“Health Talks for Billikens”: Interwar Era Children’s Advice Columns in the Defender Junior

This paper examines health advice for children in the Defender Junior, the junior version of the Chicago Defender, during the early to mid-twentieth century. “Health Talks,” which later became known as “Health Talks for Billikens,” began in 1927 as a way to dispense health information to the Chicago Defender’s youngest readers. The column, which ran until 1948, reflected a larger mission of the Chicago Defender to extend health content to Black citizens, both young and old, across the country. Both the Chicago Defender as well as the Defender Junior provided information and instructions on diet, exercise, and other forms of physical care as preventative health measures. I focus on Defender Junior in order to trace how Black children emerged as both consumers and creators of health knowledge. Through this health knowledge, Black children could participate in bodily centered racial uplift projects. I also attend to the ways young readers responded to these interventions through letters to the newspaper. Children’s letters in the Defender Junior reveal how they negotiated their relationship to health at home, in school, and with peers. By focusing on prescriptive literature from adults as well as the voices of the children who received these messages, this section takes an intergenerational approach to race, health, and print culture.