Du Bois and the Challenge of the Black Press by David Levering Lewis, Ph.D.
The Crisis, July 1997

In the startup issue of November 1910, the editor announced the purpose of the fledgling NAACP's journal of opinion with a characteristic blend of vision, urgency, and precision. Calling his creation The Crisis, after a popular poem of the day by James Russell Lowell, W.E.B. Du Bois marked the moment of debut as "a critical time in the history of the advancement of men." The magazine was to be first and foremost a newspaper, he said. Secondly, it would serve as a review of opinion and literature. Thirdly, it would publish short articles. "Finally," the editorial page would stand "for the rights of men, irrespective of color or race," he declared, "for the highest ideals of American democracy, and for reasonable but earnest and persistent attempts to gain these rights and realize these ideals." The tone, during his twenty-four years at the helm, was stern, militant, and the agenda was one of human rights advanced through education, politics, and economic justice.

The Crisis was heir to a tradition of advocacy journalism that descended from Freedom's Journal, the first newspaper published by Africans in North America, through the Liberator of William Lloyd Garrison and the North Star of Frederick Douglass, to the New York Globe of T. Thomas Fortune, the brilliant, beleaguered idol of Du Bois' youth. Du Bois had sharpened his editorial pen to a fine edge against the whetstones of The Moon and Horizon, short-lived magazine efforts in the years immediately preceding The Crisis. Subtitled A Record of the Darker Races, The Crisis appeared at the ideal "psychological moment," the editor wrote later. "Its success was phenomenal." And phenomenal it was, with circulation rising from several thousand monthly to 50,000 by 1917, peaking finally at slightly more than 100,000 in 1919, a bonanza figure that placed the magazine well ahead of the new New Republic and The Nation. The range of subjects was almost always impressive, and, often enough, dazzling: Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas on racial typology; African influences in the ancient world; the rise of Japan; organized labor; Pan Africa; Intermarriage; "Men of the Month". In the early issues, the rights of women were at the forefront, complementing editorials and articles on voting rights, equal education , housing and jobs, and the "lynching industry," along with the myriad large and petty indignities daily faced by people of color.

Chronic indignation was the signature of The Crisis. J. Max Barber's Voice of the Negro in Atlanta had been courageous until the white South forced the editor to flee. William Monroe Trotter's Guardian continued to be as reckless as it was principled . Du Bois was all these. No slight was too minor, no precedent too hoary, no rationale for government policy or social code based on skin color too entrenched to escape Du Boisian irony, rage, or, as the case warranted, logical refutation that was unusually clear and unequivocal. It was a unique advantage (but also, in later years, increasingly problematic) that the official organ of the NAACP was in reality the ray of its editor's worldview, a journal of Du Bois' opinion. Lecturing his fellow board members as sternly as his readers, he declare, "The function of this association [NAACP] is to tell the nation the crying evil of race prejudice." It was a hard duty, he added, "but a necessary one--a divine one."

When board members, others in the black leadership community, or genteel readers and influential white allies were made squeamish or downright alarmed by acid criticisms of the level of education of black preachers or of the nepotism and parochialism prevailing in black colleges, Du Bois reminded them of the therapeutic value of controversy. "Agitation is necessary evil to tell of the ills of the suffering," a famous editorial proclaimed, analogizing the function to a toothache. "Pain is necessary, " he liked to say. But when Du Bois attacked the black press as an institution, consternation was widespread. Deploring its low brow content and plain bad grammar (the Washington Bee and Richmond Planet were major malefactors, he said), the editor challenged African-American newspapers to report on more serious social matters than weddings and murders.

The ensuing firestorm, in which the Planet called on readers to ignore the "professional bookworm" and the Bookerite New York Age gloated that Du Bois had seriously damaged his credibility, rattled the NAACP so badly that the membership voted a placatory resolution praising the Negro press at its annual convention in summer 1914. Then, as today, the press (whatever its ethnic anchor) seems to have been practiced in self-exoneration and generous to a fault about its own faults as it oscillated between blaming the messenger and obfuscating the message. In the main, Du Bois may have been more right than not-not only about the black press, but also the clergy and the colleges. He believed passionately in the high obligation of advocacy journalism to challenge, educate, expose, and prescribe. Taking himself to be the senior spokesperson of this race ( a widely conceded conceit), The Crisis editor repeatedly pushed controversy to the limit almost as much from a sense of professional obligation as conviction. When he transgressed the limit with "Segregation" and "Separation and Self-Respect" and other explosive editorials espousing the development of African-American political and economic institutions along lines separate and apart from the American mainstream, the integrationist association that he had cofounded finally bridled. His editorial for January 1934 insisted that the "race-conscious black man cooperating together in his own institutions and movements...will eventually emancipate the colored race." Understandably alarmed when southern congressmen approvingly entered Du Bois' editorials into the Congressional Record in order to justify a racial wage differential under the New Deal's National Recovery Act, the board of directors demanded either silence or departure.

Whatever the merits of these Du Boisian thinkpieces as realistic responses to Depression-era hardships, they had a remarkable impact throughout much of Black America upon the quality of civil rights discourse. His resignation from the NAACP engendered a swirl of articles and correspondence lasting the summer of 1934 about formulas that could move the race out of political crisis and economic misery that, when read today, are still impressive for their variety, fervor, breadth, and flashes of originality.

When Du Bois returned to the NAACP ten years later, he lost little time in making it clear that, at age 75, he remained as impervious as ever to political, civil, and economic half-measures, and still as serenely committed to the therapeutic value of controversy. As he himself privately anticipated, however, while the NAACP was pleased to have one of the nation's most respected public intellectuals rejoin the fold, board member were to find themselves increasingly displeased by Du Bois' radical political and economic views. When he was again forced to leave the Association in 1948 because of his enthusiastic public support of Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party, Du Bois was also dropped as columnist from the Chicago Defender. Too hot for Cold War civil rights, he moved firmly into the orbit of the Far Left and onto the margins of the black postwar generation's concerns.

Du Bois' eloquent linking of racism, maldistribution of money, and distortion of knowledge were to be found almost exclusively in the red press after 1950. It was there, ten years before his death, that he served up a judgment about the national media in the Monthly Review that will probably have the prophetic staying power of the classic pronouncement about the problem of the twentieth century. "The organized effort of American industry to usurp government surpasses anything in modern history, " he warned. "From the use of psychology to spread the truth has come the use of organized gathering of news to guide public opinion and then deliberately to mislead it by scientific advertising and propaganda. This has led in our day to suppression of truth, omission of facts, misinterpretation of news, and deliberate falsehood on a wide scale. Mass capitalistic control of books and periodicals,news gathering and distribution, radio, cinema, and television has made the throttling of democracy possible and the distortion of education and failure of justice widespread." Whether or not Du Bois would salute this newest incarnation of the journal of opinion he created eighty-seven years ago would depend, I think, on how well The Crisis pays attention to the economic causes of the "crying evil of race" and how willing it is to give some of its readers a massive Du Boisian toothache.