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The Black Chicago Renaissance

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Introduction

If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter.... We stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves. —LANGSTON HUGHES, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"

Beginning in the 1930s and lasting into the 1950s, black Chicago experienced a cultural renaissance that rivaled and, some argue, exceeded the cultural outpouring in Harlem. The Black Chicago Renaissance, however, has yet to receive its full due. This volume addresses that neglect. The Black Chicago Renaissance was unparalleled in many respects. Like Harlem, Chicago had become a major destination for black southern migrants. Unlike Harlem, it was also an urban industrial center. This fact gave a unique working-class and internationalist perspective to the cultural work that would take place there.

The contributors to this Black Chicago Renaissance anthology analyze a dynamically prolific period of African American creativity in music, performance art, social science scholarship, and visual and literary artistic expression. Each author implicitly discusses forces that both distinguish and link the Black Chicago Renaissance to the Harlem Renaissance. New scholarship, to which this volume contributes, suggests that we are better served and our understanding of black culture significantly enriched by placing its modern development in a national and international context and by probing the histories of multiple (sequential and overlapping—Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis) black renaissances.

The "New Negro" consciousness with its roots in the generation born in the last and opening decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, replenished and watered by migration, and solidified into the creative force, the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, was destined to reemerge significantly transformed in the 1930s as the Black Chicago Renaissance. A younger generation built on the strengths of the previous generation of New Negroes and created a dynamic legacy distinctly Chicagoan. To be sure, there was considerable generational overlap, but it still begs an important question. Why was a Black Chicago Renaissance necessary or, for that matter, the cultural flowerings that arose in Indianapolis, Indiana, Memphis, Tennessee, and Los Angeles, California, to name only a few?

Speaking from a post–civil rights movement and a member of AfriCOBRA (1968 to the present) perspective, art historian Michael D. Harris suggests a starting point for considering the overarching question of why renaissances were important to African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century: "The momentum of over 150 years of derogatory images and characterizations flowed down on our heads with real consequences because white power enforced and depended on black racial identity. We reinvented ourselves repeatedly to resist and frustrate the oppressive systems and representations that circumscribed us collectively, acting on the belief that we either became coproducers or might change the worldview by our actions. We re-presented ourselves to counter the other form of representation." Black expressive cultural workers endeavored to produce "art that attempts to provide a double vision rather than a double consciousness," and, Harris maintains, that "art imbued with that double vision locates itself in the center of an African American epistemology rather than on the periphery where definitions and contentions of race are found." An urgency radiated throughout the Black Chicago Renaissance, an urgency to create music, literature, paintings, radio programs, magazines, photography, comic strips, and films that expressed black humanity, beauty, self-possession, and black people's essential contributions to not only the local geographical community but also to the development of global communities. In the 1920s, black Chicago commercial and cultural activity centered around Thirty-Fifth and State Streets. By the early 1930s, the commercial and social heart had moved to Forty-Seventh Street, and its intellectual and political heat radiated far beyond the borders of Chicago and the United States.

Black Chicagoans, both old settlers and new migrants, energetically engaged in the challenging work of community building, economic development, political engagement, and the production of a new expressive culture giving voice and form to their New Negro, urban/cosmopolitan identities. Moreover, black cultural artists in music and dance and in visual and literary arts demonstrated cognizance of the centrality of race and sex in the distribution of power, the ways in which the social construction of both interacted to determine social privileges and exclusions. The challenge was to deconstruct racial categories and rid "blackness" of its negative symbolism and upend beliefs that held whiteness and maleness as the only authentic markers of American identity and citizenship. The creative agents of the Black Chicago Renaissance had their work cut out, the pieces arrayed, waiting to be fashioned into a new garment.

