The Crisis Cover Girl

Lena Horne, the Naacp, and Representations of African American Femininity, 1941-1945

Bibliographic Data

ID23136159
AuthorsMegan E Williams (0000-0003-2277-5352, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume16
Issue2
Pages200-218
Publication date2006-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1054-7479 • E-ISSN: 1548-4238
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/amp.2006.0019
OpenAlexW1996585962
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited15

The Crisis Cover Girl: Lena Horne, the NAACP, and Representations of African American Femininity, 1941–1945 Megan E. Williams The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) first featured two-year-old Lena Horne in its October 1919 issue of the Branch Bulletin. 1 Touting her as one of the organization's youngest members, the Branch Bulletin photograph of light-skinned Lena Horne commenced a lifetime of visibility in the black press. During the war era, the Crisis, official organ of the NAACP, would attempt to construct an image of Horne that both empowered African American women to reject dominant images of black womanhood and reflected the association's goals of racial advancement and integration. Though it went unsaid, Horne felt that Walter White, Executive Secretary of the NAACP and a key member of the editorial advisory board for the Crisis, viewed her as "an interesting weapon" in his attempt to coerce Hollywood "to shake off its fears and taboos and to depict the Negro in films as a normal human being and an integral part of the life of America and the world." 2 Throughout the war years, the Crisis sought to infuse its image of Horne with White's notion of normality—a notion influenced by class status, skin color, and a desire for racial integration. Horne's light complexion, enduring relationship with the NAACP, familial ties to the black bourgeoisie in Brooklyn, mainstream success among white audiences, refusal to play stereotypical film roles, performance of popular music, and willingness to contest Jim Crowism in the entertainment industry all made her an ideal Crisis cover girl during World War II. Still, Horne did not passively accept this prescribed role as a bourgeois race woman. Throughout her career as a songstress and film star, Horne maintained, negotiated, and resisted the NAACP's construction of her as a model of acceptable African American femininity in order to achieve her "main motive" of "protecting [her] opportunity to sing," an opportunity [End Page 200] which afforded her the means, as a divorced mother, to provide for her children. 3 Lena Horne first appeared on the Crisis's cover in 1941 and again in 1943. Historically, editors of periodicals have employed images of women on their covers as a means of attracting the attention of potential buyers and announcing their magazine's persona and potential. According to historian Carolyn Kitch, cover girls "conveyed ideas about women's natures and roles, but they also stood for societal values." 4 Beginning in the early twentieth century, the Crisis, a monthly published in New York City by the NAACP, pictured well-dressed, educated, and primarily light-skinned African American women on its covers in an attempt to subvert dominant representations of black women. The Crisis, which achieved a circulation of forty-five thousand during the war years, published sixty issues between 1941 and 1945; thirty-eight featured cover photographs of women. 5 Of the thirty-eight cover girls chosen to represent respectable African American femininity, Horne was the only woman to appear twice on the cover of the Crisis within this five-year span. The Crisis is the official publication of the NAACP, an interracial group of northern elites founded in 1909. Since its inception, the NAACP has sought to attain the privileges guaranteed African Americans by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution but denied them under Jim Crow. Historically, the NAACP has worked to gain civil rights and achieve integration by exposing and rectifying injustices through the existing legal system and by adopting the dominant culture's values of middle-class respectability and morality. Many African Americans believed that by demonstrating middle-class mores and values they would, in the words of August Meier, "impress whites so favorably that they would be freely accorded their rights." 6 Originally viewed as radicals, especially when compared to the conciliatory...

Femininity · Girl · Mainstream · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · White (mutation) · Gender Studies · Law · Military history and social perspectives · Music History and Culture · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society

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