Letter from Census Bureau to Madeline Allison
One hundred years ago today … Madeline Allison, secretary of the N.A.A.C.P. and editor of the Crisis, received an answer to her query to the US Census Bureau.
United States. Bureau of the Census. Letter from United States Bureau of the Census to Madeline G. Allison, July 19, 1921. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries
It seems likely that Allison’s request was related to questions regarding voting rights of Blacks in Southern States, an ongoing concern for the N.A.A.C.P., as we reported in our February 17, 1921 post.
Allison published regularly in the Crisis and the Brownies Book, including research into lynching. (See our post of February 5, 1921.) Her role as secretary results in there being a sizeable amount of archived correspondence under her name (much of which is digitally available courtesy of the W.E.B. Du Bois Collection at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst).
She was also an entrepreneur: in 1921, Allison launched a venture as private shopper for Blacks who wanted to purchase Harlem goods, operating out of the N.A.A.C.P. offices.
The Crisis, February 1921, p. 134. Modernist Journals Project.
The above is the first of many such advertisements in the Crisis, and the source of a rare surviving photograph of Allison. (Subsequent ads were text-only.)
The Negro Associated Press called Allison’s venture “an einteresting example of a new occupation for Negroes.”
Negro Star, 21 January 1921, p. 2. Newspapers.com.
– Jonathan Goldman, July 19, 2021
TAGS: African American history, Black women, voting, elections, great migration, shopping, consumerism, advertising, work, labor, entrepreneurship