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New York: NAACP / The Crisis Publishing Company, Inc., February 1961. Sm 8vo (7.75” x 5.375”), illustrated wrappers. 67–126 pp., b&w illus. throughout. CONDITION: Wrappers good, with some wear including 1.5” loss in lower-left corner, contents very good.

This issue of The Crisis includes the article “The Negro as Conscience of America,” by teacher and producer Annetta G. Jefferson; Arthur Spingarn’s twenty-fifth annual review of “Books by Negro Authors,” which in 1960 included No Longer At Ease by Chinua Achebe; E. R. Braithwait’s To Sir, With Love (later turned into a film seven years later, starring Sidney Poitier); a reprint of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, among many others; and “New Challenges to Neighborhoods,” on “How citizens may effectively participate in the neighborhood council movement,” by New Jersey professor and activist Stanley B. Winters. A brief piece on the imprisonment of Father Theodore R. Gibson, in Florida is followed by regular features “Looking and Listening. . .,” “Along the N.A.A.C.P. Battlefront,” “What the Branches Are Doing,” and so on. The cover features a portrait of a young woman in a patterned blouse—Kathleen Briggs of Richmond, Virginia—who “has been active in the Richmond ‘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 #10319

Price: $175.00