Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro

Introduction

The Significance of the March 1925 Issue of Survey Graphic:

Survey Graphic was the monthly illustrated number of Survey magazine, the premier journal of social work in America in the 1920s. In November of 1924, the Survey's chief editor, Paul Kellogg, asked Alain Locke (then a professor of philosophy at Howard University) to design and edit a special issue devoted to the African American "Renaissance" underway in Harlem. Locke agreed, and the magazine that resulted was the first of several attempts to formulate a political and cultural representation of the New Negro and the Harlem community (see also, for example, Fire!!, an arts and literary magazine produced by Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, Zora Neale Hurston, and others in response to Locke's work). Less than a year later, Locke re-published the contents of the March 1925 Survey Graphic in expanded form as the New Negro anthology that most students of the Harlem Renaissance are now familiar with. The original Survey Graphic Harlem number, however, is today little read and generally accessible only to scholars specializing in the period.

The Survey Graphic Harlem Number and the New Negro Anthology:

Coming soon . . .

About the Original Print Source of this Hypermedia Edition:

This hypermedia edition was prepared using the University of Virginia's Alderman Library copy of the March 1925 Survey Graphic: HV 1 .S82 MAR. 1925 V.6 NO.6

There are few extant copies of the original March 1925 Survey Graphic. A 1981 reprint is available from the Black Classic Press, Baltimore, MD (ISBN 0-933121-05-9).

Comparison of the Alderman Library copy and the Black Classic Press reprint yields several variants:

The Black Classic Press reprint transposes (with consistent pagination) pages 663 and 664 as they appear in Virginia's Alderman Library copy; the only other original copy of the March 1925 Survey Graphic that I have personally examined also follows this altered pagination.

The poem "Song" by Langston Hughes on page 664 of the Alderman Library copy exhibits a textual variant when compared with the Black Classic Press reprint:

Lovely, dark, and lonely one
Bare your bosom to the sun
Do not be afraid of night
You who are a child of night.

In the Black Classic Press reprint, this becomes (emphasis added):

Lovely, dark, and lonely one
Bare your bosom to the sun
Do not be afraid of light
You who are a child of night.

This is also the text as it appears in Arnold Rampersad's authoritative edition of the Collected Poems (1994).

Therefore, it seems likely that the March 1925 Survey Graphic saw at least two printings, with this error and the page order corrected in the second. In order to maintain consistency with the digital facsimile, and also because it is unavailable in any other reprinted form, I have chosen to follow the Alderman Library copy for both the text of "Song" and for pagination.

Finally, there are also minor variations with the Black Classic Press reprint in the classifieds which appear in the final pages of the magazine (which further suggests multiple printings). Once again, I have followed the Alderman Library copy.

About this Hypermedia Edition:

This edition has been prepared with three major criteria:

to digitally preserve a complete facsimile of the Survey Graphic Harlem number;
to offer a keyword searchable text for all items in the Survey Graphic Harlem number;
and, to provide students and scholars with convenient access (via the World Wide Web) to the Survey Graphic Harlem number.

The edition itself is best envisioned as consisting of two parallel sets of materials: a machine-readable transcription of every text in the original periodical, together with a digital image of every page of the original periodical.

All text will eventually be tagged in SGML according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative. All text is also being spellchecked in WordPerfect, and proofed against the original print source. Page breaks and unambiguous hyphens have not been preserved; readers interested in the layout and pagination of the texts as they were originally printed are therefore advised to consult the corresponding images.

All images have been scanned at 400 DPI, in 24-bit color; they exist as archived TIFFs at the University of Virginia, and are presented here as JPEGs for general Web use. Please note that downloading the images into a graphics editor permits them to be cropped, enlarged, and otherwise manipulated for analysis.

Back to Cover Page