Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Since its inaugural issue under the editorship of W. E. B. Du Bois in November 1910, The Crisis , the official journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), has been at the forefront of the struggle for civil rights and economic justice in the United States. For a century, its articles and editorials have attacked Jim Crow segregation, agitated for anti-lynching legislation, and promoted voting rights, equality in the courtroom, equal rights for women, and equal funding in education. Beginning with the sponsorship of Du Bois and his literary editor Jessie Fauset, The Crisis also promoted literature and the arts and provided a publishing venue for important black writers and artists such as Langston Hughes, Charles Chesnutt, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Aaron Douglass. Currently published bi-monthly with a circulation of 250,000, The Crisis continues in the twenty-first century as the leading journal of African American politics, ideas, and culture. Du Bois's initial November 1910 Crisis editorial set the journal's principles and future agenda: it would show through “facts and arguments … the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested today toward colored people.” He pledged the new journal would inform its readers on “important happenings and movements in the world which bear on the great problems of inter-racial relations” ... log in or subscribe to read full text