W.E.B. Du Bois and The Crisis
One hundred years ago today … The February 1st issue of The Crisis: A History of the Darker Races arrived. A monthly magazine under the editorship of W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis was, still is, the official organ of the N.A.A.C.P. It was published out of its Greenwich Village offices at 70 Fifth Avenue at the southeast corner of 11th Street.
The Crisis cover, “Portrait of Harry Elan” b Frank Walts. Courtesy The Modernist Journals Project.
The Crisis, still in publication, had been founded in 1910 by Du Bois, Oswald Garrison Villard, J. Max Barber, Charles Edward Russell, Kelly Miller, William Stanley Braithwaite, and Mary Dunlop Maclean. Thanks to The Modernist Journals Project, the first twelve years of its run are available digitally.
Courtesy The Modernist Journals Project.
Its February issue featured its usual collage of editorial opinion and cartoons, N.A.A.C.P updates, African-oriented anthropology (“Prehistoric Negroid and their Contributions to Civilization” by Frances Hoggan, MD.), African diasporic history (“One Hundred Years of Negro Congregationalism in New Haven, Connecticut” by Edward F. Goin), news analysis (“The Lynching Industry, 1919”). Under the literary editorship of Jessie Fauset, it contained fiction and poetry.