"My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience" [and] "Beware The Begging Joints" [in] Negro Digest: A Magazine of Negro Comment - Vol, III, No. 7, May 1945

Periodical. Small octavo. 98pp. Stapled wrappers. Wrappers toned with moderate wear and soiling, several leaves with creased corners and one with a very short tear, sound and about good; the text is bright and the paper supple A single but notable issue from this influential and important digest, which was the foundation of the Johnson Publishing empire. In addition to excerpting articles by and about African-Americans from other publications, there was also much original content written expressly for the magazine. This issue is especially notable for printing the recurring column "My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience," this month penned by Langston Hughes: a sad story in which a teenaged Hughes is harassed in a Cleveland cafeteria, as well as Zora Neal Hurston's "Beware the Begging Joints" (condensed from *American Mercury*). Also prints "Does Interracial Marriage Succeed" by heavyweight champion Joe Louis; "Can the Negro Afford Birth Control?" by Dr. Julian Lewis; a four-page "condensation" from Walter White's book *The Rising Wind* (on the status of Black troops in the European Theater after a personal visit); and the monthly column "If I Where a Negro," this month penned by Francis E. McMahon. McMahon had recently been the subject of major controversy when he was fired from Notre Dame University (with encouragement from the Vatican, it turned out much later) for speaking out in favor of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. An important issue of an important magazine; early issues are uncommon.