For hundreds of years, Black people have been lynched, murdered, and left to die by racist individuals, organizations and institutions, often with impunity, in countries across the world. While many of these deaths have received little notice or even gone unremarked entirely by the wider public, deaths of Black children have frequently highlighted tensions around ideas of white and institutional responsibility, Black childhood, and racial innocence. Literary responses to Black child deaths take a range of forms, but many are specifically designed as a call to action against racism and advocacy for Black childhood as a protected space. The proposed session for the MLA 2025 conference will examine literary responses to the deaths of Black children in multiple global locations during the twentieth century, and consider the ways that creators of this literature engage in advocacy for Black children and their communities as well as encourage activism in their readers.
The panel focuses on the ways that the system of white enslavement of Black people which began with European colonialism continues to impact the experiences of Black people in both white- and Black-majority nations through individual and institutional racism, and how writers address these experiences and demand systemic change. Speaking in 1988, visual artist Eddie Chambers argued that Black art has a duty to “confront the white establishment for its racism, as much as to address the black community in its struggle for human equality” (“Black Art” p. 240), and the papers in this session will consider how Black writers achieve this and go further, not just addressing the Black community but encouraging Black activism. One of the ways that writers do this is through reframing the concept of innocence, something which critics such as Robin Bernstein, Robin D’Angelo, Michelle Martin and Katherine Capshaw have pointed out has historically belonged only to white children. By claiming both innocence and childhood for Black children, the writers discussed in this panel demand change from both Black and white readers.
In “Crossing Over: Literary Activism and the New Cross Fire,” Karen Sands-O’Connor discusses the effect of one of the seminal events of 1980s Britain, the death of thirteen young Black people in the New Cross Fire, on Black British writers. Through poetry, prose and illustration, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Errol Lloyd, and Alex Wheatle criticized white institutional racism while supporting the Black community in protesting injustice. The two papers in the session that examine white American violence against African American boys focus on the impact of African American boys’ murders on the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter movements. Jennifer Ryan-Bryant’s “"Mama, I am gold": Absence and Presence in the Emmett Till Poem” uses works by Gwendolyn Brooks, Patricia Smith and Marilyn Nelson to illustrate the ways in which American lynching culture has reshaped literary history itself through the constant, nearly unbearable tension that the poems sustain between absence and presence. Discussing more recent violence against Black youths, Elicie Edmond’s “Coming of Age in Civil Rights America: The Politics of Literary Black Representation in Angie Thomas’s The Hate You Give” argues that Thomas’s novel pushes back against anti-Black representation in the young adult novel and offers readers a model for their own activism and protest. Finally, Stacy Creech de Castro’s “Echoes of Resistance: Black Childhood and Literary Activism in Latin American and Caribbean Literature(s)” discusses literary resistance and refusals in response to the deaths of Black children in Latin American and Caribbean literatures, featuring Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat's short stories from Krik? Krak! (1996) and Everything Inside (2019), along with Afro-Indigenous Mexican poet Alan Pelaez Lopez’s “Zapotec Crossers” (2018).
Literary notions of childhood innocence have historically not been equally attached to white and Black children, but Black writers responding to Black child deaths have demanded change and encouraged activism through their literary production. By regarding these literary responses across multiple global locations, the session will provide space for discussion of commonalities as well as differences among writers facing the challenges of racism, conflict, and institutional oppression in their communities. By focusing on the deaths of children, the session will explore the (literary) place of childhood and innocence in civil rights/anti-racist struggles. The session will also examine issues such as language, literary form, and audience in considering the effectiveness of literary activism.