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This chapter describes the origins of the Chicago Central Area Committee, an organization created in 1956 to provide a unified voice for the downtown corporate community in civic affairs. Prior to 1956 the downtown business community was fragmented, with no single organization representing downtown interests as a whole. By the mid-1950s, certain business leaders saw this as a growing problem. The passage of the Illinois Blighted Act in 1947 and the federal Housing Act of 1949 ushered in a series of slum clearance projects in the city’s central area sponsored by various neighborhood groups. Business leaders grew alarmed as these projects were introduced in piecemeal fashion, unconnected to any broader vision for downtown redevelopment. Business unity was forged through political struggles over concrete planning initiatives in which business elites became increasingly cognizant of their collective interests in the city’s slum clearance and redevelopment program.

This chapter discusses the university as a site for strategic pursuit of the ideals of education, justice, and democracy. It describes a democratic university–community collaboration effort—the South Side Initiative launched by Lehigh University in 2007—which has sought to shift the relationship between a wealthy private research institution and the ethnically diverse, predominantly working-class South Side neighborhoods of the postindustrial city of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where the university is located.

This chapter traces the complex interplay of race, geography, and cultural criticism that permeated the Renaissance as a whole. Beginning with the categorization of the neighborhood as the Black Belt and ending with heralding itself as “Bronzeville,” the chapter examines the interaction of newly arrived migrants with previously settled African Americans that bloomed into an exciting community. It specifically analyzes two popular intersections in the South Side of Chicago—the “Stroll” district (the intersection of 35th and State Streets) during the early 1920s, and the intersection at 47th and South Parkway. This intersection, along with the Stroll, served as foundations and sources of work for famed African American musicians, artists, and writers, such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks.

This chapter explores the early career of Chicago-born painter Charles White, and argues that the artistic production of young black artists became intricately intertwined with protest politics during the 1930s. As a young man, White educated himself in the history of African Americans by discovering books like The New Negro, the definitive collection of the Harlem Renaissance, and by joining the Arts Craft Guild, where White and his cohorts taught each other new painting techniques and held their own exhibitions. These painters developed as artists by identifying with the laboring people of Chicago and by pushing to expand the boundaries of American democracy. African American artists like White thus came to represent the vanguard of the cultural movement among workers in the 1930s, making Chicago's South Side the center of the black arts movement.

This chapter focuses on the South Side Community Art Center and the South Side Writers' Group that predate the fame of Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks. As pillars of the Bronzeville's community, these institutions of art and literature generated a unique aesthetic consciousness/political ideology for which Chicago Black Renaissance would garner much fame. The chapter emphasizes how the artists and authors of both institutions evidenced a strong commitment to and conditioning by the streets and people of Bronzeville. The aesthetic formula characterized by these visual arts and literary groups collided in ways that always articulated a vital political and modern consciousness that sustained the Renaissance movement into the 1940s.

Chapter 5 brings together three very different area congregations in very different locations in the city of Chicago. New Covenant Missionary Baptist Church is situated in the middle of Chicago’s predominantly black South Side, a racially and culturally bounded area under great stress from the restructuring economy. Fourth Presbyterian Church stands on the famous Magnificent Mile of North Michigan Avenue but also within blocks of the now-demolished Cabrini-Green Homes public housing project. Much as these two area congregations differ, they share a common desire to create communities of resistance to the most deleterious aspects of the new metropolis. Congregation Ezra-Habonim is located in a Jewish enclave that emerged for religious as much as racial reasons. The three area congregations in this chapter fall along the entire urban impact continuum from weak to strong.

This chapter talks about how Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks, perhaps the two most famous literary figures of the Black Chicago Renaissance, shared a common struggle to discern a new black consciousness in the physical and metaphoric spaces of Chicago's South Side streets. The chapter analyzes the photographic 12 Million Black Voices of Wright and Edwin Rosskam, as well as Wright's last novel, The Outsider, to show how he depicted the confining realities of the kitchenette apartment along with the segregated, overcrowded city pavement of black neighborhoods. It compares Wright's attempt to define and defy these urban realities to poet Gwendolyn Brooks' Street in Bronzeville and Maud Martha that similarly elucidated the intense material deprivation of African Americans.

This chapter discusses the rent strikes staged by Illinois Negroes with the help of Unemployed Councils in the early years of the Great Depression to resist evictions from the Chicago South Side. Chicago suffered during the depression which began in 1929, and the ill effects of the crisis were graphically reflected in the housing situation. Finding rents hard to collect, many owners agreed to condemnation and demolition of rundown houses as the cheapest way out. This chapter examines the alliance between militant Negroes and neighborhood Unemployed Councils in 1930 to fight Negro evictions from the South Side, culminating in riots on August 3, 1931. It also considers a few bright spots with regards to the Negro housing picture in Illinois, citing the high rate of home ownership among Negroes in Chicago; the provisions made in the State Housing Act in 1933 for the creation of the Illinois State Housing Board; and the completion of the Ida B. Wells Homes, a project built expressly for the colored citizens of Chicago, in 1941.

This chapter situates the black intellectual Horace Cayton into the vibrant community of Chicago's South Side during the Depression and World War II era. It details the research projects undertaken by Cayton in Chicago, including his labor scholarship and journalism, Cayton-Warner and WPA projects, and ultimately his crowning achievement: the coauthored 1945 Black Metropolis. In charting this flurry of activity, the chapter shows how Cayton never felt satisfied with his position in the black elite and the Chicago School of Sociology. To broaden his activities among working people and artists, Cayton managed the Parkway Community House that he fashioned into a central hub for the black arts movement. The programs, protest meetings, and cultural events at the Parkway House reflected the personality of Cayton, who crossed boundaries of class, race, and respectability.

This chapter examines the development of jazz within the context of the Great Migration and the New Negro aesthetic by focusing on the political activism of black musicians in New Orleans and Chicago. Between 1915 and 1930, more than one million African Americans left the South for the urban North, an exodus that came to be known as the Great Migration. The net effect of this Great Migration was an explosion of African American culture and entrepreneurship concentrated in places like Chicago’s South Side and Harlem. The cabarets and theaters of Chicago’s black entertainment district, known as “the Stroll,” acted as incubators that nurtured jazz from its infancy to adolescence. Here the music matured into a distinct Chicago style that blended southern and northern influences, cultures, and personalities to create a national—and uniquely American—musical art form. This chapter shows that black musicians actively sought to “make the American dream work” through efforts ranging from fish fries and lawn parties to organizing efforts such as forming benevolent societies in New Orleans or unionization in Chicago.

This chapter examines the work of Jule Styne. It begins with an extended commentary of his career, but also gives data and song information. Styne was born in the slums of London, son of a butter-and-egg man (and sometime wrestler). The family moved to Chicago in 1912, where Styne had a short career as a piano prodigy; a drill-press accident desensitized a finger, and the preteen switched from the concert hall to the burlesque pit. By the mid-1920s Styne was leading his own band on the South Side of Chicago and writing occasional songs as well, including the 1926 pop hit Sunday (words and music by Ned Miller, Chester Cohn, Jules Stein—the composer’s real name—and Bennie Kruger).