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Protest and Affirmation: Composite Texts in the Crisis

The Crisis has long been recognized for its instrumentality in the early civil rights struggle and for its promotion of African American literature and the arts, particularly in the 1920s. But I want to suggest that its large cultural presence in the early twentieth century was due, in part, to its multimedia format and its layout, which have drawn scant scholarly attention. From its first issues, the Crisis—founded in 1910 as the monthly publication of the NAACP, with W. E. B. DuBois as editor—featured dynamic conjunctions of written and visual texts. Individual pages are composite texts that mix copy and headlines with photographs, drawings, maps, and graphs, a format that enhanced the coverage of its two most prominent topics: protest against racial injustice and affirmation of the achievements of African Americans. Furthermore, protest and affirmation are often juxtaposed. Regular columns like ‘‘Men of the Month’’ that demonstrate the accomplishments of individuals are often positioned beside articles that record and decry American racism. The resulting pages have an incongruence characteristic of the montage or collage. Art and film theories suggest that the discord among the elements of these forms heightens their effect. In the Crisis, these striking combinations of diverse texts and images are particularly pronounced in the magazine’s first decade. The disjunctions in the Crisis of those years make its critique of American racism and its affirmation of African Americans especially compelling. When DuBois was hired by the newly formed NAACP as its director of publicity and research in the summer of 1910, one of his pri-