1In 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was created to protest against all forms of segregation, racial violence and economic oppression, and call for strict enforcement of the Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments to the Constitution, which provided former slaves with citizenship rights and equal protection under the laws, and granted black men the right to vote. Indeed, the platform of the “National Negro Committee,” out of which the NAACP would emerge, laid particular emphasis on full civil rights for African Americans, equal educational opportunities, and the restoration of the right to vote, which had been denied to many Southern Blacks since the late nineteenth century.i The NAACP subsequently launched The Crisis Magazine,a Record of the Darker Race,ii a monthly publication meant to help in the fight for full civil rights and against stereotyped representations of African Americans. Black intellectual and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Boisiii edited the Crisis from its creation until 1934.

2In the first issue of the monthly, dated November 1911, Du Bois thus outlined the scope and intent of the magazine: it was to be “first and foremost a newspaper” that would “record important happenings and movements in the world which bear on the great problem of inter-racial relations, and especially those which affect Negro-Americans”; secondly, it would provide “a review of opinion and literature,” and include “a few short articles.” Finally, the editorial page would “stand for the rights of men, irrespective of color or race” and vigorously defend the “highest ideals of American democracy” (Crisis November 1910, 10). Evidently then, literature was not the main object of the magazine and, a few years later in 1927, arguing for the creation of a “purely literary magazine,” African American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston defined what, to her, were the limits of The Crisis and Opportunity,iv the two main African American magazines at the time: “The way I look at it, ‘The Crisis’ is the house organ of the NAACP and ‘Opportunity’ is the same to the Urban League. They are in literature on the side” (Hemenway 49).

4This essay will investigate the role of literature and the links between literature, news-reporting and history in The Crisis between 1910 and the early 1920s. There are several reasons why this period is particularly interesting. First, research on literature in The Crisis has tended to focus on the period of the Harlem Renaissancev and less on its early years. Second, within the dozen years following its launch, the magazine grew in size (from 16 pages for the first number in 1910 to over 40 in 1922) and circulation. In April 1912, The The Crisis announced a circulation of 22,500; four years later, it declared itself “self-supporting” and reached 30,000 issues (Kirschke 12, 230). In September 1919, Du Bois himself proudly announced a circulation of 104,000 for the June 1919 issue (Crisis September 1919, 235). However, by April 1921 and for various reasons, circulation was down to 53,000 (Lewis 34). Third, the period of highest circulation of the journal corresponds to momentous events: World War I and Du Bois’s visit to France; major race riots in East St. Louis (1917), Chicago (1919), and in other parts of the United States; the beginning of the Great Migration (1916-1930), which would take well over one million black Southerners to northern cities; the suffragist movement; and a significant rise in immigration. Furthermore, in 1919 Jessie Fauset became the literary editor for The Crisis and the magazine would progressively devote more space to literary works until she left in 1926.vi

6We will not study literature per se and will not provide an analysis of the literary style, nor assess the literariness of the short stories and poems printed in the 1910s. Rather, we wish to examine the place accorded literature in the Crisis and its role in relation to the rest of the magazine, from news commentary, political essays, and echoes of the African past, to illustrations and advertisements, all of which are linked to a broad vision of history. Our position is that of specialists of African American history, publishing history, and material culture. We will thus pay attention to the content, placement, and layout of various articles and columns, of illustrations and advertisements, as well as to their authors—whenever possible—and to their articulation in each issue. By doing so, we will consider the intersection of literature, in a broad sense, and history. First, we will look more specifically at book reviews in The Crisis over time, before considering the various developments of American literature as seen in the pages of the magazine. We will then explore the representation of Blacks and of African American history in the fiction and illustrations published by The Crisis, in keeping with what Christian Jouhaud sees as a comprehensive historical analysis of literature that, among other aspects, “takes literature into consideration as a form of mediation between producers and receivers, at given moments and in specific sites” (Jouhaud 273).vii

