Protest and Affirmation: Composite Texts in the Crisis

The Crisis has long been recognized for its instrumentality in the early civil rights struggle and for its promotion of African American literature and the arts, particularly in the 1920s. But I want to suggest that its large cultural presence in the early twentieth century was due, in part, to its multimedia format and its layout, which have drawn scant scholarly attention.¹ From its first issues, the Crisis—founded in 1910 as the monthly publication of the NAACP, with W. E. B. DuBois as editor—featured dynamic conjunctions of written and visual texts. Individual pages are composite texts that mix copy and headlines with photographs, drawings, maps, and graphs, a format that enhanced the coverage of its two most prominent topics: protest against racial injustice and affirmation of the achievements of African Americans.

Furthermore, protest and affirmation are often juxtaposed. Regular columns like "Men of the Month" that demonstrate the accomplishments of individuals are often positioned beside articles that record and decry American racism. The resulting pages have an incongruence characteristic of the montage or collage. Art and film theories suggest that the discord among the elements of these forms heightens their effect. In the Crisis, these striking combinations of diverse texts and images are particularly pronounced in the magazine's first decade. The disjunctions in the Crisis of those years make its critique of American racism and its affirmation of African Americans especially compelling.

When DuBois was hired by the newly formed NAACP as its director of publicity and research in the summer of 1910, one of his primary goals was to establish the Crisis.² The magazine's content and design reflect trends in newspaper and magazine publishing at the turn of the century. Since the 1850s, the frequency and popularity of illustrations in periodicals had continued to rise, and the development and improvement of halftone techniques in the 1880s made it possible and more common to reproduce photographs and written text on the same page. While many periodicals stayed with the old look of pages filled only with type, the more innovative newspapers and magazines increased the number of drawings and photographs.³ These publications were DuBois's models; in fact, when he wrote to a potential financial backer in 1905 about a "Negro journal" he wanted to launch, he included notes explaining that the publication would be "on the order of Harper's Weekly or Colliers," both of which were heavily illustrated.⁴ Their comics, political cartoons, portraits, maps, and photographs accompanied a mix of news articles, editorials, creative literature, expos»s, and discussions of politics.⁵ Similarly, DuBois's proposed journal would include a "literary digest of fact and opinion," news about African Americans in the United States and elsewhere, and "[i]llustrations attempting to portray Negro life on its beautiful and interesting side."⁶ The difference between established magazines and DuBois's new one would be an increased focus—or, rather, a focus at all—on African Americans and the color line. Many mainstream periodicals of the time were negligent or derogatory in their coverage of African American life, as articles in the Crisis repeatedly confirm.⁷ A few white periodicals devoted occasional attention to the achievements of African Americans or protested lynchings and acts of racism and violence, but such coverage was the exception.⁸ While a mix of visual and written texts thus characterized many progressive periodicals oriented to white readers, DuBois filled a gap in their coverage when he used this mixed-media format to depict the experiences of African Americans.

The Crisis also complemented other African American periodicals of the early twentieth century, many of which included visual as well as written texts and articles with a positive slant.⁹ For example, DuBois cited the Voice of the Negro as "the greatest magazine which the colored people had had" and named the Crisis its successor.¹⁰ When the Voice of the Negro ceased publication in 1907, though, only...