Crisis, The

in full The Crisis: A Record Of The Darker Races,

The cover of the first issue of The Crisis, 1910
UPI/Corbis-Bettmann

American monthly magazine published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was founded in 1910 and, for its first 24 years, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois; by the end of its first decade it had achieved a monthly circulation of 100,000 copies. In its pages, Du Bois displayed the evolution of his thought from his early, hopeful insistence on racial justice to his resigned call for black separatism.

The Crisis was an important medium for the young black writers of the Harlem Renaissance, especially from 1919 to 1926, when Jessie Redmon Fauset was its literary editor. The writers she discovered or encouraged included the poets Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen and the novelist-poet Jean Toomer. Under Fauset's literary guidance The Crisis, along with the magazine Opportunity, was the leading publisher of young black authors. After Fauset's departure The Crisis was unable to sustain its high literary standards.