1 Du Bois, The Crisis and His Political Program for Racial Equality

Du Bois’s role as editor of The Crisis is central to understanding the connection between art and politics, and between artistic expression and rhetoric in the development of his political program. Du Bois contributed to establishing the magazine in 1910, one year after the founding of the NAACP, and became its only editor after a few years.¹¹ In 24 years of Du Bois’s editorship, the NAACP’s magazine reached a wide circulation, and hosted several articles penned by black and white progressive intellectuals, from social worker and NAACP co-founder Jane Addams to poet and writer Langston Hughes.¹² From the very beginning, Du Bois fought within the NAACP to ensure his editorial autonomy, and his strong personal imprint on the magazine emerges from the very first issue, as he penned The Crisis manifesto. The document clearly stated the moral and political mission of The Crisis and its editor’s, by advocating for

the rights of men, irrespective of color or race, for the highest ideals of American democracy, and for reasonable but earnest and persistent attempt to gain these rights and realize these ideals.¹³

As Daniel Levering Lewis’s biographical work has detailed, The Crisis was mostly shaped as Du Bois’s own personal project, and became a public platform for its editor’s ideas on African-American culture and politics.¹⁴ Du Bois’s stubbornness and provocative arguments often put him at odds with the board of the NAACP, and eventually prompted him to leave the association and the magazine.¹⁵ Specifically, after the market crash of 1929 The Crisis hosted a lengthy debate on Communism, while urging its readers to embrace a “new racial philosophy.”¹⁶ In 1934, Du Bois was in open conflict with the association, and—in an extreme attempt to raise a discussion within the ranks of the NAACP—he publicly advocated for auto-segregation as the only feasible way to both preserve the dignity of black culture and safeguard the African Americans’ economic interest during the Great Depression.¹⁷ However, until he started questioning the association’s political strategy in the second half of the 1920s, Du Bois’s outlook was mostly similar to the NAACP’s, and it included unconditional opposition to racial separation and a strong commitment to interracial dialogue and federal intervention. The magazine then became a powerful weapon in putting forward this agenda, but it also retained its editor’s personal take on the matter. For this reason, The Crisis is an essential source to trace the evolution of Du Bois’s thought and examine his ability to adapt his rhetoric and theoretical arguments to the contingencies of the moment.

As he had stated in The Souls of Black Folk, one of Du Bois’s cultural and political dilemmas was to find a way for African Americans both to retain pride in their blackness and to be recognized as full citizens of the United States. “He [the American Negro] would not Africanize America,” Du Bois wrote in 1903,

for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.¹⁸

On one hand, Du Bois’s lifelong commitment to reconcile the aspects of the “double consciousness” resulted in an attempt to redefine the concept of blackness (and of whiteness by contrast), by celebrating black culture and constructing a nationwide, positive, and unifying black identity. On the other, it meant exposing racial prejudice—and its practical consequences—as a powerful tool of social control and domination, and as a means of political exclusion.¹⁹ Until the second half of the 1920s, the cornerstone of Du Bois’s political strategy is explained by the concept of “cosmopolitan patriotism.” Historian Jonathan Hansen has used this expression to describe a heterogeneous group of progressive intellectuals, such as Jane Addams, socialist union leader and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, and Du Bois himself, who tried to push the boundaries of liberalism between 1890 and 1920, by challenging the link between liberalism and laissez-faire theories about economics and social regulation. During this period, social reform was widely discussed, and it was ultimately made possible through the growth of the role of the federal government.²⁰ This was also a moment when the concepts of whiteness and citizenship were under revision. The arrival of millions of migrants from southern and eastern Europe pushed the boundaries of what being “white” meant, but ultimately prompted a series of immigration reforms, which employed a quota system based on ethnic and racial hierarchies.²¹ In the 1920s, Du Bois was increasingly influenced by these changes, as well as by the lack of recognition reserved to black troops who fought in World War I, and by the absence of federal commitment to racial equality. The latter aspect was especially reflected in the never-ending stalling of the anti-lynching bill in Congress, despite the numerous campaigns launched by the NAACP and other activists in favor of its passage.²²

