Scrapbooking Summer Camp with Yolande Du Bois

In the depths of winter, the end of the school year seems far off for families and their children. But that won’t stop people from dreaming about and planning for summer: vacation, trips, and, for some families, summer camp. And leisure is never just fun and games. Since the time of Jim Crow, schooling and recreational activities have been linked to Black political struggles. Yet an emphasis on the fight for equity in education has tended to overlook, as Marcia Chatelain has observed, a similarly vigorous struggle for more recreational opportunities for Black children.

As Carolyn Finney describes in Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (2014), after Emancipation the color line extended to a range of outdoor spaces including pools, beaches, parks, and campgrounds. At the turn of the twentieth century, increasing numbers of European immigrants and Black people migrating from the South transformed Northern cities. As a result, the wilderness emerged as a “pristine white reprieve” opposed to the sordidness of urbanization and its racist associations with non-whites. As whites fled cities for their leisure, they searched for and found segregated outdoor spaces thanks to the discriminatory practices of organizations like the National Park Service.

Against this backdrop emerged the first organizational summer camps, run by the YMCA in the 1880s and later by the Boy Scouts. Into the early twentieth century, these camps remained largely segregated by race and gender. While geographically separated from cities, these camps were symbolically “manufactured” visions of the wilderness and extensions of the “manhood factories” that were YMCA Christian clubhouses. As Leslie Paris has documented in her history of summer camps, these institutions evoke a nostalgia today but their origins date to nineteenth century American colonialism.

In the early 1920s, the first summer camps for Black children opened. Among them were the YWCA camp Fern Rock, located in the Hudson Highlands region of New York, and Camp Atwater, located in Brookfield, Massachusetts. Among the first ever campers at Fern Rock and Atwater was Yolande Du Bois (1900-1961). A new glimpse into the early years of these camps is now possible through recently discovered personal materials of Yolande’s that the University of Massachusetts, Amherst acquired in 2023. The materials date from roughly 1918 to 1929, and they span Yolande’s final years in high school, her time as a student at Fisk University, and her post-college years. The scrapbooks, or “memory books” as she called them, include photos from trips abroad, original stories, memorabilia from various college events, cut-outs of poems, Valentine’s cards, and more. Yolande’s scrapbooking joined a tradition of Black men and women as curators of their own lives and legacies, archiving details about individual and community life. Black scrapbookers including Joseph W. H. Cathcart, Alexander Gumby, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass papered their pages with the day’s news clippings intertwined with events in their own lives, including visuals like postcards and photographs and other ephemera. Assembling artifacts of one’s personal life reflected what historian Laura E. Helton calls Black “autodocumentary,” while the act of Black scrapbookers’ curating contemporary events and happenings produced “alternative histories,” to reference scholar Ellen Gruber Garvey’s framework. Scrapbooking was not only a matter of protest and invention, but pleasure and desire. Yolande’s scrapbooks “give voice to the black girls who, for far too long, have been uniquely denied an individual identity,” as Farah Jasmine Griffin writes. Yolande’s “scissored and glued history” represented a Black feminist practice of self-fashioning through artistic labor. Making space for these practices, in the words of Amaka Okechukwu, nurtures an “ethic of care and recovery that exceeds the boundaries of formal archives and archiving, and because of this, sometimes looks like research, curating, storytelling, and art-making.”

Yolande’s life has been mostly overlooked in the long shadow cast by her famous father (and her poet husband Countee Cullen). W. E. B. Du Bois had closely scrutinized his daughter’s health and habits. In See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure in the Interwar Era (2022), Tara Green writes that given how “doting and domineering” Du Bois was, Yolande has rarely been granted much agency of her own. Yet these scrapbooks reveal a creative and talented artist, influenced by the Art Nouveau style embraced by more well-known New Negro artists like Laura Wheeler. Often unattributed, Yolande’s creativity appeared on the pages of The Crisis.

A strong wave of Christian activism among African American women in New York City enabled the YWCA to take a leading role in sponsoring camps for Black girls. Fern Rock was also a host site for the organization Fresh Air Fund. Founded in 1877 and billed as a “fresh new way of living,” The Fresh Air Fund sponsored summer gatherings that offered children a chance to spend time at either camps or with host families for several weeks at a time.

