Christa Schwarz, the symposium's articles are an enduring resource, with relevance to "attitudes toward the black−white literary marketplace on the crucial issue of representation.
[3] The Crisis literary editor, Jesse Redmon Fauset, focused the discussion points and asked critic Carl Van Vechten to draft the final questionnaire.
[5] In addition to Fauset and Van Vechten, participants who responded included Charles W. Chesnutt, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Walter White, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes.
Also responding were Alfred A. Knopf, John C. Farrar, H. L. Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, Vachel Lindsay, Sinclair Lewis, DuBose Heyward, Julia Peterkin, and Joel Spingarn.
Black artists who responded to the questionnaire were "far less unified in their responses", some of them allowing for freedom of expression but agreeing with the implications of the seventh question: Is there not a real danger that young colored writers will be tempted to follow the popular trend in portraying Negro characters in the underworld rather than seeking to paint the truth about themselves and their own social class?