Opportunity and Crisis Magazines

Interesting note #1: Countee Cullen studied at NYU. He won national poetry awards and took the lead in the literary movement when he was still an undergrad here. NYU seems so stuffy now, but we've got a proud history.

To start my research in the Harlem Renaissance and poetry publishing I focused on the two main black magazines from the 1920s, Opportunity and Crisis. Bobst has every volume of each, so I was able to flip through them and find the poetry. Opportunity featured a lot of poetry, and had yearly writing contests that created a lot of excitement and resulted in some great works. Crisis also included poetry, but it was not the main focus of the magazine. So far, I have only looked at Crisis issues from the 1910s, before the “Renaissance” started. At that time, Crisis was unparalleled as a black magazine (Opportunity didn’t start until 1923). In the first couple years, lynching was the main issue for Crisis, and so poetry seemed largely out of place. Some poems about lynching appeared. In general, poems were accompanied by an article about the same topic. The issues generally had one theme (Children, or Education, or Women) so poets probably submitted work to fit that theme. A lot of the poems that appeared were tied to recent events or were elegies for black leaders who had died.

WEB Du Bois was the editor of Crisis. Charles Johnson was the editor of Opportunity. Johnson organized dinners and gatherings of white and black publishers, writers and intellectuals that did wonders for the literary movement, helping people get contracts and form collaborations. Unfortunately, Opportunity did not have enough money to pay its literary contributors, so it was not a means of livelihood for the poets, only a way to broaden their audience and hopefully get a publishing deal. The Messenger was another journal that included poetry, but it had a smaller circulation and was more radical and socialist so it had a smaller impact.

Paul Lawrence Dunbar was the idol and father of the literary movement. He wrote in the late 1800s (died in 1906), and was the first black to achieve national recognition for verse. He was technically gifted but also gained fame through dialect poetry, imitating black speech patterns in a less patronizing way than white poets. James Weldon Johnson was one of the leaders of the early poetry group in the 1910s and 20s. Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes were the darlings of the early 20s, with Arna Bontemps emerging in the late 20s after winning two successive Pushkin competitions by Opportunity Journal.

There was a heated debate over art vs. propaganda: whether poets should focus on beauty and personal expression or keep their eyes on bettering the black race. Some poets wished to honestly portray black life, even if some parts reflected badly on the race. Others, following the “Racial Uplift” philosophy, felt that only positive, shining examples of the race should be represented in art.

I was surprised by how many artists had published volumes of their work in the 1920s. There seemed to be a fair amount of white publishers who recognized a demand for and value in black poetry. The story of Paul Lawrence Dunbar paying for and distributing his own poetry at the turn of the century seems completely outdated by the 20s.

Areas for Further Research

I’d like to look into Southern magazines. Both Crisis and Opportunity were based out of New York. Howard University had a literary magazine (Stylus) that I’ll check out. Since the literary movement in Harlem has been so deeply studied, and the South is often presented as the opposite of culture, as a place to flee from, I would love to find bits of literary society in Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia.


I’d also like to look at some magazines and newspapers that aren’t exclusively black, like Harper’s and the New York Times, to see which black poems they choose to publish and how frequently. I don’t want to scan every issue of the New York Times from the 1920s, however. Perhaps by looking at the publication information in the anthologies by Johnson, Kerlin and Cullen I’ll be able to find the specific issues and go poem by poem. A librarian would be able to help me find copies of the New York Times. I know some are in microfilm, but it would be much quicker and easier to look at them online.

I could also look at black newspapers (not magazines) and see how often poetry appears there. Opportunity featured a yearly ranking of the best black periodicals.