The New Brownies’ Book, A Love Letter to Black Families, Dr. Karida L. Brown and Charly Palmer
This book is an ode to Black people, and this book accomplishes that goal well. When it arrived, I didn’t want to crack the cover for fear of marring its beauty. The cover is magnificent in its expression of the black struggle and black hope.
A beautiful child, dressed in a magnificent dress, an angel, but an angel with a ferocious and proud expression graces the cover. Throughout the entire book, the message is clear that black is beautiful, black is worthy and black is worth fighting for. In addition to expressing the views of W. E. B. Du Bois, who believed in socialism and activism, I wish it had expressed a bit more of the need to rise through the maintenance of the family unit and a valuable good education. Brown and Palmer are examples of how far a black person can go and how great can be a black person’s achievement.
Activism alone often descends into unnecessary violence and suffering. There have been times when some have attempted to coopt the message in order to cause chaos. The absence of any mention of Dr. Ben Carter, and Supreme Court Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Robert Woodson, and Jacqueline Woodson, among so many others today who preach beauty and unity, was a loss for me. However, the book captures the very real fear, the beauty of the dreams, the actual progress and the despair of the failures of the past with its presentation of the works in the book.
The art work, the photographs, the poetry, essays, short stories all express the beauty of black culture and black history and hopefully will influence a better way forward.