In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Race Women, Crisis Maids, and NAACP Sweethearts: Gender and the Visual Culture of the NAACP in the Early Twentieth Century
  • Susan Bragg (bio)

In November 1911, an ad ran in the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), The Crisis, urging readers to order subscriptions for friends and promising to send Christmas cards with an illustration of “one of THE CRISIS girls.” Adorning the ad was the portrait of a light-skinned young woman gazing dreamily outward, her waving hair loosely pulled back to highlight her romantic image. “You know the one—with wistful face and the shadow of songs in her eyes,” the advertisement promised. This was not the first time John Henry Adams’s drawing of a brown-skinned beauty was published in The Crisis. First seen as a classic cover girl in August 1911, her image later appeared on the holiday gift cards, as a print for framing, and, by 1913, as a “Crisis Maid” selling face powder in the back pages of the journal.1 Adams’s illustration was joined by dozens of other photographic and illustrated images of young “Crisis Maids,” presented on the cover of the journal as many as eight or ten times each year throughout the early twentieth century. (Figure 1) Indeed, the Crisis Maid quickly emerged as the NAACP’s central metaphor of both African American womanhood and black racial destiny, a compelling figure through which to imagine the possibilities of race reform in America.

This essay explores the influence and impact of female iconography within The Crisis in the 1910s and 1920s, critical years associated traditionally with the leadership of editor W. E. B. Du Bois and the growth of the NAACP.2 Sold by subscription to the predominantly African American membership base of the NAACP, the journal was also sent to philanthropists, members of Congress, influential civic leaders, and public libraries to combat popular stereotypes, [End Page 77] encourage interracial engagement, and reimagine black equality in America.3 “Human contact, human acquaintanceship, human sympathy is the great solvent of human problems,” announced Du Bois in his inaugural 1910 editorial in The Crisis. Posed often in profile, the serene Crisis Maid invited readers to explore her youthful but genteel image.4 As the NAACP sought to claim public influence on what the mainstream press referred to as the “Negro problem,” the Crisis Maid served as an eye-catching “ambassador” on behalf of the organization and as symbol of black modernity.

In the era of the New Woman, this female imagery both sought to attract readers to the cause of race reform and reflected a critical anxiety about the role of African American women in the campaign for black civil rights. Scholars such as Daylanne K. English, Amy Helene Kirschke, and Anne Stavney have demonstrated how Du Bois repeatedly framed African American men as individualized leaders, seeking to document a generation of “real” men ready to claim manhood rights of voting and civic participation. In contrast, the Crisis Maid represented a more fluid iconographic symbol of respectability and “fitness.”5 She could alternately represent a symbol of “progress” in her middle-class presentation, a cultural fantasy about “authentic” African American beauty in modern America, and a welcoming figure to draw readers into the journal (and the NAACP).6

This essay builds upon existing scholarship to argue that the female imagery of The Crisis also served as a catalyst for women’s engagement in the NAACP, allowing African American women to insert themselves into both visons of black modernity and NAACP branch-level politics in these formative years. I explore several types of female imagery within the magazine, including the Crisis Maid as she appeared on the cover; the magazine’s sponsorship and coverage of baby contests and beauty pageants; and literary elements of The Crisis that resonated with its visual components. As other scholars have noted, much of this imagery celebrated African American family life and, more specifically, women’s familial roles and duties. Yet as art historian Marina Warner reminds us, “a symbolized female presence both gives and takes value and meaning in relation to actual women.”7 In fact, African American women responded to...

pdf

Share