DU BOIS, W.E.B. (DuBois), editor

Five issues of the magazine The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races (September 1911; November 1911; December 1911, January 1912; and April 1912)

Five issues (Volume 2, number 5; Volumes 3, numbers 1-3, 5). Quartos. Stapled wrappers. A pretty much uniform dampstain to the bottom edge of each issue, some other modest wear including a couple of tears, but about very good copies. W.E.B. Du Bois arrived in New York City in midsummer of 1910 to assume his position as director of publicity and research of the recently organized NAACP and as editor of the new organization's proposed publication. It was named by Mary White Ovington, one of the co-founders, with Du Bois, of the NAACP, after James Russell Lowell's poem, The Present Crisis. Dr. Du Bois did everything possible to nurture the publication, and made it a powerful vehicle in the crusade for human freedom. The first issue of The Crisis was published November, 1910, as "a record of the darker races." According to Du Bois' autobiography he had printed 1,000 copies of the first issue, and thereafter it went up a thousand a month until by 1918 it reached a circulation of 100,000 (the most recent of the issue present here claim a circulation of 22,500). Du Bois wrote much of the content of the magazine including articles on lynching, the color line, racial congresses, colored women's clubs, columns on "men of the month," and so forth, but these issues also contain photographs, and stories, articles, or poems by Jessie Fauset, William Pickens, Mary W. Ovington, Leslie Pinckney Hill, William Stanley Braithwaite, and Charles W. Chesnutt. Early issues of The Crisis are rare, any accumulation of them more so.

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