10Most of the books (and sometimes articles issued in various periodicals) reviewed were works of history or sociology, not necessarily by African Americans. Thus, the first two reviews published in the second number of The Crisis dealt respectively with the assessment by an English traveler of the race question in the South of the United States, and with a work issued by African American journalist and editor John Edward Bruce titled Eminent Men and Women. While the former was harshly criticized for being racist and inconsistent, the second received mixed praise from the unnamed reviewer, probably Du Bois himself.viii Indeed, Bruce’s work was depicted as a “laudable attempt” to provide role models and as potentially useful in schools; according to the reviewer, however, the work brought together all kinds of individuals, both important figures such as Frederick Douglass and obscure ones, without ever giving a proper sense of their respective merits (Crisis December 1910, 30). The following month brought readers a summary of an article entitled “The Lady of the Slave States” by Mrs. George Haven Putnam, a writer and the wife of the New York publisher, who essentially debunked the myth of the Southern lady, “the gracious fascinating woman of culture who ruled family and estate by the charm of her personality,” and was kind to her slaves (Crisis January 1911, 28). It also offered long extracts from a “remarkable” pamphlet by newspaper editor Melville E. Stone denouncing “Race Prejudice in the Orient” (Crisis January 1911, 28-29). Book and article reviews were thus extremely diverse, especially in the first years of The Crisis, touching on topics about both the United States and the rest of the world, especially Africa, Asia and the West Indies.

12In March 1912, for the first time, the “What To Read” column was accompanied by the byline “Conducted by Jessie Fauset.” In this section, Fauset authored the three short book reviews of works by Du Bois, Mary White Ovington (one of the NAACP’s co-founders) and a novel by Percival Gibbon. Her tone is very personal and the books are examined in the light of what they reveal of the race question. Fauset continued to write reviews for the magazine, occasionally looking at children’s literature (January 1914) as well as autobiography and fiction, but mostly examining books and articles dealing with racial issues considered from a political or sociological perspective. One of the rare exceptions was a review of black author and lawyer Charles Weldon Johnson’s anonymously published Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, which Fauset praised as “an epitome of the race situation in the United States told in the form of an autobiography” (November 1912, “What To Read” 38). The reviewer noted that the book was, unsurprisingly, anonymous and that it seemed to be “a work of fiction founded on hard fact.” Most of the reviews authored by Fauset are rather short, and the magazine usually carried at least two in each issue. There were exceptions, though, as when the aptly titled “A Pile of Books” contained no fewer than eleven reviews (February 1915). The column occasionally included a specific heading to indicate the topic linking the various works under review (for example “History and Facts” in June 1914 and “Problem Literature” in August 1914).ix

15The scarcity of reviews devoted to works of fiction or poetry in the first decade of the magazine may be due to a concern frequently expressed in the columns of the magazine, that of the poor quality of African American literature. What type of literature African Americans should write, and how it could be improved were enduring concerns of Du Bois’s, expressed both in his correspondence and in The Crisis from the very beginning.x This concern was first voiced in the monthly, probably by Du Bois himself, in the April 1911 issue, after the death of African American activist, poet, and writer Frances Watkins Harper:xi “She was not a great singer, but she had some sense of song; she was not a great writer, but she wrote much worth reading. She was, above all, sincere” (20). The same issue honored poet William Stanley Braithwaite, whose art was “characterized by care, restraint and exquisite taste,” and who marked “the rise of Negro American letters above the mere bonds of race into the universal brotherhood” (19). Yet, Du Bois lamented the fact that “We have among ten millions to-day one poet, one novelist and two or three recognized writers of articles and essays” (21). The rest of the article identified Braithwaite as the poet and Charles Chesnutt as the novelist. Du Bois may well have included himself among the writers of articles and essays. Two years later, in a rare book review devoted to poetry, the author (probably Fauset) deemed that the poems in Fenton Johnson’s A Little Dreaming (1913) were “very uneven in value” but that “bits of singing” were to be found here and there (April 1914, “Song and Story” 301). In June 1916, Fauset provided a rather negative assessment of African American literature in her “Looking Glass” section. She somewhat deceptively announced “interesting developments in Negro literature,” with repeated attempts at poetry (which she judged “good, bad, and indifferent”). The two novels she mentioned (one by William N. Ashley, the second by F. G. Gilmore) had “the usual difficulty that we are too near realities to write beautifully about them” (“The Looking Glass. Literature” 69). A few years later, writing about the short story in dialect by Ottie B. Graham, which had been awarded a 50-dollar prizexii by the magazine, Fauset remarked on the mediocre quality of the submissions, as she felt that most lacked a plot as well as imagination. She blamed teachers who failed to provide their students with good literature from which to learn (Shaw, Galsworthy, Conrad, Du Bois, and a few others), but also rued the lack of exemplary African American writers who could serve as models: “More than ever, we need writers who will be able to express our needs, our thoughts, our fancies” (June 1923, “The Prize Story Competition” 57-58).

