Writing Letters and Shaping Race: American Children’s Use of Print in Claiming Citizenship and Influencing Racial Conflict, 1946–91

In the United States during the second half of the twentieth century, conversations about racial equality and civil rights abounded, and American children were key participants in those conversations. Children wrote letters to activists, educators, senators, first ladies, and, most especially, presidents in order to weigh in on and influence the status of racial conflict in the United States. One young black girl wrote a letter to President Harry S. Truman in 1949 simply to “command the right to go places.” These letters and other examples of children’s writings, including speeches and poetry, reveal both what children were hearing and learning from the adults around them as well as how they chose to apply that information and take independent action. Children’s arguments about race and equality reflect their understanding of their relationship to the state and demonstrate how they chose to enact their own citizenship and take political action, often through correspondence with the president himself. Moreover, these letters can be used to trace different streams of racial ideology that developed in the United States from the conclusion of World War II through the end of the Cold War. This paper will explore several examples of children’s writing, mostly in letters to United States presidents, to illustrate children’s use of print as a mode of political participation in American society and to trace children’s role in the development of competing forms of American racial ideology between the mid-1940s and the early 1990s. The paper will also establish the need to study children’s perspectives in order to understand the broader history of race in twentieth-century America.