A mother and her child

Looking through the covers of The Crisis it is clear that this publication was meant to do at least one thing. The first was reinvention. At the turn of the 20th century, Black Americans saw themselves longing to create a new public image that decentered the stereotypes of the “Sambo” or the “Zip Coon”. Both of which were images of Black people that were cemented into the minds of white society in an attempt to further dehumanize and infantilize Black people in a post-Reconstruction era. Henry Louis Gates in “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black”, talked extensively about the creation of “The New Negro” image that was meant to reclaim the presentation of the Black identity. Once Black people were in control of their own identity then they could manipulate it. And according to Gates, “to manipulate the image of the black was, in a sense, to manipulate reality. The Public Negro Self, therefore, was an entity to be crafted” (137).  This manipulation of reality in a sense was placing Black people into the confines of white respectability. Shifting back to The Crisis covers, W.E.B. Du Bois’ instance on shifting the image of Black people from the “racist caricatures of “ ‘grinning’ Negroes, ‘happy’ Negroes, ‘gold dust twins,’ ‘Aunt Jemimas,’ [and] ‘solid’ headed tacks” (Harris 82), led instead to an overrepresentation of the Black bourgeoisie class that Du Bois wanted the magazine’s readership to aspire to. The covers many of which feature Black scholars, athletes, soldiers, parents, and children alike, were meant to act as the new public representation of Black society. 

 A Black graduate graces the cover of Crisis.

With such an intense focus placed on the visual, it seemed inevitable that “The New Negro” movement would spawn creative and vivid ways of showcasing this new Black identity through music, art, poetry, etc. Du Bois’ vision of “The New Negro” however became a point of contention, especially when assessing who he chose to represent this new ideal of Blackness on the covers of The Crisis magazine. In the article, “Printing the Color Line in The Crisis,” Donal Harris notes how Du Bois’ passion for “aesthetic conservatism” reflected in who he put on the cover, usually higher society, light-skinned, educated women and men (88). It would not be hard to classify this as intentional on Du Bois’ part. A large part of “The New Negro” movement was visual representation and the only way to standardize this new Black image would be to limit and even denounce anything that was representative of “lower-class Harlem life” (88).

 Yet, as a counter to this critique, Du Bois and as a result, The Crisis and its covers were faced with tackling new issues of representation. For years, Black people had been made into caricatures by songs or books. The Crisis, therefore, was in a new position to represent “race in print” by a for Black people (86). Du Bois, through The Crisis covers, wanted to “re-present [African Americans’] public selves” and the most efficient way of doing this was by displaying the Black bourgeois class front and center while tackling the complexities of this within the pages of the magazine (86).