It is important to underscore that African Americans had been in Chicago since its founding in 1833. Indeed, an enduring source of pride to black citizens of the Windy City is the fact that a black man, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, was its first settler. By the time of the Civil War, in 1861, the city's black population numbered 955. Within twenty years, the city boasted the nation's second-largest population, numbering 200,000 people, 6,480 of whom were African American. World War I and southern economic decline combined with the rise in lynching violence to fuel the onset of the Great Migration and successive ebbs and flows of black southerners. The onset of the Great Depression for a brief period severely curtailed the flow of black migrants. The numbers began to increase after 1936.

The two generations of Great Migration "New Negroes" who settled in Chicago gave added weight to the complex forces that spurred the rise of multiple artistic renaissances, or flowerings, of African American culture production. The influx of the migrants helped to fuel and shape the Black Chicago Renaissance of the 1930s through the first half of the 1950s. As southern migrants redefined themselves as urban and northern, they helped to propagate a dynamic, multifaceted, modern metropolitan culture.

The Great Migration brought to Chicago a cadre of young black writers and artists. These include Richard Wright (1908–60), born near Roxie, Mississippi, moved to Chicago in 1927; Arna Bontemps (1902–73), a native of New Orleans, migrated to California before landing in Chicago; Margaret Walker (1915–98), born in Birmingham, Alabama, was a 1934 graduate of Northwestern University; and Mahalia Jackson (1911–72), a great gospel singer, collaborated with composer Thomas A. Dorsey (1899–1993), born in New Orleans, who arrived in Chicago in 1927. A serial resident in the cultural capital of the nation's heartland, poet Langston Hughes (1902–67), born in Joplin, Missouri, and a 1929 graduate of Lincoln University, used his literary talents, blues aesthetics, humor, and Jesse B. Semple comic strips published in the Chicago Defender, one of the nation's most influential black weekly newspapers, to capture and convey with humor the hope, weariness, and excitement of the migrants. These men and women joined native Chicago-born black expressive-culture creators like Katherine Dunham (1909–2008), who attended Joliet Township Junior College before entering the University of Chicago.

All who contributed to the literary, cinematic, intellectual, and dance and music performing arts community in Chicago were at once captives and yet purveyors of Great Migration fever. The shifting terrain of black bodies fostered new urban geographies and aspirations while molding self-affirming agency (or resistance) to white racial and political domination. Artists comprised the vanguard of the struggle to fashion new expressive sites for contesting racial, class, and gender hierarchies and reshaping public culture. They led the way in forcefully representing the humanity, work, and political agency of black citizens who moved from farms to factories and across regions better to seize greater freedom and equality of opportunity. In 1900, Chicago's black citizens numbered only 30,150 out of a population of 1,698,575, or 1.8 percent of the total. From 44,000 in 1910, the number of black residents reached over 250,000 by the mid-1930s. Langston Hughes's poem "One Way Ticket" bluntly but elegantly captures the motivations that had set the stage for early-twentieth-century black migration.

––––I am fed up ––––With Jim Crow Laws ––––People Who are Cruel ––––And Afraid ––––Who lynch and run, ––––Who are scared of me ––––And me of them.

––––I pick up my life ––––And take it away ––––On a one-way ticket— ––––Gone up North, ––––Gone West, ––––Gone!

Moving north, however, did not automatically translate into becoming northern. The development of a sense of becoming and belonging in the black urban and northern freedom spaces, especially on the South Side of Chicago, was an evolutionary process more complicated than even Hughes's poem suggests. The ticket to the so-called promised land was never just a one-way journey. Many of the "gone" often returned to rural homes, if only for intermittent visits, or after death to be buried in a graveyard near the family church. Black southerners who did not move north made short and extended trips to visit friends and family in the north. In other words, migrants zigzagged between southern rural home bases and urban ones in northern towns and big cities. This fluid migration contributed to the southernization of the north, just as black migrants affected southern black perspectives. At its most fundamental level, the movement of black people south to north and back again fostered a resiliency and determination to break mental shackles of subordination in both regions.

