Shedding Light on Black Culture

Many people try to do things represent black culture in different ways especially in the 1900’s. Du Bois was one of those who represented black culture by  putting certain things in the articles like New York Times or New York post etc to shed light on equal rights.  As stated in the article “Founding the Crisis is a turning point in Du Bois’s career, and the time he spent building it financially influences his ideas about how best to represent race in popular culture.” Du Bois wanted to expose racial injustice and how different colored people were treated compared to others.

Shining light on black culture in that time and age was unique because before that in the late 1800’s they were lynchings of blacks, and still segregation in certain places. “The Crisis, emerged with the conscious desire to reshape the style, size, and color of commercial periodicals as well as the implicit race of the people who read and wrote them.” The Crisis has impacted the way magazines are made today because of the way it effected people back then.

The Crisis was unique back then because before that blacks really didn’t have a voice and with the Crisis magazine it was a way to express themselves. Also giving blacks a platform to show not just people in the community but people all over the world their culture and the racial inequality that was going on. Problems that African Americans were going through that were included in the Crisis magazine was Women rights, violence, education and racial discrimination. “The problem is not that the political crisis is over that somehow racial inequality was abolished in the first fifteen years of the magazine’s life but that the crisis of black print culture has evolved.” Due to the Crisis shedding light on the problems African Americans face it contributed to the abolishing of racial inequality.

Not only was the Crisis magazine used to show the black culture and what they were going through, it was also used as a documentation of black culture back then. To elaborate on that, the Crisis magazine is like records of black history because it shows what was going on in that time period. I feel that the Crisis magazine has an impact on us today because newspaper articles and magazines include the daily news or gossip of what is going now which the Crisis magazine did back in the 1900’s. I like how the magazine helped unite African Americans because after the magazine was published we finally felt like we could voice our opinions and fight for our rights without being punished.

“The Crisis played an integral but often over- looked part in the history of the big magazines, as its innovative methods for representing race and racialized intellectual work so successfully set a pattern for African American print culture.” it is clear that the magazine was created to shed light on black cultures and African Americans post slavery in the 1900’s which has impacted the way magazines are made today.