“Lex Talionis: A Story,” by Robert W. Bagnall

Robert W. Bagnall’s “Lex Talionis,” with its depiction of a scientific process that transforms a white man black, is an early Afrofuturist text that shares a striking resemblance with the central conceit of George Schuyler’s better known Black No More (1931). Published in 1922 in the Crisis, the short story’s content and form work in concert with the magazine’s aims to argue for the importance of the black press during the Jim Crow era.