Even though it started to diminish after World War I, Du Bois’s commitment to cosmopolitan patriotism is visible at least until 1925, and is traceable through his writings in The Crisis. As a cosmopolitan patriot, Du Bois celebrated “individual autonomy and cultural diversity,” while exhorting “Americans to embrace a social-democratic ethic that reflected the interconnected and mutually dependent nature of life in the modern world.” Firmly believing that “Americans could best secure the blessings of liberty and property by ensuring their universal distribution,” Du Bois openly advocated for federal support to public education, as well as federal intervention against racial segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching.²³ However, as much as Du Bois believed in the right to equal opportunity and universal access to citizenship, for example by supporting the women’s right to vote, he was—very practically—aware that a broad political alliance was needed in order to push the federal government to take a stand in favor of African Americans. During the 1910s and 1920s, the majority of African Americans held no political power where segregation was institutional, a situation only slightly improved by the increasing numbers of African Americans living in northern cities during the Great Migration.²⁴ Hence, Du Bois used his editorship of The Crisis to build an interracial dialogue on political and civil rights, and to construct a wider political alliance, composed of other discriminated groups and northern liberal whites. In order to achieve this goal, he employed an elaborate rhetoric, which encompassed a variety of political and social issues—like distribution of taxation and Congress representation—and linked them directly with the fight against racial prejudice.

2 Black Artistic Expression as a Multilayered Political Discourse

In the context of Du Bois’s editorship of The Crisis, artistic representation of black subjects emerges as instrumental to his political program for racial equality. At a time when African Americans were rarely featured in mainstream magazines—and when they were it was often in racist terms—promoting a black art was more than just a way to build a strong cultural identity for African Americans.²⁵ In Du Bois’s view, reaffirming the dignity of African Americans as artistic subjects was also a powerful political weapon. It was a means to reinforce their public image as both citizens and individuals in the eyes of the American nation, while directly challenging the power relationship implicated by the concepts of blackness and whiteness regarding access to citizenship. Through The Crisis, artistic expression was theorized and employed to dignify the image of African Americans as humans, and their contribution to society and history.

During this period, Du Bois’s belief in the political significance of art and his commitment to interracial dialogue is well represented by his pageant The Star of Ethiopia. Written between 1911 and 1913, The Star of Ethiopia debuted at the New York Emancipation Exposition, set to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Even though staged only four times between 1913 and 1923, the pageant was widely publicized in The Crisis, and Du Bois used it to explain his views about the political role of art. Written with the purpose of celebrating “the gifts of black men to this world,”²⁶ The Star of Ethiopia implicitly expressed “Du Bois’s concept of art as propaganda—that is, an art conveying a message of racial uplifting and equality.”²⁷ The dual and equally important cultural and political role artistic expression occupied in Du Bois’s thought is summarized in a 1916 article in The Crisis titled “The Drama among Black Folk.” In this text, Du Bois referred to The Star of Ethiopia as a demonstration that “pageantry among colored people is not only possible, but in many ways of unsurpassed beauty and can be made a means of uplift and education … .”²⁸

On one hand, Du Bois thought that The Star of Ethiopia showed his commitment to the development of an authentic black art, consecrated to an original ideal of “beauty” not conforming to white standards. On the other, by showing that people of African descent could be both artists and artistic subjects, as well as agents—and not merely objects—of history, The Star of Ethiopia was bound to reinstate the African Americans’ role in Western civilization and, thus, to legitimate their claims to equal citizenship. On this last matter, the people who needed to be “educated” were the white readers of The Crisis.

“We should set the black man before the world as both a creative artist and a strong subject for artistic treatment,” Du Bois wrote in an article in The Crisis titled “The Immediate Program of the American Negro,” as he listed artistic development alongside the fight for political and civil rights.²⁹ The editor also emphasized the need to “bring into closer contact and mutual knowledge the white and black people of this land” and, thus, to fight prejudice with direct knowledge.³⁰ It is no coincidence that this piece was published in 1915, only a few months after D. W. Griffith’s transposition of Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman was released, prompting the Ku Klux Klan to be refounded in its wake. Set during the Civil War and Reconstruction, The Birth of a Nation highly glamourized the KKK, and it featured actors in blackface who played the African-American characters.³¹ Most of all, the movie reiterated the widely accepted idea that Reconstruction represented “a tragic time when white Southern rights were compromised by a corrupt and overbearing federal government supported by the votes of African Americans who were ignorant and easily manipulated.”³² The NAACP launched a boycott campaign against the movie, but The Birth of a Nation was a huge cinematic success and was the first full-length movie to be screened at the White House.³³ In this context, if art and literature painted a multifaceted image of African-American society and culture, Du Bois thought, they also served as a means to strengthen an interracial alliance and advance the cause of civil rights.

