Transcript: The Crisis: A Weapon Against Jim Crow

NARRATOR: If the South would not change, Du Bois would. He moved to New York in 1910 to join forces with the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People – the NAACP- a newly formed interracial organization that would become the driving force in the civil rights movement.

Appointed editor of the NAACP’s journal the Crisis, Du Bois was determined to forge the magazine into a weapon against Jim Crow. The Crisis battled racial discrimination, exposed atrocities and outrages against blacks, supported women’s rights and promoted race pride in the arts and literature.

Within four months, the number of subscribers jumped from 1000 to 6000 and eventually soared to over 100,000. Du Bois startled his readers in 1912 when he supported Woodrow Wilson for President even though Wilson was a Democrat and a Southerner. Wilson, he said, had promised fairness and justice for blacks and he seemed a man of his word. But Dubois warned Wilson what blacks expected from him.

DU BOIS (ACTOR): We want to be treated as men. We want to vote. We want our children to be educated. We want lynching stopped. We want no longer to be herded as cattle on street cars and railroads. We want the right to earn a living and own property. Be not untrue, President Wilson, to the highest ideals of American Democracy.

NARRATOR: Immediately after his election, Wilson gave the green light to three Southern cabinet members to segregate their departments. One white supervisor boasted. "There are no Government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro’s place is in the cornfield." Du Bois attacked Wilson.

DU BOIS (ACTOR): The federal government has set the colored apart as if mere contact with them were contamination. Behind screens and closed doors they now sit as though leprous. How long will it be before the hateful epithets of "Nigger" and "Jim Crow" are openly applied?