James E. McGirt's Periodical, Poetry, and Performance:Bringing the Southern Landscape to Popular Audiences in the Pre-Harlem Renaissance Period Akiyo Ito Okuda In 1907 Mcgirt's Magazine received a thumbs-up from W. E. B. Du Bois's The Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line. The review reads, McGirt's Magazine … is staunch and true. Not a "yellow" line in it. … His frontis piece for December should be framed and hung in every house, especially in the South where the school histories invariably omit such incidents as the one therein shown, viz: The death of the Black man, Crispus Attucks, the first to fall in the struggle for American independence. (Murray) The comment suggests the magazine, published in Philadelphia by James E. McGirt from 1903 to 1910, was truthful in depicting Black life and at the same time progressive in racial causes. It also shows the magazine's wide reach to the southern audience. The magazine's contributors, from today's point of view, come across as a Who's Who of African American activists of the period: Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frances E. W. Harper, Kelly Miller, and Mary Church Terrell. The magazine lasted almost a decade—a rare feat for a Black-owned general magazine without any institutional backing—and offered a forum to discuss political, social, and economic issues. It provided a means toward the progress and social advancement that has characterized turn-of-the-century African Americans. The magazine's founder and editor James E. McGirt1 himself represented these values of self-improvement and social uplift. Born in [End Page 363] North Carolina, he was educated at local schools in Greensboro and graduated from Bennett College, a religious institution, in 1895. He migrated to the North, becoming a successful magazine publisher in Philadelphia, but unlike other African Americans whose mobility in this period was one-directional, in 1910 McGirt returned to North Carolina and remained a successful entrepreneur (Parker 124, 127). From this southern base, McGirt continued traveling, giving lectures, and performing in both the South and the North until his untimely death due to illness in 1930. Throughout his life McGirt was involved in political activism.2 In Propaganda and Aesthetics (1979), Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson trace the role magazines played in promoting African American literature from 1900 to the mid-1970s. Johnson and Johnson, when discussing the early twentieth-century magazines, recognize "Colored American Magazine and Horizon, along with Voice of the Negro… . [as] race periodicals, involved first in political and social occurrences and then in black literature" and highlight how they "published the work of young poets and fiction writers, most of whom had no other outlets for their efforts" (1). Critical of Booker T. Washington's "accommodationist" outlook, such magazines endeavored to advance their more radical views and included creative literature to highlight [End Page 364] racial causes. McGirt's Magazine fits well within this context as it published articles on social and political issues3 while also devoting pages to conventional verses and serialized novels. In fact, his contemporaries admired McGirt as a literary figure. In his comprehensive Negro Year Book in 1912, Monroe N. Work listed McGirt along with Charles W. Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sutton E. Griggs, Frances E. W. Harper, and Pauline E. Hopkins as a fiction writer worth noting (206–07). In addition to the surge in the number of periodicals published, many literary societies were also organized in cities around the country. While McGirt edited and published an influential magazine, he also wrote and performed poems and dramas at such literary gatherings. Equally noteworthy are his continuous attempts at placing his work in a larger American popular culture scene. Building on Johnson and Johnson's claim that literature mattered, I suggest that performance culture closely connected to the print culture also played a significant role at the turn of the century. McGirt's contribution as an editor, poet, and dramatist should be recognized as a representation of African American print and performance cultures of the period. Furthermore, McGirt confirms that the geographical South was not cut off from such cultures; he moved...
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Jul 3, 2021
Michael Guihot + 1
Open Access