‘Free Baptism…in the Pages of the Crisis’: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of the Harlem Renaissance

“The editor steps outside the limits of criticism to become personal. I should think that a publication so holy-clean and righteous-pure as the Crisis should hesitate about promoting anything from the pen of a writer who wallows so much in ‘dirt’ ‘filth’ ‘drunkenness’ ‘fighting’ and ‘lascivious sexual promiscuity’ […] deep-sunk in depravity though he may be the author of Home to Harlem [McKay’s novel] prefers to remain unrepentant and unregenerate and he ‘distinctly’ is not grateful for any free baptism of grace in the cleansing pages of the Crisis.”-“Claude McKay to W.E.B. Du Bois,” June 18, 1928

Du Bois was widely regarded as the father of the Harlem Renaissance for having giving considerable space to its authors and poets within the pages of The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races (1910-1934) during his first editorship and his book reviews and essays often castigated this young cadre of African American intellectuals for their moral looseness. So much so that Claude McKay, an acclaimed Harlem Renaissance poet and novelist, took issue with Du Bois for his didactic and moralist criticisms. (There is great irony for Du Bois during this period considering his working relationship with Jessie Fausett who is considered the ‘mid-wife’ of the Harlem Renaissance.) Their relationship can be observed in the wonderfully written Harlem Rhapsody by Victoria Christopher Murray.

Although his future agnosticism would eventually make him decidedly critical of all forms of orthodox Christianity and its ministers, Du Bois’s speeches, commencement addresses, periodical writings, book reviews, and scholarship always retained a rather perceptible moral and ethical strain that clearly resonated with the sermons he heard during his youthful time within the First Congregational Church of Great Barrington. In later years, Du Bois himself remarked about his life, “my morals were sound even puritanical.”

Even as early as 1897 while still a major contributor to Crummell’s The American Negro Academy, Du Bois’s infamous terming of a black “Talented Tenth” insisted that such leadership should “sound a note of warning that would echo in every black cabin in the land: unless we conquer our present vices they will conquer us.” Similarly, Du Bois envisioned and hoped that Renaissance writers would help him in setting forth both intelligent and moral leadership for African Americans that writers like McKay and Zora Neale Hurston did not consider as part of their work.

These writers were more in lockstep with Alain Locke’s conception of The New Negro which in differentiating itself from ‘the old Negro’ wanted no parts of religion even Du Bois’s Congregational and Puritanical remnants in spite of his disavowals of religion.