Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life

Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life was published from 1923 to 1949 as the official organ of the National Urban League, a civil rights organization dedicated to the assimilation of blacks into mainstream America and noted for its research on blacks in the United States. The monthly journal is most frequently cited for the major role it played in formalizing and sustaining the arts movement known as the Harlem Renaissance; however, it was most consistent in publishing book reviews, editorials, and several articles each issue based on studies by the League's department of research and development.

These articles typically took about two thirds of the publication and addressed crime, labor, housing, intelligence testing, education, interracial relations, and so on. The journal's name was taken from the League's motto “Not Alms, but Opportunity,” and its stated mission was to report objectively on black life to “provide a basis of understanding” and to “encourage interracial co-operation.” Specifically, it published information that would refute and discredit racial stereotypes then held about blacks in the Americas and Africa.

Charles S. Johnson, the journal's founder and editor from 1923 to 1928, graduated from Virginia Union University and the University of Chicago, where he was trained as a sociologist. It was Johnson's scientific training in Chicago that would shape much of his writing and the research published in the journal. Typical of his interest in analyzing the complexity of popular beliefs was his August 1923 essay on Marcus Garvey. While his contemporaries at The Crisis and The Messenger had joined mainstream pundits in denouncing Garvey and calling for his imprisonment and deportation, Johnson insisted that Garvey could not be seen as a joke. Instead, he drew analogies between Garvey's African nationalism with the nationalistic movements elsewhere in the world supported by downtrodden peoples. Garvey wanted for Africans what the Irish wanted for Ireland and the Indians for India.

Johnson also thought it equally important to foster among blacks and influential whites an understanding and appreciation for black contributions to the “classical” arts. Opportunity regularly included poems, literary criticism, essays, and photos of sculpture and art [Page 391]by black artists, as well as artifacts from African countries. Johnson is most often praised, however, for his orchestration of the now-famous March 1924 “coming out” dinner at New York's Civic Club for Harlem's literary giants to meet mainstream publishing brokers. Attendees included editors at Century, Survey, The Nation, and Harper Brothers, as well as the black writers Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Jessie Fauset. This was followed in Opportunity's September issue with the announcement of what would be the first of three literary contests that paid modest cash prizes to winners. These efforts are frequently credited with being the catalysts for the formalization of the Harlem Renaissance, where black artists were published and patronized by wealthy, influential whites. The journal, however, would continue until 1949 with the publication of statisticsdriven research about blacks in the United States.