the new journal unapologetically introduced what Thurman regarded as a more genuine picture of black America: “uneducated, crude, and scrappy black men and women depicted without tinsel or soap.”7 Thurman had recruited his contributors from the ranks of the older journals; they included Hughes, Du Bois’s future son-in-law Countee Cullen, writers Gwendolyn Bennett and Zora Neale Hurston, journalist John P. Davis, painter and illustrator Aaron Douglas, and writer and painter Richard Bruce Nugent.
