Sondra Kathryn Wilson, editor
The Crisis Reader.
Modern Library, 422 pages, $14.95
Sondra Kathryn Wilson, editor
The Opportunity Reader.
Modern Library, 538 pages, $14.95
Sondra Kathryn Wilson, editor
The Messenger Reader.
Modern Library, 418 pages, $14.95
For nearly ten years, our Negro [artists] have been “confessing” the distinctive sordidness and triviality of Negro life, and making an exhibition of their own unhealthy imagination, in the name of frankness and sincerity. Frankness is no virtue in itself, however, as any father will tell his son, nor is sincerity. A dog or savage is “sincere” about his bestialities, but he is not therefore raised above them… . If sincerity is to justify one in exploiting the lowest traits of human nature; and in ignoring that sense in man which Cicero says differentiates him from other animals—his sense of what is decent—then sincerity is to pander to a torpid animalism.
William Bennett explaining rap music? Not exactly. The above passage was put to paper by a black scholar and psychologist named Allison Davis, and it appeared in August 1928 in The Crisis: a Record of the Darker Races. This magazine was published during the Harlem Renaissance by the NAACP (although still around, the magazine is no longer relevant), and Davis’s piece is one of the offerings in The Crisis Reader: Stories, Poetry and Essays from the NAACP’s Crisis Magazine . The volume was published last year and has been followed