The Crisis, April 1915

Long overdue: a post on The Crisis. It would take much more than a blog post to do it any justice--but I think a few thoughts would be better than continuing to save it for another day. Hopefully from now on it will join the regular rotation of journals I read and report on here.

One of the first things I notice when working with The Crisis, compared to the London journals I have been reading more frequently, is that it is very beautiful. Here's an image of the cover:

Inside the journal, I searched for who the picture was--but to my eye, the only acknowledgement of it was a line about the cover designer (Richard L. Brown) and that the photograph was "from life." Realizing that one of the goals of the journal is to break the way cultural norms of beauty are laid on racial lines, I think that the anonymity of this woman might in itself be a political statement. She is beautiful, and that is the whole point.

The recurring column "Along the Color Line" is filled with news in many categories that might interest the readers of The Crisis: six pages of double-columned lists of events in music and art, politics, economics, meetings, etc. etc. While these lists hold much information, the last entry, "Courts and Crimes" resonated most strongly with current events, in a terrible way:

Note in particular the two last records. The Crisis records white lynching as well as black, and it record when policemen kill black people in the same space it records lynchings. From later in the same issue, a manifesto of self-defense: "Lynching would cease in short order if the colored people of this country resented the lawless murdering of friends, relatives and compatriots as they should —with the rifle and sword. The ballot will not settle it definitely. Neither will commercial nor intellectual achievement. But mobs do not lynch when they are assured of a come-back. Least of all, would a mob invade a colored district in chase of its victim were there any likelihood of their being received as they should be—with bullets (281)." I noted immediately that this explicitly puts political, intellectual, and economic solutions to lynchings off the table. The only way to meet force, for The Crisis here, is force. A similar doctrine was present in The Egoist with reference to the Ulster volunteers. I'll be interested to see how this develops.

Quick Notes:

The Crisis takes a strong stand for woman's suffrage, page 285. That already puts them ahead of The New Age and The Egoist on that issue, though I do think its realpolitik resonates with Dora Marsden.

William Stanley Braithwaite contributes two poems to the issue. I like "Laughing it Out" as a nugget of productive nihilism:

Meta Warrick Fuller is listed as a finalist for the first Spingarn Medal, which led me to look at some of her sculptures, which are awesome. They remind me of Rodin.

Du Bois himself contributes "The Immediate Program of the American Negro," which is another powerful manifesto, and is worth more attention than I can give it right now.

Charles W. Chestnutt contributes the first half a short story, "Mr. Taylor's Funeral."

I noticed especially the advertisements: such a wealth, compared to the bare pages of the London journals! Here's one I thought was particularly cool for its literary footwear: