My paper traces how much of this activity was organized, implemented, and debated by female members of the Children’s Book Council, founded in 1943 to coordinate—but not dictate—the professional activities of editors in the trade. While racial representation, reform, and inclusion in American children’s books continues to be a reoccurring—and inadequately resolved—civil and cultural concern in the 21st century, it is only recently that scholars have begun tracing the empirical history of these challenges. This paper seeks to build on recent literary studies of the fitful move toward a more robust multiracial publishing climate, by exploring how post-Depression era progressive gestures advocating racial reform intersected with the exponential growth of affordable, mass-produced children’s books in the U.S. from World War II onward.
I argue that the first midcentury, mass-produced children’s books to actively rehabilitate imagery of children of color—and black youth in particular—were byproducts of related pressures on editors and publishing firms. During the war years especially, these initiatives aligned with broad shifts to the production of inexpensive books promoting social tolerance and international unity among wartimes Allies. Overall, the paper explains why CBC members consistently rebuffed calls to “define any policy or formulate any program” in relation to “books about racial subjects” by 1945, all the way up to the 1970s.