as Sue Jones collapses, and strains from the nearby
church repeat the phrase “Lord have mercy.”
Johnson completed the play in the same year
that she began hosting literary salons in her WASH-
INGTON, D.C., home. The play is one of several
piercing antilynching plays that Johnson wrote dur-
ing her career. A Sunday Morning in the South,like
her other works, underscores the random nature of
racial violence and the particular upheaval that it
wrought in respectable African-American homes.
Johnson’s work contributed much to the systematic
protest of LYNCHING, mob violence, and the KU
KLUXKLANthat continued throughout the Harlem
Renaissance. She wrote the play some six years
after the NATIONALASSOCIATION FOR THEAD-
VANCEMENT OFCOLOREDPEOPLE(NAACP) pub-
lished Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States,
1889–1918 (1919), its comprehensive study of
lynching practices. Johnson, along with playwrights
such as MARYBURRILL,ALICEDUNBAR-NELSON,
and ANGELINAGRIMKÉ, succeeded in raising public
awareness about the violence. Their works con-
tributed to political efforts by the NAACP and
other organizations to protest the insufficient gov-
ernmental efforts to combat the practice.
Bibliography
Gunning, Sandra. Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red
Record of American Literature.New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996.
Johnson, Georgia Douglas. The Selected Works of Georgia
Douglas Johnsonwith an introduction by Claudia
Tate. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1997.
Perkins, Kathy A., and Judith L. Stephens, eds. Strange
Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women.Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Zangrando, Robert. The NAACP Crusade Against Lynch-
ing, 1909–1950.Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1960.
Survey Graphic
A periodical that was linked to Survey Magazine,
the leading American social work journal of the
1920s. Survey Graphic, published from 1921
through 1948, was the monthly illustrated com-
panion publication of Survey.Founded by PAUL
KELLOGG, the journal represented a shift away
from its primary audience of professional social
workers toward a larger socially and politically con-
scious reading public.
In March 1925, Survey Graphicpublished its
most well-known and historic issue when it focused
on African-American writers, issues, culture, and
scholarship. ALAINLOCKE, who was a HOWARD
UNIVERSITYprofessor, HARVARDUNIVERSITYgrad-
uate, and the first African American awarded a
RHODESSCHOLARSHIP, was the guest editor of the
issue entitled HARLEM: MECCA OF THE NEW
NEGRO.The volume included works by and about
African Americans. The Harlem issue featured art-
work by WINOLDREISSand creative writing by a
number of notable figures including COUNTEE
CULLEN,ANGELINAGRIMKÉ,LANGSTONHUGHES,
CLAUDE MCKAY,ANNE SPENCER, and JEAN
TOOMER.ALBERT BARNES, George Haynes,
MELVILLEHERSKOVITS,ELISEMCDOUGALD, J. A.
ROGERS, and ARTHURSCHOMBURGwere among
those who contributed essays and scholarly articles.
Locke promptly capitalized on the tremendous set
of materials and later that year published THENEW
NEGRO(1925), an anthology that included many of
the works published in Survey Graphic.Bibliography
Chambers, Clarke. Paul U. Kellogg and the Survey: Voices
for Social Welfare and Social Justice.Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1971.
Finnegan, Cara. Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA
Photographs.Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books,
2003.“Sweat”Zora Neale Hurston(1926)
Published in the first and only issue of the avant-
garde periodical FIRE!!,the story was one of two
works that ZORANEALEHURSTONcontributed to
the controversial and short-lived publication that
hoped to mark the emergence of a new generation
of Harlem Renaissance writers. Critics regard
“Sweat” as one of Hurston’s most powerful and so-
phisticated works.
The protagonist, Delia, is an earnest, hard-
working, and long-suffering laundress. Her marriage
to Sykes, a domineering and insensitive man, is
draining and demoralizing. Sykes’s efforts to humili-
ate Delia, the woman whose labors maintain their504 Survey Graphic