ABOUT THIS BOOK

Beginning in the 1930s, Black Chicago experienced a cultural renaissance that lasted into the 1950s and rivaled the cultural outpouring in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The contributors to this volume analyze this prolific period of African American creativity in music, performance art, social science scholarship, and visual and literary artistic expression.

Unlike Harlem, Chicago was an urban industrial center that gave a unique working class and internationalist perspective to the cultural work being done in Chicago. This collection's various essays discuss the forces that distinguished the Black Chicago Renaissance from the Harlem Renaissance and placed the development of black culture in a national and international context. Among the topics discussed in this volume are Chicago writers Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, The Chicago Defender and Tivoli Theater, African American music and visual arts, and the American Negro Exposition of 1940.

Contributors are Hilary Mac Austin, David T. Bailey, Murry N. DePillars, Samuel A. Floyd Jr., Erik S. Gellman, Jeffrey Helgeson, Darlene Clark Hine, John McCluskey Jr., Christopher Robert Reed, Elizabeth Schlabach, and Clovis E. Semmes.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Darlene Clark Hine is Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies, professor of history, and chair of African American Studies at Northwestern University. John McCluskey Jr. is professor emeritus of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University.

REVIEWS

"This collection reveals that 1930s-50s Chicago had enough African American artists who were born, worked, or studied there—in the applied, performing, and recording arts, social sciences, and literature—to constitute a critical mass rivaling the earlier cultural exuberance of Harlem."--Choice

"The book offers highly readable essays from scholars who tell stories about the artists -- including some Harlem Renaissance ex-parts who came to Chicago -- and the conditions that contributed to a major arts movement in the city that lasted for more than two decades."--Chicago Tribune

"A lively, useful anthology of ten critical essays on Chicago's remarkable upturn in black cultural politics and political culture at midcentury."--Journal of Illinois History

"A service to all readers interested in twentieth-century American cultural history."--Literature & History

"The Black Chicago Renaissance offers an in-depth investigation of the Renaissance and. . . . Positions itself as one of the most successful works of scholarship on this movement. . . . A must-read for American culture, African-American culture, and African-American and American history studies."--Journal of American Culture

"The Black Chicago Renaissance is an informative. . . anthology of ten essays that analyzes the city's African American cultural fluorescence from the early 1930s to the early 1950s. . . .Offers pioneering research on multiple understudied topics."--The Journal of American History

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cover

Contents

Dedication

Let’s Call It Love J. M. Mahlum

Acknowledgments

Introduction Darlene Clark Hine

Part I. Black Chicago: History, Culture, and Community

Chapter 1 African American Cultural Expression in Chicago before the Renaissance: The Performing,

Chapter 2. The Negro Renaissance: Harlem and Chicago Flowerings Samuel A. Floyd Jr.

Chapter 3. The Problem of Race and Chicago’s Great Tivoli Theater Clovis E. Semmes

Chapter 4. The Defender Brings You the World: The Grand European Tour of Patrick B. Prescott Jr.

Part II. Black Chicago’s Renaissance: Culture, Consciousness, Politics, and Place

Chapter 5. The Dialectics of Placelessness and Boundedness in Richard Wright’s and Gwendolyn Brooks

Chapter 6. Richard Wright and the Season of Manifestoes John McCluskey Jr.

Chapter 7. Horace Cayton: No Road Home David T. Bailey

Chapter 8. “Who Are You America but Me?”: The American Negro Exposition, 1940 Jeffrey Helgeson

Chapter 9. Chicago’s Native Son: Charles White and the Laboring of the Black Renaissance

Part III. Visual Art and Artists in the Black Chicago Renaissance

Chapter 10. Chicago’s African American Visual Arts Renaissance Murry N. DePillars

Photo section

Notes on Contributors

Index