The June 1918 edition of The Crisis is a unique mixture of the realistic and the optimistic. While the magazine reports on injustices, such as lynchings, The Crisis also maintains an often optimistic tone towards the American government and the status of race relations in the country. While the magazine clearly acknowledges oppressions, these oppressions are rarely discussed from a bitter or angry tone. Rather, The Crisis consistently maintains a tone of professional distance or even one of positive thinking. An example of this optimistic tone can be found in the Editorial section in which the author writes, “This war is an End and, also, a Beginning. Never again will darker people of the world occupy just the place they have before...Out of this war will rise, too, an American Negro, with the right to vote and the right to work and the right to live without insult” (60). Despite this positive tone, The Crisis understands the true and horrendous state of racial oppression in America and depicts it boldly, without fear of consequence.

This bold, distanced tone is seen clearly in the short article titled “North Carolina” (70-71). While the author of the article refers to a white superintendent beating a black teacher as “an astonishing event” (70), the author does not go much further to editorialize. Rather, he simply provides the facts, and includes both the black teacher’s statement as well as that of the white superintendent. He swiftly and triumphantly sums up the end of the story: “As a result of all this, the colored teachers have resigned in a body, the colored principal has been thrashed and will not return to his job, and the white superintendent has been arrested, charged with assault” (71). Yet the author avoids any bitterness or raged-filled rants.

I think I am so impressed with—and maybe startled by—this distanced, optimistic, realism is because it exists so strongly in contrast to the polarizing nature of current media and news publications. A story as horrendous as the one The Crisis reports on would now be spun into a news extravaganza with every channel putting their best commentator forward to argue about the occurrence. Despite the extreme nature of racial discrimination and oppression witnessed in “North Carolina,” The Crisis refrains from politicizing. As the name would imply, the state of race relations in 1918 was at a point of crisis, yet the authors of this journal maintained calm and collected attitudes despite the heightened political and cultural context they lived in. This optimism is unique in a time marked, at least in our 20th century understanding, by disillusionment. Despite America’s presence in World War I and the black men serving—and dying—overseas, The Crisis does not reflect the same disillusionment we see in other writings of the time, such as in Brittain’s Testament of Youth, for example. Instead of fighting out against the entire system of racial oppression and government intervention, The Crisis chooses to operate within this system. The Crisis, instead, writes as if incidents like the one that occurred in North Carolina will soon be long gone as the black involvement in World War I, and the war in general, is the “Beginning” and the “End.” The Crisis chooses to believe something that we have unfortunately still not fully witnessed: that the long history of racial oppression is finally reaching its long-anticipated conclusion.