The New Brownies' Book: A Love Letter to Black Families by Charly Palmer and Karida L. Brown

Dolls of Our Lives

Allison Horrocks and Mary Mahoney

Society & Culture, History

4.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2024

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Just over 100 years ago, W. E. B. Du Bois created a magazine just for children. The Brownies’ Book: A Monthly Magazine for Children of the Sun reached thousands of children in the early 1920s...including (the fictional) Claudie Wells.

For this month's episode, we reviewed a 2023 tribute to The Brownies' Book curated by a team of scholars and artists. Their Love Letter to Black Families includes material from the original Brownies' magazines, such as poems by Langston Hughes and historic photographs, along with newly commissioned collages, essays, and tributes. We talk about how this book that was largely made in homage to Du Bois and the Harlem Renaissance speaks to children and adults living in the contemporary, post-2020 world.

Original air date: February 23, 2024

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome everyone to dolls of our Lives. This is the show or
0:14.6	reliving the American Girl series book by book except on Patreon or we're taking
0:19.2	on related content that we decide and you suggest.
0:23.7	I'm Mary.
0:24.7	I'm Allison.
0:25.9	And we're so excited to be here today to talk about the new brownie book.
0:29.7	Very excited.
0:31.2	We are continuing our coverage of Claudia Wells by kind of going out into her world and I know there's a lot of different things that we could cover.
0:40.0	We wanted to cover something that was relatively recent and kind of new in the world of
0:46.3	Claudioi and Harlem and Harlem Renaissance.
0:49.2	Absolutely and it's a really unique historical artifact in a sense like the original Brownie book.
0:56.0	So we'll get into what that was and what the new Brownie book is adding to it or offering.
1:01.0	But before we do that, let's kind of get into some recent pop culture.
1:05.9	This will come out in a couple of days, let's hope. So what's been going on with you
1:10.4	also and what are you taking in? We were recently asked you know what
1:13.7	we're watching and I said I'm sort of like accidentally watching sports or
1:17.5	sports by osmosis because it's just hard to avoid things like the Super Bowl. It just kind of is everywhere and someone joked that you know the kind of siren song of millennial culture of having little John and others in Ludacris come out with Usher and then have Beyonce releasing an album. storm of like Taylor Swift is living out her you know like original eponymous album
1:46.3	Dreams of like dating a football star we have Beyoncé kind of like you know giving
1:52.2	everyone an unexpected drop in the middle of this I'm very happy for
1:56.0	usher I think usher has been doing fine but between all of this and news of like
2:00.7	Ashanti's pregnancy it just kind of feels like everything has come together perfectly.
2:05.2	Yeah there's been a lot and I won't even go back and talk about the Grammys because we didn't really get into that before which I think is related to the Super Bowl because we had kind of parallel
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