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The Crisis : A Record of the Darker Races. Vol. 68, No. 1 - Whole Number 579.
New York: NAACP / The Crisis Publishing Company, Inc., January 1961. Sm 8vo (7.625” x 5.25”), illustrated wrappers. 3–62 pp., b&w illus. throughout. Address label of “Eldred Day” in Lawrence, Kansas, affixed at back wrapper. CONDITION: Very good, dampstain along spine, as well as top of rear wrapper, 1” closed tear at top left corner of rear wrapper. This issue of The Crisis includes two in-depth articles: “Why Nixon Lost the Negro Vote,” by Gloster B. Current, and the “Second Battle of New Orleans”—offering “A sketch of the four little girls involved in the New Orleans integration fight”—by Clarence A. Laws, NAACP field secretary. Laws’ article describes the academic interests and progress of Ruby Nell Bridges, as well as “T…,” “G…,” and “L…,” whose name were not released, due to intimidation and violence. Regular features include “Looking and Listening. . .,” “Along the N.A.A.C.P. Battlefront,” “What the Branches Are Doing,” “College News,” and “book Reviews.” The cover illustration—tying in nicely with the article on six-year-old Ruby Nell Bridges and her fellow pathbreaking students—shows four adorable young girls, posing for the camera in their pretty dresses: “This quartet of junior models participated in the Sag Harbor, N. Y., NAACP benefit that cleared $500 to support student ‘sit-ins.’” The Crisis, now the longest-running Black-oriented publication in the world, was founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois as the official publication of the NAACP. Its name was adapted from James Russell Lowell’s Civil War poem The Present Crisis, and, though it was primarily conceived to address political and social news, it also became an important literary forum. Especially during the literary editorship of Jessie Redmon Fauset between 1918 and 1926, The Crisis served as a literary incubator for the Harlem Renaissance, publishing early work by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. As “A mirror for and to black America,” The Crisis spurred Black art, education, and civil rights, and “inspired a black intelligentsia” (Holt). REFERENCES: Holt, Thomas C. “Du Bois, W. E. B.,” African American National Biography, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (New York: Oxford UP, 2008), online at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.
Item #10318
Price: $175.00
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