12 pp. 9x6, original red wrappers, printed in black.
Rare issue - possibly the only surviving copy - of the student magazine at the foremost African-American secondary school of its time, the M Street High School in Washington, D.C. Founded after the Civil War, the School adopted a “rigorous curriculum” and had an “extraordinary faculty”: Kelly Miller taught Mathematics there before becoming a Professor at Howard University; the distinguished Black woman physician, Dr. Sara Brown, taught Science; future editor, poet and novelist Jessie Fauset taught French; and Carter Woodson taught History and Civics while founding his Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. By 1915, 75% of the School’s graduates had gone on to college – including such prestigious “white” schools as Harvard, Radcliffe, Dartmouth, Amherst, Williams, Oberlin, Columbia and Stanford. Many of its alumni were destined to become prominent educators and public figures, like Sadie Alexander (nee Mossell), “Socials” co-editor of this magazine, niece of the Dean of Howard University who, 30 years later, as the only Black woman member of President Truman’s Civil Rights Commission (see 1947 listing below) would champion racial integration of the US Army. The magazine itself has much school news as well as a report on the annual NAACP convention and an editorial on “the European War” which laments the “diabolical ingenuity” of newly-developed weapons like airships, machine guns and “other instruments of war. for the destruction of man.” (See the next listing for another, military-theme, issue of the magazine).