those available to white children and young adults who resided in that area. By the end of the 1910s, African American young adults were served by the Harlem branches of the Young Men's Christian Association and the Young Women's Christian Association. Athletic clubs provided young men with competitive opportunities to participate in sports. The Music School Settlement for Colored People provided cultural activities for young African American children and adults.

This chapter examines psychologists’ involvement in the 1960s and 1970s in inventing a diagnosis known as “minimal brain dysfunction” (MBD) – a precursor to attention deficit attention disorder (ADHD). Although asserted to be a physiological matter, one best treated with stimulant drugs like methylphenidate (Ritalin), MBD was not based on a clear medical symptom. Quite soon, the modal individual for whom Ritalin became considered the most appropriate treatment was a white and middle-class child. As desegregation was often followed by the new phenomenon of tracking within schools, and as more African American children were labeled as suffering from “mild mental retardation,” the contrasting diagnosis of MBD represented a new disease entity to address the cognitive challenges sometimes faced by privileged children of the predominantly white suburbs. Simultaneously, a growing number of commentators, both African American and anti-racist white, came fiercely to protest what they perceived to be a disturbing tendency to overprescribe stimulant medications to poor children of color.

This chapter examines the logic underlying most of the Jewish and African American children's literature discussed in this book. It begins with a brief introduction to the histories of Jewish and African American children's books before moving to readings that show how democratic rhetoric allowed both Jewish Americans and African Americans to harness juvenile materials as a chief means of demonstrating patriotism and respectable religiosity. The discussion is organized around three periods that are crucial to commemorations of Jewish and African American identities: the colonial era, World War I, and the civil rights movement. These examples of military action and activism demonstrate how minorities, through their willingness to sacrifice their own lives for others, remember their way into civic membership. In this sense, voluntarism becomes the primary way to sign one's belonging.

This chapter traces the origins of the playground movement in America by presenting the story of Philadelphia's Starr Garden Recreation Park. It first considers philanthropist Theodore Starr's support for kindergarten advocate Anna Hallowell and African American pastor Reverend Henry Phillips in their child-saving efforts by establishing Starr Garden Park, and how he built on the efforts of George Stuart and his Colored Mission Sabbath School to expand Starr Garden Park into the playground that it is now. It then describes Susan Wharton's commitment to African American children and families in the neighborhood through her work as a founder of the Starr Centre Association and its predecessors, the St. Mary Street Library and the Philadelphia College Settlement. Finally, it discusses the issue of race by citing the role of African Americans in the processes and organizations that led to the establishment of the Starr Garden Park/Playground.

The beginning of 1923 found the Colored Orphan Asylum in a financial crunch, an all-too-familiar situation. The boarding-out report for 1923 acknowledged both progress and problems. The boarding-out program had commenced in 1918, in Jamaica, Queens, with African American families who lived in frame houses with six rooms and a bath. Now, five years later, there were forty-four boarding homes on tree-lined suburban streets in South Jamaica. All the locations were in the western Long Island portion of New York City, close enough to be monitored by the asylum yet far enough from the crowded tenements of Harlem and its crime and temptations. The trustees had to search for more ways to educate and entertain their charges, as they kept admitting more neglected and dependent children. They were the first institution that the courts or the State Board of Charities called upon to admit African American children.

This chapter examines the presence of the trope of exodus in Jewish and African American children's literature, ranging from echoes of exodus in Jewish immigration stories to African American texts on the Middle Passage and slavery. It first considers questions about history, suffering, and speech by offering a reading of Julius Lester's The Old African before moving to a discussion of the intersections between exodus tropes and archetypal American narratives, including the pilgrim story, cowboys, and treks to the western prairies. It then explores issues of leadership, Moses, and Miriam in Jewish and African American lore and how Jews and African Americans are figured together in narratives of suffering and escape. The chapter shows that crossing is a place of agreement and consensus because all Americans (except Native Americans) had to journey here in the past few centuries, and that exodus is the means through which minority groups engage with the ideas of crossing, strangeness, and covenant.

This chapter explores how domestic imagery figures in the telling of Jewish and African American past and an idealized hearthside vision that glosses over moments of trauma. In particular, it considers how domestic objects are used to make painful histories more accessible to children. It shows how Jewish and African American children's literature sets up homes that can be understood according to very Victorian notions of household femininity, nostalgically modeling families in which women are angels of the house and sentiment-laden objects dominate memory. It also analyzes Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family and its sequels and the role of food-driven nostalgia in books about both Jews and African Americans before concluding with a discussion of how memories of trauma are tempered by commemorations of domesticity as authors create heritage. The chapter suggests that American religiosity is linked to nostalgic visions of material home spaces.

