Contempo [Vol. 1, No. 13 (Dec 1 1931)]

Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Contempo, Ltd, 1931. Fair. About 17” x 12½” (issued). Newsprint. Pp. 4. Fair: bottom tattered, with about 3” of loss and susceptible to more; moderate foxing to lower quarter; some small stains and spotting.

This is an issue of Contempo, a fairly well-known North Carolina periodical, invaluable for its distinction of holding the first printed appearance of Langston Hughes' controversial poem “Christ in Alabama.”

Hughes wrote the poem in 1931 in response to the infamous Scottsboro case, in which two white women falsely accused nine young Black men of rape. He sent it to Contempo that October, and the (truncated) paper printed it a few days before his scheduled speech at UNC Chapel Hill. Each of the first three stanzas places a member of the Christian holy family in a southern racial context: “Christ is a N****r,” mother Mary “Mammy of the South,” and “God's His Father – /White Master above.” The fourth and final stanza evokes a tortured, Black Christ “On the cross of the South.”

In this issue, Hughes' poem appears front and center, underneath a provocative block-print image by African American artist Zell Ingram. The image shows a silhouetted figure, completely Black, save for a stigmata on each hand and the lips, which are white. The two leading articles surrounding it (one also by Hughes) both address the Scottsboro case. In his editorial, Hughes deemed the white female accusers “prostitutes,” described the Alabama court proceedings as “absurd farces” and articulated that “the South ought to be ashamed of itself.”

The authors of a scholarly article entitled “'Mammy of the South / Silence Your Mouth': The Silencing of Race Radicalism in Contempo Magazine” (https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0000) argued that the issue was a “bold, courageous, and perhaps even foolhardy effort by young, liberal-minded, white editors to condemn racial injustice and protest the Scottsboro Trials before a national audience.” They posited that “Contempo defied southern racial codes not only by publishing such blunt rebukes, but even more flagrantly by inviting an African American writer to voice them.” What happened next was even more startling, however; after the backlash this issue received,

“coverage of Scottsboro all but vanished from the magazine, and near silence ensued on the subject of racism . . . Contempo continued to publish inflammatory articles by white writers on topics such as censorship, pornography, and communism, and to champion experimental writers such as Faulkner and Joyce. These loud radical discourses distract from the silencing of race in Contempo, a silence that extends from the pages of the magazine through to the annals of literary history.”

Though the physical condition of this copy's lower half leaves something to be desired, the leading articles, poem and artwork have managed to escape mostly unscathed, save a few small spots only barely affecting a couple characters of text.

Contempo is reasonably well-represented in OCLC, and exact holdings are difficult to ascertain. (Inventory #: 8137)