17While direct references to fiction, poetry, and theater remained sparse during the 1910s by comparison with the issues published later during the Harlem Renaissance, several items in The Crisis nevertheless demonstrate the importance of reading and literature in a broad sense. Access to print culture and the benefits of reading were regularly displayed, and illustrations played a significant role.xiii For example, in the Crisis of July 1911, a photograph illustrates an article on the growth of the YWCA; it shows young women reading in an elegant and comfortable environment (“An Evening in the New York Association” 122), thus equating reading with uplift. The Crisis encouraged families to read as it was believed that literacy could play a major role in African American emancipation—and women’s emancipation in particular. The presence of periodicals and literature in the home was deemed essential as they taught African Americans how to read, all the while informing them of the state of domestic and foreign affairs. In February of the same year, a photograph of “A Library” (February 1911, 31) depicts African Americans in a reading room while the accompanying text mentions that only five Southern cities offered facilities to black readers; the photograph displayed the “flourishing colored branch” in Louisville, Kentucky. Such instances exemplify the place of literature in The Crisis outside the conventional offering of short stories, poems, and book reviews. There were indeed many other ways in which the black magazine mentioned literature and its importance for the African American community.xiv   

21The works of Du Bois and other members of the NAACP were often targeted for special promotion, as was the case with Du Bois’s novel Silver Fleece, and works by members of the NAACP’s “General Committee”—as listed in the first issue of November 1910 (12-13)—which, for example, comprised Charles W. Chestnutt and Mary White Ovington.xvi The self-promotion of like-minded authors, including black ones, at a time when there was almost no mention of African American contributions in white publications, created a community of writers linked to The Crisis. As other Modernist magazines would do, TheCrisis also mentioned, and sometimes reviewed, works published outside of its circle, “thus invoking a modernist community of readers who were ‘in the know’ about the latest trends” (Thacker 7). Similarly, readers were also considered as a community of people who shared comparable values and ideas; this was reinforced by various articles and columns, but also by advertising.

22Ads in The Crisis could promote objects and services similar to those advertised in other periodicals and in newspapers (typewriters, beauty products, real-estate property, music lessons, etc.). Often, they would also target African Americans specifically, either through what was advertised (vocational and training schools, specific universities, black businesses for example) or because the persons represented were black. They also dealt with literature in a broad sense: many ads were placed in the hope of finding agents to sell books; others promoted self-published works, often bearing on African or African American history. The magazine also carried ads for fiction, book clubs, libraries, bookstores, and publishing houses. For example, the second page of the February 1915 issue has two large inserts promoting Out of the House of Bondagexvii described as “the latest and greatest book from the pen of Professor Kelly Miller” of Howard University, and a children’s book, Hazel: The Story of a Little Colored Girl, by Mary White Ovington,xviii one of a number of books, fiction and nonfiction, sold directly by The Crisis and its agents. In the same issue, another ad indicates a price of one dollar for “The poems of Phyllis Wheatley/ the early Negro poetess/ collected by Richard R. Wright, Jr. / and Charlotte Crogman Wright” (162). Also, in the “Crisis Advertiser” of October 1919 (321), Young’s Book Exchange of New York City presents itself as the “Mecca of Negro History and Literature.” Literature was thus scattered among more mundane topics.

27Indeed, Du Bois can hardly be seen as the mouthpiece of the NAACP. Any magazine echoes a variety of voices and is thus necessarily polyphonic: this is especially true of the first years of The Crisis. Reading the monthly in its first decade suggests that it increasingly became Du Bois’s own production, with fewer voices being heard outside his own. As early as 1913, Du Bois’s refusal to accede to a request by Villard that, in addition to a list of lynchings, The Crisis also include a list of crimes committed by African Americans, led to Villard’s decision to withdraw as contributing editor of the magazine (Lewis 1993, 471-72). Much has been written on the quarrels between Du Bois, Villard, and other members of the NAACP over who should control the magazine and whether it should be seen as the organ of the NAACP, or whether Du Bois should have an entirely free hand to steer The Crisis.xix Du Bois envisioned The Crisis as “in a sense a personal organ and the expression of [himself]” (Lewis 1993 478) and, as Elliott M. Rudwick noted, the “Crisis was definitely ‘Du Bois’s domain’” (Rudwick 218).