3 Defying Stereotypes through a Black Public Image: The Political Link between Art and Rhetoric

Du Bois’s interpretation of art as a multilayered discourse is directly reflected in his elaborate use of rhetoric to describe African Americans as fit for citizenship and reclaim their space in the history of the modern nation. This is evident in Du Bois’s non-fiction writings, and especially in his historical studies on the Reconstruction period. Du Bois’s first contribution on Reconstruction was published in the American Historical Review in 1911, after being presented as a paper in 1909. In this article, titled “Reconstruction and its Benefits,” Du Bois stressed the positive influence freedmen had on Southern administrations before Jim Crow laws were passed. In particular, Du Bois’s article stated that:

We may recognize three things which negro rule gave to the South:

1. Democratic government.

2. Free public schools.

3. New social legislation.³⁴

As this passage suggests, Du Bois’s analysis of Reconstruction provided several arguments in favor of his political program for racial equality. It stated the African Americans’ fitness for citizenship, rectified their role in US history, and demonstrated the positive impact a direct federal intervention could have in guaranteeing equal rights for African Americans. As we have seen, Du Bois’s studies challenged the mainstream narration about Reconstruction, which provided cultural and political legitimacy for White Supremacy. Since Du Bois meant to widen the support for civil rights along the color line, Reconstruction became a recurring theme in his writings in The Crisis.³⁵

That Du Bois was committed to constructing a positive black public image, necessary to engage an interracial audience, emerges clearly also if we look at the issue of racial responsibility. Through his editorship of The Crisis, Du Bois used the concept of racial responsibility to inspire his African-American readers to undertake the task of “uplifting the race,” while at the same time assessing their dignity as individuals. As he had stated in his 1903 article on the “Talented Tenth,” Du Bois sustained the need to develop an African-American elite to lead the fight for racial equality, and The Crisis reflected this idea.³⁶ The magazine hosted a page entirely dedicated to the “Talented Tenth,” and achievements by African-American citizens were celebrated as accomplishments and sources of inspiration for the entire racial group.³⁷ As we have seen before, Du Bois referred to The Star of Ethiopia, and to artistic expression in general, in the same terms. As historian Kevin Gaines has noted, this was part of Du Bois’s struggle to reconcile citizenship with blackness and “to transform a pejorative concept of race into an affirming vision of cultural distinctiveness.”³⁸

However, the notion of racial responsibility had also been historically problematic, since it was used in the public discourse to support negative stereotypes about African Americans. The concept was deeply entangled with pseudo-scientific theories about the biological inferiority of non-white racial groups, their tendency for abnormal behavior, and their unfitness for citizenship.³⁹ In this context, Du Bois did not dismiss the notion of racial responsibility altogether, but he challenged its negative outcomes.⁴⁰ The magazine featured several articles on this topic, and presented scientific evidence to dispute the existence of racial hierarchies.⁴¹ Du Bois also made extensive use of visual references to stress his point. A notable example is a cartoon drawn by the African-American artist Lorenzo Harris and picked by Du Bois for the June 1913 issue. In the picture, titled American Logic, one finely dressed white man stands next to a “rough-looking white hoodlum.”⁴² On the left, two black men stand next to each other, mirroring the two white men on the other side of the picture. The caption below the two whites reads: “THIS MAN [referring to the finely-dressed man] is not responsible for THIS MAN even if they do belong to the same race.” By contrast, the caption below the two black figures says: “THIS MAN is responsible for all that THIS MAN does because they belong to the same race.”⁴³