This chapter examines the pervasive pattern of disproportionate minority contact (DMC) in the existing juvenile justice system, suggesting that its origin can be traced to the oppressed status of African American communities within America's broader social/political/economic construct. As a result, African American children (and other communities of color with similar issues) are more likely to become involved with the juvenile justice system, are treated more harshly, and are more likely to end up in the deep end of the system. Because the juvenile justice system is itself a societal construct, it is structured—and functions—as a mechanism of social and political oppression. The chapter considers the Black nationalist norm of cultural autonomy and argues that this norm must be embraced in order to promote empowered communities that resist oppression and would reduce minority contacts with the juvenile justice system.

Children’s Bibles represent a significant but understudied aspect of the use of the Bible in American life. The variety of ways the stories of the Bible have been retold, illustrated, and packaged for children can help index America’s diverse and changing religious landscape. This essay presents a focused reception history of the Bible. It examines six trends that emerged in American Protestant children’s Bibles and Bible storybooks in 1990–2015. These include presenting Bible stories as fun stories for children, presenting fun-loving anthropomorphic animals, presenting dinosaurs living alongside humans, presenting the Bible as one long story of redemption in Jesus Christ, writing and illustrating children’s Bibles from African-American perspectives, and packaging children’s Bibles for male or female readers. The essay places these trends within the wider context of children’s Bibles throughout American history and notes these trends’ significance for understanding how Americans approach the Bible and emerging trends in American culture and American Christianity.

This chapter discusses the education of black children in Reconstruction Tennessee. It details the efforts of Freedmen's Bureau agents and Northern missionaries to establish schools across Tennessee to prepare young former slaves for freedom. In the Sabbath schools, Bureau and missionary day schools, and public schools, freed children were taught religious and Victorian values and civic duties. In all three black children were taught what educators believed were correct interpretations of Christianity and citizenship, and learned how to live independent and industrious lives—essentially how to be free. To get along in these schools, students had to conform their thoughts and actions to Northern middle-class standards. As a result, many black children, as part of the first free generation of African Americans, matured into Protestant Christians who exhibited a fervent and particular American nationalism and a belief in free labor.

Split-brain theorizing became the lingua franca of the 1970s and 1980s, with the left hemisphere considered the seat of rationality and language while the right hemisphere housed intuition and creativity. Expert and popular writing on cerebral asymmetry came to be directed to society’s privileged, who were encouraged to expand their right-brain potential with yoga, transcendental meditation, and biofeedback. At the same time, a substantial part of debates among neuropsychologists and related medical, social-scientific, and educational professionals revolved around the implications of such a revaluing of right-hemispheric skills specifically for African American, Latino, and Native American children. A remarkable array of experts began to affirm the existence of racial differences in intelligence while taking up a critique that “right-brained” (and often poor and minority) children were trapped in “left-brained” schools. Declaring IQ to be an inaccurate measure, psychologist Alan S. Kaufman in 1979 developed an influential alternative assessment scale specifically to expand what counted as intelligence and to include a range of creative, nonverbal, spatial, and emotional capacities—only to find that gaps in test scores between white and nonwhite children narrowed accordingly.

The Mismeasure of Minds is situated at the intersection of: the history of scientific and social scientific attitudes toward minorities and the poor in the twentieth century, including the history of educational reform; the histories of psychology and the neurosciences; and the history of the transfer and adaptation of theories and the interplay of the behavioral sciences and medicine with culture and politics—with a particular focus on the 1950s through the 1990s. The book explores how psychological theories migrate into popular culture and public policy and attends to the ways in which theories and concepts, both when they have merit and when they are manifestly incoherent, can nonetheless be profoundly consequential – especially for African American children. It argues further that to study race and intelligence between Brown and The Bell Curve tells us a great deal about the vicissitudes of white identity in postwar America, as it documents the extent to which whites of the middle and upper classes were also addressed and engaged in worries over learning difficulties, beliefs about creativity and intuition, and ideas about the benefits of self-discipline and postponement of gratification.

This book concludes with a discussion of how moving from sacrificial citizenship to unbinding through fantasy has resulted in more pliable, less tightly bound spaces in the reading and writing of Jewish and African American children's literature. It notes the terrifying nature of the Abrahamic bargain that Jewish and African Americans make in the telling of their stories, as well as the persistence of religious metaphors in those texts. These children's books contain central themes of crossing and dwelling, sacrifice and suffering, pain and monstrosity that take readers through a popular story of American religious history. As this book has shown, children's literature, in its form and function, is a crucial aspect of how we form religious selves and of the performance and practice of North American religions.

This chapter first briefly introduces readers of some arguments made in an earlier work, Children of the Prison Boom (2013). This book made three core arguments, the first of which was that 25 per cent of recent birth cohorts of African-American children could expect to experience the imprisonment of a father. In addition, the book outlined a host of theoretical mechanisms through which paternal incarceration could affect child wellbeing. Finally, Children of the Prison Boom generates estimates of how mass imprisonment might have affected Black-White inequality in childhood wellbeing in the United States. The chapter then broadens these arguments beyond the narrow confines of the United States and the Black-White dichotomy.