28The Crisis regularly published “affirmative texts,” thereby “refuting the stereotypes that underlay assumptions about African Americans” (Carroll 23).The regular column “Great Men” offered readers of The Crisis positive representations of African American men and women (it sometimes included Whites), as did the “Racial Uplift” section. Representations of African Americans in fiction were also discussed in the pages of the magazine. In March 1911 (26-27), Du Bois printed two letters on a novel by Lloyd Osbourne (an American writer and the stepson of Robert Louis Stevenson), entitled The Kingdoms of the World, which was being serialized in Munsey’s, one of the monthly magazines with the largest circulation at that time (Damon Moore 114). The first letter was penned by a black reader, Henry E. Baker, and the second was the author’s reply. Baker objected to the depiction of the two black characters in the story, one of them a West Point cadet and the other a man who accepts what Baker saw as a humiliating position in a white boarding house. According to Baker, African Americans had the greatest difficulties fighting this type of representations produced by the pen of popular authors and shapers of opinion. Osbourne, who expressed “some chagrin” at Baker’s reaction, vigorously defended his characters, explaining that he was “most emphatically on the side of the colored people in their hard progress upward.” He intended to show the difficult position of African Americans in order to make at least some (presumably white) readers identify and sympathize with their plight but, as he pointed out to Baker, he had to do so in a subtle way (Baker had evidently missed the subtlety) so that readers would not be offended. Indeed, according to Osbourne, “The picture of a more advanced, more educated, finer, higher type of colored man—in the present truly deplorable state of public feeling—would make enemies.”xx Osbourne evidently saw himself as well-meaning and was piqued at Baker’s reaction. He reminded his reader of the power of a widely circulated magazine like Munsey’s—whose readership he assessed at around one million—to change at least a few minds on the issue.

31Just as Langston Hughes’s poems in the August 1923 issue describe Harlem as he saw it then, history in The Crisis is a history of the present, with reports on both achievements and the problems to be addressed, including segregation, racial violence, and economic oppression. Yet the monthly carried frequent reminders of African American history, including slavery and Reconstruction, and sought to set the record straight, using articles, essays, book reviews, and, to a lesser extent, fiction to do so. When David W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation was released in 1915, The Crisis reported on the NAACP’s efforts to have it banned in various cities, remarking that the city of Portland, Oregon, did not allow its libraries to hold books by Thomas Dixon, whose historical romance The Clansman (1905) had served as the basis for the film (Stokes 79). A cartoon accompanying the article and entitled “The Verdict” showed Dixon condemned by a “jury of fair minded Americans,” with one member of the jury holding a banner that read, “As a historian we find the defendant a pretty good liar” (Crisis October 1915 295-6). The Crisis thus offered its readers an interpretation of the past that Du Bois, as a historian, thought indispensable to allow his readers to understand the current situation of African Americans. In between his article on Reconstruction (“Reconstruction and Its Benefits,” issued in 1910 in the American Historical Review) and the chapter on the topic in The Gift of Black Folk (1924), the editor of The Crisis sought to provide his readers with a more accurate vision of the period than that given in mainstream histories, in literature (as in Dixon’s trilogy on Reconstruction), and movies (most notably Birth of a Nation).xxi A letter sent by Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina in answer to a request from Du Bois for information on the Senator’s views on Reconstruction in his state (which at one time was the only state with a majority of African Americans in the legislature) is significant in this regard. In a post scriptum, Tillman explained that “The negroes were dupes of course and should never have received the ballot at all, but the fanatical abolitionists under the leadership of Thad Stevens and Chas. Sumner concocted the whole program to wreak vengeance on the Southern white people.”xxii Du Bois does not seem to have used the photograph of the South Carolina legislature in 1868 that Tillman had sent him, but in the January 1915 issue of the magazine he printed a letter from Tillman to the Editor of the Maryland Suffrage News, in which the Senator made the same point and argued that giving the vote to women would lead to even worse results, as “Negro women are much more aggressive in asserting the ‘rights of that race’ than the Negro men are” (The Crisis January 1915 140-1).