In order to capture the attention of his white audience, mainly based in the North, Du Bois did not limit himself to criticizing stereotypes about African Americans, but he designed some of his own. In opposition to the vilified honest black citizen, Du Bois placed the trope of the unlawful white citizen of the South, and thus challenged the link between whiteness and fitness for citizenship. In many of his writings for The Crisis, he confronted racial segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans by describing white Southern citizens and their state administrations as corrupt and disrespectful of the law.⁴⁴ This was the case with a series of articles written between 1911 and 1920, in which Du Bois challenged the widespread idea that white taxpayers’ money funded schools and services for African Americans. In order to prove his point, Du Bois published data showing irregularities in how tax expenditures were calculated, thus invalidating the economic argument used by state and county administrations to justify poor quality services for African Americans in the South.⁴⁵ In some cases, Du Bois sustained that African-American taxpayers were the ones who funded the same schools and facilities they were barred from attending, because of Jim Crow legislation.⁴⁶

The pejorative stereotype about white Southern citizens was employed at length in Du Bois’s editorials on lynching as well as in his writings about disfranchisement. In particular, Du Bois’s rhetoric about white Southern citizens and administrations portrayed the segregated South as a threat to the whole democratic system of the United States. Du Bois argued that since the distribution of representatives per state was calculated according to the total number of citizens, the disfranchisement of African Americans allowed white Southern voters to proportionally elect more representatives than the average per citizen. He often gave detailed accounts on how this disproportion affected the balance of power on the federal level.⁴⁷ On the other hand, Du Bois argued, the de facto one-party system in the South affected the balance of power in the Senate, because white Southern Democrats were certain to be elected and most of them were able to hold office for more terms than the average congressional representative.⁴⁸ This argument was presented to appeal to a wider interracial audience, and thus to cement an alliance between African-American citizens and white northern citizens in favor of federal intervention.

The campaign Du Bois conducted at the end of the 1910s in support of women’s suffrage represents another fundamental example of how he made use of his rhetorical skills to construct a wide political alliance. Du Bois, as many scholars have confirmed, genuinely supported votes for women as part of a cosmopolitan democratic project “which knows no race or sex.”⁴⁹ In his articles in The Crisis, however, Du Bois’s arguments in favor of women’s suffrage also served as a means to attract support for civil and political rights for African Americans. Firstly, Du Bois tried to unite the supporters of the two causes by comparing women’s struggle for suffrage to the struggle against the disfranchisement of African Americans.⁵⁰ Secondly, he tried to convince his African-American readers that their backing of women’s suffrage could reopen the “discussion of the right of black folk to vote in America,” and implicated that their public image could benefit from their support for women’s right to vote.⁵¹ Finally, Du Bois used the trope of the undemocratic and unlawful Southern state administrations both to associate the two causes and to stress the need for federal intervention. These rhetorical connections are summarized in the October 1920 editorial of The Crisis, published to celebrate the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment. “Who oppose Woman Suffrage?” Du Bois asked his readers, before concluding:

With but few exceptions those states which oppose … universal education; those which advocate and practice lynching, mob violence and government by minority. These states are:

Alabama Virginia

Georgia Maryland

Mississippi Delaware

South Carolina North Carolina

Louisiana.⁵²

After the victory represented by women’s suffrage, Du Bois initially hoped that, if the federal sphere could successfully challenge the link between masculinity and citizenship, it could also intervene in favor of African Americans. It became increasingly clear that this was not the case, and Du Bois’s commitment to cosmopolitan patriotism faltered. Du Bois’s uncertainty was deeply influenced by a profound change of public opinion about social reform and citizenship, a shift that started after World War I. The Progressive Era had brought an array of reform possibilities and “economic, social and political regulations [were] adopted, new public services were offered, and the management of national resources expanded.”⁵³ After the Russian Revolution, with the surge in nationalism due to the war and the return of black troops, the United States faced a period of sharp social and political conflicts, against “the Reds,” foreigners, and African Americans. This political unrest influenced federal legislation during the 1920s, e.g., immigration restriction, and had immediate violent consequences, such as the race riots of the “Red Summer” of 1919.⁵⁴ In 1918, Du Bois had sustained that the support of African Americans for the war would have been essential to their recognition as citizens.⁵⁵ For these declarations, he had already faced severe backlash within the African-American community.⁵⁶ When, after the war, the results he expected did not materialize, Du Bois had to confront his own disappointment. As the immigration quota system of 1924 paved the way to the future inclusion of European migrants as white citizens, the shifting concept of whiteness continued to be associated with citizenship and defined in opposition to African Americans.⁵⁷ By the second half of the decade, the enduring Jim Crow system, the Congressional halt to the anti-lynching bill, and the increase in cases of school segregation in the North made it increasingly clear to Du Bois that he but also the NAACP needed to change their strategy, and rethink the connection between citizenship, identity, and the public image of African Americans.⁵⁸

