editor. The Crisis first published Hughes’s signa-
ture poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Other
well-established and prominent writers, including
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, the author of THE AUTO-
BIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLORED MAN, and WALTER
WHITE, the author of Fire and Flint (1924) and
Flight (1926), served on its editorial board. Both
Johnson and White served as executive secretaries
of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People.
Equally important, in 1924 The Crisis estab-
lished the Amy Spingarn Prizes in Literature and
Art. While judges of this award included the novel-
ist CHARLES CHESNUTT, author of THE MARROW OF
TRADITIONS and House behind the Cedar, recipients
included Hughes, ARNA BONTEMPS and RUDOLPH
FISHER. Renaissance writers and poets Hughes,
COUNTEE CULLEN, Georgia Douglass, JEAN TOOMER,
Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and many others published
their early works in The Crisis. Finally, the leaders
of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People provided a venue for young
black writers to meet important New Yorkers with
influence in the publishing world, including Carl
Van Vechten and Sinclair Lewis, by hosting social
events and parties in their fashionable Harlem
apartment. In sum, early on in the 20th century,
the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People, paved the way, particularly
through The Crisis, for African-American litera-
ture and culture to gain respectability, viability
and value in the American mainstream.
Some renewal for the NAACP as the oldest civil
rights organization for equality came with the
passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In the years
that followed, the NAACP confronted systemic
discrimination, media stereotypes, and the unfair
application of the death penalty in particular. The
NAACP continues its search for revitalization, new
direction, and effective leadership to resolve the
problems of black America.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Harlan, Louis T., and Raymond W. Smock, ed. The
Booker T. Washington Papers. Vol. 12: 1912–14. Ur-
bana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.
Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom. New York:
Little, Brown, 1994.
Salzman, Jack, ed. “National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People.” In The Afri-
can-American Experience, 479–493. New York:
MacMillan, 1993.
Smith, Jessie C., and Joseph M. Palmisanoe, eds. The
African-American Almanac. 8th ed. Detroit: Gale
Group, 2000.
France A. DavisNative Son Richard Wright (1940)
Richard Wright’s first and greatest novel features
Bigger Thomas, an intelligent, courageous, and
defiant African-American youth living in the tene-
ments of Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s. Big-
ger Thomas is not only the best-known black male
protagonist of the African-American literary tradi-
tion but also its most villainous. A black boy born
in the South, in Mississippi, and reared during his
teenage years on Chicago’s South Side, the literary
symbol of the urban ghetto during and after the
Great Depression, Bigger cannot escape his fate.
This remains true even though Bigger’s name sug-
gests that he will never be as obsequious as his pre-
decessor, the passive Uncle Tom (see SAMBO AND
UNCLE TOM) created by Harriet B. Stowe in her
American classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854).
The novel’s three sections, “Fear,” “Flight,” and
“Fate,” encompass Bigger’s life and experiences.
Marginalized in the segregated world of the rat-in-
fested urban slum where he shares a one-bedroom
apartment with his mother, brother, and sister,
Bigger lives in fear of crossing the visible and in-
visible social lines in the larger world in which he
lives. Stepping out of his apartment building, he is
prophetically reminded of his assigned status and
place by a billboard featuring the penetrating gaze
of the local attorney general who, inevitably, will
indict Bigger for murder, sending him to his fate:
the electric chair:The poster showed one of those faces that
looked straight at you when you looked at it
and all the while you were walking and turning
your head to look at it it kept looking unblink-
ingly back at you until you got far from it you
had to take your eyes away, and then it stopped,384 Native Son