The Front Page

Newspaper front pages and magazine covers offered important spaces of internationalism. The growth of black internationalism during the interwar years in places such as New York’s Harlem, for example, was shaped by the rapid expansion of the black press. In 1923 the National Negro Press Association (NNPA) estimated that there were around 300 black newspapers published in the US, more than double the number that had been recorded four years earlier. New magazines like the NAACP’s The Crisis (est. 1910), The Messenger (est. 1917) and the Urban League’s Opportunity (est. 1923) radically altered the look of America’s newsstands. Through their contents, but most strikingly their front pages, they offered a visual and aesthetic language of internationalism which drew on themes of modernism, Pan-Africanism, and primitivism. For many they offered a lens for interpreting the world as powerful as that of maps or international travel.

Further information:

Website of The Crisis, still published by the NAACP: https://www.thecrisismagazine.com/

Archive of the early issues of The Crisis, from 1910 to 1922: http://www.modjourn.org/render.php?view=mjp_object&id=crisiscollection

Ralph L. Pearson (1977) “Combatting Racism with Art: Charles S. Johnson and the Harlem Renaissance”, American Studies 18(1), 123-134, https://journals.ku.edu/amerstud/article/download/2303/2262/