4 Forging a New Political Alliance through Artistic Expression: Du Bois’s Criteria of Negro Art

As Du Bois looked for a new political strategy, his ideas about artistic expression as a way to bridge the gap between black and white Americans changed as well. This emerges clearly if we look at his rhetoric about art as propaganda. As Daria Frezza has noted, the war boosted the debate about the negative use of propaganda by enemy forces. After the end of the conflict, propaganda was discussed in popular magazines, and the word “came to have a substantially negative meaning that included the diffusion of false and misleading news, similar to the appeals put out by the enemy powers.”⁵⁹ In 1921, Du Bois confronted the topic head-on, and penned an editorial with the purpose of distancing African-American artistic expression from a pejorative notion of propaganda. “Negro art is today plowing a difficult row,” Du Bois wrote,

chiefly because we shrink at the portrayal of the truth about ourselves. We are so used to seeing the truth distorted to our despite, that whenever we are portrayed on canvas, in story or on the stage, as simply human with human frailties, we rebel. We want everything that is said about us to tell of the best and highest and noblest in us. We insist that our Art and Propaganda be one. This is wrong and in the end it is harmful. We have a right, in our effort to get just treatment, to insist that we produce something of the best in human character and that it is unfair to judge us by our criminals and prostitutes. This is justifiable propaganda. On the other hand we face the Truth of Art. We have criminals and prostitutes, ignorant and debased elements just as all folk have. When the artist paints us he has a right to paint us whole and not ignore everything which is not as perfect as we would wish it to be.⁶⁰

In this editorial, Du Bois tried to distinguish between a “positive” propaganda, that is a truthful portrayal of African-American society, and a “negative” propaganda, which was harmful, because it was partial and misleading. Even though there was a first attempt to reconceptualize the word “propaganda,” the tone of the article profoundly differs from “Criteria of Negro Art.” By advocating for a realistic and diverse representation of African-American society, Du Bois was still tied to the ideas he expressed in The Immediate Program of the American Negro, about the need of increasing interracial contacts and improving the dialogue between the two races.

Notwithstanding Du Bois’s efforts, the use of the word “propaganda” as a pejorative term spilled into the debate about the Harlem Renaissance, and it served as a weapon to discredit a part of the movement. By the mid-1920s, as Watts put it,

Harlem artists who dared to paint images of dignified racial difference were branded as ‘propagandists’ precisely because their stories undermined or indicted (racist) conventional wisdom promoted by ‘pure art.’⁶¹

In this context, it is correct to say that Du Bois’s sharp language and his use of the word “propaganda” in “Criteria of Negro Art” were a direct response to what he perceived to be dangerous drifts of the movement. Specifically, in January 1926 Du Bois warned Alain Locke that his commitment to “a search of disembodied beauty” devoid of political purpose was detrimental to cultural advancement as well as political attainments for African Americans. He added that, if Locke’s thesis was “insisted too much,” it was going to “turn the Negro renaissance into decadence.”⁶² The editor of The Crisis was also critical of the depiction some artists of the Harlem Renaissance gave of African-American neighborhoods, because he thought that they merely confirmed racist prejudices and catered exclusively to a white audience. This issue is evident in the negative reviews Du Bois wrote about Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven in 1926 and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem in 1928.⁶³