Yolande created a scrapbook of her summer at Fern Rock, just weeks after graduating from Fisk University in 1924. The scrapbook’s opening page names the date and location in Yolande’s distinctive black capital letters and includes her own artwork of a swimming swan. (See Image 1) Near the swan are lily pads and blue and red flowers. The cover of the Fern Rock scrapbook includes a photograph of Yolande and other campers in the water, with swimming caps on; and another of Yolande beaming, standing next to her parents on the pier on Lake Tiorati (the Algonquin word for “sky-like”).

Yolande’s scrapbook photos show that camping was important to her and her family. “Listening” to the images reveals a complicated history of Black people struggling for full citizenship in the Progressive Era. At the time, citizens viewed the countryside as an escape from cities and World War I ratcheted up the belief that physical fitness was necessary for a strong nation state. As Ava Purkiss writes, embracing physical fitness allowed Black women to “exercise” citizenship in the face of institutional discrimination and spatial segregation. Camping and scouting thus became central to the modern exercise movement. Their troops were segregated in their early years, but Black girls took part in Camp Fire (1910), the first girls scouting group in the US and YWCA’s Girls Reserves troop. The campers at Fern Rock were called “Girl Reserves,” and on the cover of her 1925 Fern Rock album, Yolande celebrates a fellow camper, Harriet, with an inscription of the Girl Reserve pledge (see top left in Image 2).

Alongside lessons stressing respectability and moral fitness, the Christian women’s leadership nurtured Black girls’ physical strength and vitality, including skills as athletes and swimmers. Samantha White has written about the importance of developing Black girls’ aquatic selves. As White notes, opportunities for swimming remain severely limited for African American people; less than 2% of all college swimmers are Black, and only one HBCU, Howard, has a swim team.

In a July 1925 letter, Yolande described to her father how a camper at a nearby camp had drowned. This made visible the precarious relationship Black children have had with public swimming areas. Six summers prior, a Black child, Eugene Williams, had drowned in Lake Michigan at the hands of white children, a tragic event that ignited the race riots of the 1919 Red Summer. Swimming pools have been and remain “contested waters.” Today, Black children are considerably more likely than their white peers to die from drowning.

In August 1935, Yolande wrote to her mother Nina, delighting in how her own 3-year-old daughter Du Bois Williams (1932-2021) was enjoying the camp, and especially being in the water, where she was a “Young Fish!” Before attending Fern Rock, Yolande participated in the first summer of Camp Atwater, the country’s oldest summer camp for Black children. It was first named the St. John’s Camp, after the name of the congregation where the camp’s founder, William DeBerry, had been a long-time pastor. The camp would be known for its Afrocentric model and would attract middle- and upper-middle-class Black families.

Du Bois Williams would also later join her Girls Scouts friends as a camper at Atwater. In July 1937, Du Bois Williams sent her grandfather a postcard from the camp (see Image 3).

That very month, the magazine Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, the publication of the National Urban League (the Springfield chapter now owns and operates Atwater) published an article titled “Character Objectives in Summer Camps,” adorned with photos from both Atwater and Fern Rock. The author, the leading early Black psychologist Herman G. Canady, wrote that camps were not merely spaces for leisure but presented “concomitant learning” opportunities for Black children. A 1948 photo shows Du Bois Williams with other members of the camp staff (see image at the top of the post).

Like Du Bois Williams did with her own mother, Black girls continue to follow in their mother’s footsteps to Fresh Air camps and nurture practices of self and collective care. While Fern Rock shuttered years ago, Camp Atwater has survived: making it, in the words of Leslie Paris, “historically anomalous.” Today, summer camps for Black children come in all shapes and sizes, in the woods and in cities, and with manifold aims: including Camp Diva Leadership Academy for Black girls, run by Girls for a Change, and the Kids & Culture camp founded in 2010 by a group of African American moms. And new scouting opportunities are disentangling legacies of Christian activism and white middle-class respectability. The Radical Monarchs, a scouting group serving Black and Brown girls founded in Oakland, draws on the legacy of Black Panthers and the Brown Berets. As an alternative to the Girl Scouts, the Monarchs, encourage girls and gender expansive youth to form “fierce friendships” and contribute to their communities.

With these marvelous scrapbooks, Yolande steps out of her father’s long shadow. History can recognize her for her contributions in making and documenting history in the early 1900s. The memory books are also a window into the central place of camping and scouting–and girl campers and scouts–in the history of Black freedom struggles.