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The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races (1910-present)
The Crisis is the official monthly publication
of the NAACP. It began in 1910 with William Edward
Burghardt DuBois as editor, and became a leading periodical for African
Americans. It was known for its radical position against lynching and
racial prejudice and reflected the ideology of Dr. DuBois. Until 1919
it sold for 10 cents a copy and boasted a monthly circulation of 80,000
copies. In the 1920s, literary contributions to the magazine increased
in keeping with the cultural explosion known as the Harlem Renaissance.
The magazine began to sponsor a literary contest and the works of poets
Langston Hughes, Countee
Cullen and Claude McKay, among others, began
to appear. The cover was also illustrated
by leading African-American visual artists such as Aaron
Douglas , John Henry Adams and Laura Wheeler Waring, a portrait painter
whose illustration appears on the cover above. The magazine continues
to emphasize cultural, social and economic matters. It is still being
published monthly by the NAACP.