32While the themes handled in fiction and poetry were not always race related,xxiii they frequently were, and they contributed to the magazine’s policy of raising pride in the achievements of African Americans while also denouncing their current condition. Unsurprisingly, many of the stories strike a somber note. Thus, for instance, Du Bois published a long short story in one of the Christmas numbers of The Crisis (December 1911) entitled “Jesus Christ in Georgia.” This parable about a black convict who ends up being lynched, and the coming of a mixed-blood stranger who turns out to be Jesus Christ, served as a pretext for a description of the convict lease system,xxiv the racial hierarchy of the South, and its racial violence. It told a story familiar to readers of The Crisis, but as a parable or a fable rather than as a news item or editorial. Literature here was meant to underscore a message central to the magazine. This was no new practice for Du Bois, whether in his own work (The Souls of Black Folk mixed fiction and nonfiction) or in his work as an editor; The Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line (1907-1910) included articles and essays as well as poetry and fiction (Lewis 1993 380-383).xxv Both cases exemplify Du Bois’s belief that social science (“strictly descriptive, empirical history” [Blight 54]) needed to be complemented with aesthetic expression. As David Blight has noted, “Du Bois’s efforts to forge an African American counter-memory should be understood in the context of this turn in his work from social science toward art” (Blight 46). This turn is described by Arnold Rampersad as the result of Du Bois’s horror at the lynching of Sam Hose in Atlanta in 1897, which led him to realize that “one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved” (Du Bois 1940 34).xxvi In addition, imagination and the use of fiction were a way to address the “eternal paradox of history,” i.e. the historian’s awareness of “how little the scientist today can know accurately of the past; how dependence on documents and memory leaves us all with the tale of the past half told or less” (Du Bois 1957, 315).

33But literature could also serve as a means to increase the attraction of the periodical. Thus in the issue of March 1912, Du Bois announced the publication of a new short story, written especially for The Crisis by well-known African American writer Charles Chesnutt.xxvii This was hailed as “one of the literary events of the year,” his first published work since “The Colonel’s Dream” (1905).xxviii “The Doll,” printed in the April 1912 issue, told the story of a barber who almost killed one of his patrons, a Southern white colonel, when he understood him to be his father’s killer. The sight of his daughter’s doll dissuaded him from doing so. It is a dark tale, with none of the humor of Chesnutt’s earlier short stories and more akin to his Marrow of Tradition (1901).

39Jim Crow laws and racial violence are denounced in the images published in The Crisis. Thus for instance, in the magazine’s “Funny Page” of March 1918, Lorenzo Harris depicts two robust men personifying “lynch laws” and “discrimination” (Image 1). The men hold up the Constitution, showing it to a third man, all the while laughing at the 14^th and 15^th Amendments, which, to them, are merely “funny page[s].” The personification of the “lynch laws” and “discrimination” as two men, mocking the Civil War amendments, represents the problem to be addressed, one underlined in the 1909 platform that led to the creation of the NAACP, namely that the Civil War amendments did not apply to part of the population. This political cartoon names and shames the Jim Crow laws that were enforced in the South between 1876 and 1964.xxix It symbolizes the white supremacist scorn for the Constitution that translated into unpunished lynching of African Americans (alluded to in the blood dripping from the hands of the man on the left). In the same issue, a cover photograph by C. M. Battey represents a well-dressed middle-class woman, while, in the “Men of the Month” column, a portrait of popular athlete Paul G. Robeson (230) and another of the multi-generational family of successful writer of black history and activist Dr. I. Garland Penn (231) demonstrate, by contrast, the achievements of African Americans.xxx Four drawings of white philanthropists on the next page (232), R. J. Coady, R. E. Jones, J. C. Frund (founder of the magazine Musical America) and reformer Emily Bigelow Hapgood, also offset white supremacist discourse, a point underlined in the accompanying text:

41A political cartoon by Jackson (Image 2) in the February 1915 issue (197) shows, in the foreground, a tree from which hangs part of a rope that was obviously used to lynch a man, whose remains are visible in the fire pit in which he was burnt. To the right, one of the victims’ arms lies on the ground, a chain hanging from the wrist suggesting both the chains of slavery and the race of the victim. These provide the reader with an explicit idea of what the victim had to endure. In the background, under a pale moon and a threatening sky, the crowd have already turned their backs on their crime and set off for other punitive raids. With scathing irony, the first two lines of the American national anthem are given by way of caption (“O say, can you see by the Dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed at the Twilight’s last gleaming!”). The cartoon illustrates an article on lynching, “The Lynching Industry” (196-98), which includes the name and the number of victims for 1914, as well as lynching statistics for the years 1885-1914. This is followed by “A Pile of Books” (198-200), in which new publications are listed, including works of history on a variety of topics, from the Haitian Revolution to the “American-Japanese problem” and “Negro Culture in South Africa.” A book of poetry by French-speaking creole poet Leon Laviaux, “Ebon Muse and other Poems,” “Englished by John Myers O’Hara” is also mentioned. About Laviaux, the reviewer writes that, “to-day a man of Negro blood is recognized as being the foremost critic and expositor of American poetry.” Such juxtaposition of horrific news and of more affirmative depictions of black culture and artistic abilities was certainly intended to shock the readers and to make them respond to the constant disparaging and persecution of the black population, either by recognizing “the precarious position occupied by African Americans, and perhaps even encourag[ing] involvement in NAACP campaigns for Reform” (Farebrother 106).xxxiThe Crisis consistently denounced lynching and the October 1919 issue was devoted to this question. In that number too, there is an association of very different images. Pictures of beautiful babies contrast with the surrounding texts describing or condemning lynching. Again, this proximity—juxtaposing innocence and crime—created discomfort and aimed firstly to shock the (black and white) readership, and secondly to encourage them to think and then react.

42While The Crisis clearly censured such crimes, it also constantly promoted more affirmative visions, including a new image of the African American family. The unsigned illustration published in August 1920 (Image 3) depicts a black family in their living room. The furniture is elegant and the atmosphere appears quite cozy. All members of the family are well-dressed and stylish. Both parents are reading newspapers, a possible sign of middle-class status and a reminder that the opportunity to read was a privilege then.xxxiiThe Crisis encouraged families to read because, since the days of Frederick Douglass, literacy had been linked to emancipation. The press also served to inform readers of the state of domestic and foreign affairs. In the illustration, children are chatting under the gaze of their parents. The scene conveys an idea of middle-class respectability. This cartoon depicts the adherence to the social model of the nuclear family living in grace and comfort. This image of the middle class can be explained by the wealthy Blacks’ wish to emulate the model imposed by the norms of the dominant white group. Indeed, at the time still, the black elite would distinguish itself from other African Americans not so much by the conspicuous materialism growing in white America, but by their genteel behavior, together with the adherence to the codes of Victorian America, including respectability, character, and reason (Mullins; Summers 8). This promotion of the American middle-class codes, however, came with the concomitant resistance against a racist consumer and cultural space (Mullins). This comes across once more in an advertisement in the May 1921 issue for the National Capital Code of Etiquette, Combined with Short Stories for Black People (by Edward S. Green and Silas X. Floyd, respectively—the authors are not mentioned in the ad). The etiquette book is said to be about “prominent Washington colored Society leaders” (The Crisis May 1921, 34), as evidenced by a small photograph of well-dressed African Americans enjoying a fancy dinner, reflecting once more the focus on “lifting the race.”xxxiii The short stories included in the same book, reflect a similar uplift, through literature in this case. At the same time, however, the etiquette manual is described as “A book that will help the most prominent member of society or the most humble,” while the short stories are “for the Young and Old” as well as for “Father, Mother, or the Children,” reminding readers that, no matter their social class or their age, they all shared a common racial identity.

44All these illustrations clearly reveal Du Bois’s intention to bring together the black community around the same cause, namely civil rights. In order to do so, he believed, they needed to be educated through articles, pictures, cartoons, and literature provided by The Crisis. The work of African American artists and writers developed “cultural consumption [as] an antiracism strategy that challenge[d] the marginalization of Blacks as a whole” (Banks 73). According to Du Bois, the artistic field was one of the areas of struggle for African Americans. He also argued that “these artists embodied [his] ideal of Talented Tenth” (Kirschke 33). Through their work, they helped The Crisis to shape African American memory and identity.xxxiv