Search Results

This chapter argues that the long tradition of neighborhood-based politics – and the race-conscious, pragmatic, liberal political culture black Chicagoans had created – had its best moment in the election of Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor. His electoral insurgency bridged divides in black Chicago with appeals to shared racial interests in the overthrow of the white Democratic machine’s “plantation politics.” After the election, Washington pivoted from black nationalist politics to the politics of progressive reform, seeking to use interracial political alliances and government power to foster democratic political power and fair play and equal opportunity for individuals seeking housing and economic opportunity. In particular, the chapter highlights how people who appeared in previous chapters helped develop a hybrid political vision of “equity planning” that aimed to link economic development to bringing jobs, housing, recreational spaces, and municipal services to working-class communities.

The editors provide a historic overview of African American entrepreneurship in Chicago. Beginning with the pioneering entrepreneurial exploits of Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable, persons of African descent have long engaged in commercial activities in the Windy City. Early on, during the nineteenth century, most black Chicago businesspersons featured whites as their primary clients. Yet, because the twentieth century featured a simultaneous rise in both the city’s African American population and white antagonism toward blacks, a new breed of black entrepreneur emerged that focused upon serving the needs of a perceived “Black Metropolis.” This ultimately resulted in Chicago’s primacy as a center of black business activity. However, in the early twenty-first century, due to a variety of circumstances, Chicago’s African American business community has diminished.

This chapter surveys the evolution of African American-owned businesses in Chicago from the mid-to-late nineteenth century until the early twentieth century. During the nineteenth century, the most successful black entrepreneurs, such as tailor John Jones and caterer Charles H. Smiley, primarily served white clients. By the early twentieth century, as Chicago’s African American population grew, a new breed of black entrepreneur emerged. Even before the World War One “Great Migration,” persons such as newspaper editor Robert Abbott, real estate professional and banker Jesse Binga and personal care products manufacturer Anthony Overton saw the enormous profit potential associated with catering to the needs of the city’s burgeoning “Black Belt.”

This chapter examines the local historical context of the Black Chicago Renaissance. It discusses the existence of a layered class structure within the black community, and underscores the importance and the complicated tradition of support of the arts by elite black and later members of the black entrepreneurial and professional middle class. Black patronage, for both aesthetic and exploitative reasons, served an important function in providing space for creative expression and the means for its distribution and commoditization. Furthermore, the chapter is a response to the claims made by social scientists Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier. In 1923, Johnson declared that Chicago's intellectual life had numerous excuses for not existing. In 1929, Fraser echoed Johnson's assertion, insisting that Chicago had no intelligentsia.

This chapter considers the 1940 American Negro Exposition in Chicago, the first black-organized world's fair that sought to showcase African American artists on a national stage. It delineates the diversity of voices and competing visions of racial progress that defined the character of the Black Chicago Renaissance. Historians have described the exposition as a failure; the event did not attract mass audiences, and it did not create a broader public debate about the meanings of black identity, legacies of slavery, or contemporary discrimination in the United States. Yet, by examining the exposition as presented, rather than what it failed to be, the chapter uncovers important and sometimes surprising influences on the fair's messages.

This chapter examines how carceral power became a permanent fixture in Black Chicago during the Progressive Era. It documents the rise of policing in the Black Belt and shows how carceral power entered Black Chicago via attempts to control interracial sex and socializing in the Black/white sex districts on the South Side. The chapter first provides an overview of policing on Chicago's Black Belt as well as the geography of lynching and that of interracial social spaces in the city. It then considers the ways that policing of the Black Belt served as a mechanism to access and consolidate whiteness, organize the racial geography of the city, and for the Black middle class to push for the sexual regulation of Blacks. It also explores how interracial sex districts shaped Chicago's response to Black migration and the subsequent measures it took to control Black masculinity. Finally, it considers the role race scholars and Reconstruction discourses from the South played in framing and mobilizing the hysteria around interracial socializing and sex in Chicago.

This chapter argues for renewed recognition of Black Chicago Renaissance writer Frank Marshall Davis, whose first collection of poetry, Black Man’s Verse (1935), was widely celebrated for its innovative adaptations of African American vernacular forms, including the blues and jazz. Situating Davis within recent scholarly reassessment of the Black Chicago Renaissance, this chapter demonstrates how Davis’s jazz writing, as a journalist, critic, and poet, exemplifies the global orientation of the Black Chicago Renaissance that is becoming increasingly recognized. Davis’s jazz writing is especially important, for the subsequent Black Arts generation as well as for his Popular Front contemporaries, not only because of his development of inventive vernacular forms, but also because of his insistence on the African roots of African American music. In articulating how African musical principles inform jazz, Davis also underscored the international and interracial importance of jazz for black and working-class social progress.

