“That Harlem Number” [P. 500 in:] Survey Graphic. February, 1925.

Editorial recognition of Harlem as an intellectual capital…

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The Harlem Number Announced in Survey Graphic’s February 1925 Advertisement

On page 500 of the February 1925 issue of Survey Graphic, a full-page advertisement announced the forthcoming “Harlem Number.” The advertisement marked the editorial genesis of the Harlem Renaissance in print: the March 1925 Harlem issue would soon follow, later expanded into Locke’s seminal anthology The New Negro.

The notice trumpeted that the engraver’s proofs of Winold Reiss’s portraits of Black leaders, and the printers’ proofs of its major articles, were a cause for great excitement within the publisher’s office. It previewed contributions by Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Charles S. Johnson, Rudolf Fisher, W. E. B. Du Bois, Arthur A. Schomburg, J. A. Rogers, Melville J. Herskovits, Walter F. White, Elise McDougald, Kelly Miller, Winthrop D. Lane, George E. Haynes, and others. Each contributed to define Harlem as the capital of Black culture and intellectual life.

Elsewhere in this issue, a small inset map entitled “Spreading the Hampton-Tuskegee Idea” documents the presence of Hampton and Tuskegee-trained “farm demonstration agents” working across hundreds of counties in America. The visual underscored how southern Black educational institutions shaped national agricultural and civic reform.

The issue also introduced Patrick Geddes’s “Talks From My Outlook Tower,” beginning with “A Schoolboy’s Bag and a City’s Pageant”, a series of linoleum cuts from Henry Moore Picken, studies of rural West Virginia, a memorial article on labor leader Samuel Gompers, and an essay on aerial warfare and disarmament, and a review of “Ten Years of the Rockefeller Plan.”

A key issue marking Survey Graphic’s role in framing the Harlem Renaissance, scarce in the original wrappers as most were subsequently bound.

Price: $650.00