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Goodbye and Good Luck
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Message from the Editor, Victoria L. Valentine...
How time flies. It’s been six years since I was named editor of The Crisis. In the beginning
we didn’t have an office, so for nearly nine months, I worked out of my one-bedroom apartment.
Nonetheless, from day one we hit the ground running, overhauling the focus and content of the
magazine and reinventing its design. Our mission was to appeal not just to NAACP members,
but to the greater civil rights and Black communities as well. We recruited veteran journalists
and respected academics to contribute to the new vision of the magazine.
In my inaugural editor’s note, I said we would examine social and economic issues relevant
to the Black community, while also reporting on our history. Each year we published only six
issues, but we managed to cover a lot of ground toward that end.
During my tenure, we have done a number of special issues, including ones on the state of Black
children, African American health, crime and punishment, the 2004 presidential election, science and
technology, housing, Black-Latino relations and race and sports. We have marked countless anniversaries
— including Brown v. Board of Education, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on
Washington, the L.A. uprising and the Million Man March. We revisited
the work of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Bunche and
Ralph Ellison, among others, and marked the passing of too many, including
Rosa Parks, Gordon Parks and Coretta Scott King.
We examined countless pressing issues of the day, including education
vouchers, Social Security reform, affirmative action, environmental injustice,
gay marriage and immigration. We have reported numerous stories
on AIDS, both in America and abroad, and a number on Sept. 11, 2001,
the genocide in Sudan, Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing war in Iraq.
In an effort to fulfill W.E.B. Du Bois’s mission — standing “for the
rights of men, irrespective of color or race, for the highest ideals of
American democracy” — a lot of our focus has been on voting, elections
and politics. Over the years, we have reported on the reauthorization of the
Voting Rights Act, how President Bush’s federal budgets have impacted African Americans, congressional
redistricting, election reform, voter disenfranchisement and the judicial nomination process.
Similar to Du Bois’s founding era, we have a skeleton staff. There are only three of us here
working full time on the editorial team — me; Lottie Joiner, our senior editor; and Wayne
Fitzpatrick, our creative director. I am very grateful for their hard work and dedication over the
years. In addition, we wouldn’t have been able to succeed without the contributions of researcher
Michael Freeman, copyeditors Kendra Lee and Gregory Mott, and writer Frankie Gamber —
freelancers who, since I arrived, have worked with us on every issue.
Along the way, we have received four awards from the National Association of Black Journalists.
The recognition and positive feedback from readers has let me know that despite some challenges,
we must have been doing something right. In addition, kind words from Pulitzer Prize-winning Du
Bois biographer David Levering Lewis, a professor of history at New York University who serves
on The Crisis board of directors, have kept me going over the years. Lewis recently told me that The
Crisis had been transformed into a “relevant, graphically elegant national journal of opinion. W.E.B.
Du Bois would be pleased.” Overkill, I am sure, very encouraging nonetheless.
It has been an honor to edit The Crisis magazine. I look forward to the next phase of the publication,
with the hope that my successor will continue to move this venerable publication forward.
Letters
to the editor may be sent to
The Crisis
7600 Georgia Avenue, NW
Suite 405
Washington, DC 20012 or
thecrisiseditorial@naacpnet.org
* Letters may be edited for length or clarity.
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