This chapter introduces “the Living Stations of the Cross,” a Black Catholic reenactment of the passion and death of Jesus performed annually by parishioners of Chicago’s largest Black Catholic church from 1937 to 1968. This devotional practice serves as a lens through which to better understand the ways in which Catholic ritual life and relationships distinguished Catholic converts from the Protestant churches proliferating around them in the midst of the Great Migrations. It argues that Black Catholics should be understood as sharing in the same impulse as other new religious movements or “religio-racial movements,” such as the Black Hebrews and Black Muslims, who adopted religious practices and bodily disciplines that marked them as different from the assorted Black evangelical practices that were quickly coming to be understood as normative for Black religious life (known by the shorthand “the Black Church”).

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.

Chicago emerged two decades after its Great Fire of 1871 to host America's second world's fair, and with it witnessed the birth of a Black cultural movement along with the city's general rebirth. First in the performing arts, then progressing slower in the visual and literary arts, the next four decades beheld the rise of the foundational elements of a Black Chicago Renaissance somewhat paralleling that in Harlem but in an asymmetrical fashion. While the tempo of aesthetic evolution through two distinct periods was imbalanced, overall progress appeared: with a transformation in the class structure, bringing necessary Black patronage to the forefront; an intelligentsia to spur interest and appreciation in the fine arts; and impressive, awe-inspiring creative production in painting, sculpture, photography and music.

This chapter looks at the many spheres of policy gambling, a game that rose to prominence between 1908 and 1955. It understands policy as performance art, as informing black cultural production throughout Bronzeville, and as a patron and fiscal support of the Chicago Black Renaissance. Most importantly, the chapter seeks to demonstrate the relationship between lived actual realities of Bronzeville's mass culture of games and luck, and the grist mill that the game and its derivative culture provided for both the people in Bronzeville who hoped to imagine themselves beyond their existence, and the writers and artists who recognized the rich cultural material that was the policy game.

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 examines how demographic changes at the Illinois Training School for Boys at St. Charles were linked to a punitive turn in institutional policies and state juvenile confinement laws. When the number of African American boys at St. Charles increased over time as a result of migration and discrimination in charity institutions for children in Chicago, the institution’s staff members, state legislators, and residents in the surrounding communities refined their notion in discourse and in practice of what kind of boy St. Charles was intended to house. This hysteria eventually led the Illinois state legislature to mandate that the first maximum security prison for children in the history of the state be built for the “dangerous type of boy” whom the larger public believed was no longer suited for St. Charles.

This chapter unearths the history of a literary circle formed in 1927 to publish a journal called Letters and foster appreciation of black literature. Its leader was Chicago Defender city editor Dewey Roscoe Jones, whose reviews in his weekly “Bookshelf” column established him as black Chicago’s premier literary critic and commentator on the Harlem Renaissance. Most participants in Letters were university students, but they were joined by several older writers, including poets Fenton Johnson and W. H. A. Moore. Future Black Chicago Renaissance luminaries Richard Wright and Frank Marshall Davis visited occasionally but felt unwelcome. Recovering this missing link in cultural history deepens scholarly understanding of the New Negro movement beyond 1920s Harlem and of early evolution of an African American literary tradition in Chicago.

This chapter records the first use of “Defender Jr.,” the Chicago Defender's children's column, as a means of accessing children's interpretations of their religious experiences. These columns, particularly the children's letters to the editor, are used in conjunction with diaries, memoirs, and the broader historical context, to examine religious life for newly arrived young migrants to Chicago during the Great Migration. Religious leaders at the time had expressed adult fears of loss of control over young people in a new environment, as well as concerns about a broader cultural shift in religious practices. Meanwhile, the children seemed to feel comfortable in a diverse and changing religious environment. Young people continued to feel strong ties to religious beliefs and practices, although those beliefs and practices sometimes differed from those of their parents.

This concluding chapter evaluates Bronzeville's and the Chicago Black Renaissance's narrative of decline. It argues that the experience of Bronzeville's residents during this period was not one of unmitigated triumph followed by unfortunate demise; instead it was a contradictory blend of expansion, progress, and stagnation. From 1910 to 1950, neighborhood residents produced and witnessed a remarkable growth in cultural, economic, and political institutions designed to serve their growing needs. Thus, the history of the neighborhood is a conflicting mixture of opportunity and subjugation. As an ending note, the chapter comes to terms with the actual existing economic, political, and cultural relations of the period, showing how the once vibrant neighborhood succumbed to the pressures of segregation and economic disparity.

“Becoming a New Negro in Chicago” delves into Dunham’s childhood and young adulthood in order to understand her artistic and intellectual foundations. Her early years in the Chicago suburbs were filled with family trauma, but also taught her how to navigate race, class, and colorism divisions. When she moved to the city in 1928, Dunham joined the University of Chicago anthropology department, the New Negro Movement, and Chicago’s dance community. The chapter analyzes how she brought these three worlds together to articulate a place for dance in the fight for racial equality. Her first effort, the Ballet Nègre with Mark Turbyfill, folded quickly. Her second, the Negro Dance Group with Ludmila Speranzeva, was more successful, but Dunham felt that her knowledge of Africanist culture practices was lacking. She turned to anthropology to fill in the gaps and thus achieve her dream of presenting black dance as an art form.