From One Crisis to the Other: History and Literature in The Crisis from 1910 to the Early 1920s

Abstract

In 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was created to protest against all forms of segregation, racial violence and economic oppression, and call for strict enforcement of the Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments to the Constitution, which provided former slaves with citizenship rights and equal protection under the laws, and granted black men the right to vote. Indeed, the platform of the "National Negro Committee," out of which the NAACP would emerge, laid particular emphasis on full civil rights for African Americans, equal educational opportunities, and the restoration of the right to vote, which had been denied to many Southern Blacks since the late nineteenth century. i The NAACP subsequently launched The Crisis Magazine,a Record of the Darker Race, ii a monthly publication meant to help in the fight for full civil rights and against stereotyped representations of African Americans. Black intellectual and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois iii edited the Crisis from its creation until 1934. 2 In the first issue of the monthly, dated November 1911, Du Bois thus outlined the scope and intent of the magazine: it was to be "first and foremost a newspaper" that would "record important happenings and movements in the world which bear on the great problem of inter-racial relations, and especially those which affect Negro-Americans"; secondly, it would provide "a review of opinion and literature," and include "a few short articles." Finally, the editorial page would "stand for the rights of men, irrespective of color or race" and vigorously defend the "highest ideals of American democracy" (Crisis November 1910, 10). Evidently then, literature was not the main object of the magazine and, a few years later in 1927, arguing for the creation of a "purely literary magazine," African American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston defined what, to her, were the limits of The Crisis and Opportunity, iv the two main African