Nonetheless, when Du Bois penned “Criteria of Negro Art,” it is highly unlikely that he was unaware of the wider public debate surrounding the word “propaganda” in the 1920s. Even if, as Ross Posnock has argued, Du Bois was trying to change the meaning of the term “propaganda” to get rid of its negative implications, he knew that the language he used to appropriate the word was going to have a shocking effect on his audience. As someone who had always constructed his arguments with care and used elaborate rhetoric to engage in a multilayered discourse about race, citizenship, and identity, it seems simplistic to sustain that Du Bois did not expect to be misunderstood at least by a part of his audience. This was especially true for the ones not directly involved in the debate about the Harlem Renaissance. If we look at an article like “Criteria of Negro Art” from this point of view, his 1926 speech says as much about Du Bois’s position within the Harlem Renaissance as it does about his changing political plan for African Americans and its consequent rhetoric. Until then, Du Bois’s political program included engaging with a wide interracial audience and building a positive public image of African Americans, in order to draw action from the federal government. Even when he advocated for freedom and truth in art, Du Bois did so partly because he hoped that an honest depiction of the daily lives of African Americans could help to tear down racial barriers. As we have seen before, Du Bois had always supported African-American artists, and encouraged them to feature black subjects in their work. Du Bois’s commitment to interracial dialogue never meant that his white audience had a say in what black art should be about. They could, though, participate in its beauty and, through it, improve their understanding of African-American culture and society. Hopefully, this knowledge would foster their support for civil rights.

What changed after 1926 was that, as the political climate shifted, art assumed a different political purpose: forging a pact of political alliance solely among African-American citizens. Just a month after he pronounced his speech, and before its publication as “Criteria of Negro Art,” Du Bois published the manifesto of the Crisis Guild for Writers and Artists (KRIGWA). First founded in 1924, this group called for a new black artistic production catering exclusively to an African-American audience.⁶⁴ Its message excluded, then, the white audience who had been part of the readership of The Crisis and of the NAACP from the founding of the Association. “The plays,” it stated,

must be: 1. About us. That is, they must have plots which reveal Negro life as it is. 2. By us. That is, they must be written by Negro authors who understand from birth and continual association just what it means to be a Negro today. 3. For us. That is, the theatre must cater primarily to Negro audiences and be supported and sustained by their entertainment and approval. 4. Near us. The theatre must be in a Negro neighborhood near the mass of ordinary Negro people.⁶⁵

This detachment from the magazine’s previous editorial policy was increasingly reflected in Du Bois’s writings concerning education, lynching as well as federal elections, and it finally reached a peak in the 1930s, when Du Bois put forward his new political strategy.⁶⁶ As Joy Carew has noted, since the mid-1920s Du Bois increasingly dedicated himself to the study of Marx, and he took his first trip to Soviet Russia in 1926.⁶⁷ The editor gave a positive account of his journey in The Crisis, whereas he had expressed skepticism towards the Russian political experiment in the first half of the 1920s.⁶⁸ “I stand in astonishment and wonder at the revelation of Russia that has come to me,” he stated in his November 1926 editorial:

I may be partially deceived and half-informed. But if what I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik.⁶⁹

Just two years after “Criteria of Negro Art” appeared in The Crisis, Du Bois admitted the failure of his political program in a two-part article titled “The Possibility of Democracy in America,”

For several years after the World War I used to talk concerning the results of the War, and to say that notwithstanding the slaughter and the upheaval that always accompany war we were going to have in the world an extension of democracy as a result of the fighting …. But I write today to apologize and change my thesis. I was wrong in what I was predicting. I see today without any doubt that instead of the great question of democracy being an extension of democratic control into further territory, the problem that faces us in America and faces the world is the question as to whether we can keep the territory which we thought democracy had already conquered; … here in the United States, here where we have essayed the greatest experience in democracy, we have perhaps the greatest failure.⁷⁰

In the same issue of The Crisis, he called for a protest vote in the next federal election.⁷¹ By the turn of the decade, Du Bois’s disenchantment towards a federal strategy was strengthened by the economic crisis, and it became evident as he started advocating for self-help and grew weary of the NAACP, finally leaving his editorial position in 1934.⁷² However, Du Bois’s work for The Crisis reveals that his political position started shifting before the 1930s and that this change is closely linked to Du Bois’s views on artistic production as a means to strengthen the public image of African Americans. From this point of view, the multilateral nature of Du Bois’s rhetoric—carefully adapted by the editor to the contingencies of the moment—opens up many research possibilities about the wider political implications of cultural production in black political thought. Specifically, a focus on the relationship between African-American public intellectuals and their audience, the composition of this audience, and its evolution over time and geographical context can provide useful insights into the public discourse about black identity, citizenship, and representation, especially during the pre-Civil Rights era.