Transformations in black consciousness and identity were also affected by major national and international events ranging from the Scottsboro Boys' infamous "rape" trials (1931) to Italy's invasion of Ethiopia (1935) and the "Double V" national campaign of African Americans during World War II, reflecting a grim determination to fight not only for freedom from fascism, Nazism, and colonialism abroad but also against legal segregation and social injustice at home. Hughes's 1935 black poem "Call of Ethiopia," for example, exemplifies the interconnectedness of the local and national with a global awareness:

––––Ethiopia's free ––––Be like me ––––All of Africa, ––––Arise and be free! ––––All you black peoples ––––Be free! Be free!

Black migration and socioeconomic mobility bracket the demographic shifts, identity and consciousness changes, and new urban community formations in the first half of the twentieth century. Black responses to white racial violence, ingrained negative representations, and constant stereotypical denigration provide one context for our collective interest in mounting explorations of the creative artistic fluorescence that occurred in the critical years, from 1930 to 1955, and the several interrelated themes that characterize and distinguish the Black Chicago Renaissance. Themes of class mobility and tensions within the black community, white violence and black resistance, hope and despair, and stirring debates over the purpose of black cultural creations form the backdrop connecting and framing the lives and deaths of two Chicago black males. Or queried another way, what do the deaths of two Chicago black boys and the responses provoked have in common? On July 27, 1919, the body of Eugene Williams was retrieved from the waters of Lake Michigan at the foot of Twenty-Ninth Street. A few days later, the deadliest race war in Chicago's history claimed the lives of thirty-eight men and women (twenty-three African Americans and fifteen white residents), with 537 injured. More black people would have died or suffered injuries had it not been for a strong mobilization of black people determined to fight to keep white mobs from invading their neighborhoods. Still, it was the bloodiest conflagration in what James Weldon Johnson termed the "Red Summer of 1919."

Thirty-five years after the killing of Eugene Williams on the banks of Lake Michigan, searchers retrieved the mutilated body of another black teenager, Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941–August 28, 1955), from the watery grave of Mississippi's Tallahatchie River. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made the courageous decision to open his casket at the Chicago funeral in order to let the world see what had been done to her son. She declared, "Let the world see what I've seen," let the "whole nation ... bear witness" to this crime. The photographs of Till's brutalized body appeared in Jet Magazine with its impressive half-million circulation. The publication of the Till photographs marked a formative moment in the consciousness development of a generation of youths who would, beginning with the 1960 sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, destroy legal segregation and discrimination in the Jim Crow south. Mamie recalled the warning she had given Emmett before he left Chicago to visit family in Mississippi: "I did warn him that he had a place down there that was a little bit different than Chicago. I told him that if anything happened, even though you think you're perfectly within your right, for goodness sake take low. If necessary, get on your knees and beg apologies. Don't cross anybody down there because Mississippi is not like Chicago. What you get away with here, you might not be able to do it there." Mamie's warning to her son alludes to an array of important tangible realities and imaginative concerns that took hold in Chicago between Eugene Williams's death and the eve of the departure of her son.

To be sure, the Black Chicago Renaissance had deep antecedents in the pre–World War I decades. Unlike the dozens of riots that erupted in the aftermath of the Great War in cities across the country during the crimson summer of 1919, black observers heralded the Chicago race riot as the most graphic illustration of the determination and willingness of first-wave African American migrants and descendants of old settlers to resist white violence in kind. A prominent black clubwoman community activist and a stalwart crusader of antilynching renown, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, had penned a premonitory article in the July 7, 1919, issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune.

With one Negro dead as a result of a race riot last week, another one very badly injured in the county hospital; with a half dozen attacks upon Negro children, and one on the Thirty-fifth Street car Tuesday, in which four white men beat one colored man ... the bombing of Negro homes and the indifference of the public to these outrages. It is just such a situation as this which led up to the East St. Louis riot.

Less than three weeks after Wells-Barnett detailed the origins of the East St. Louis riot, Eugene Williams made the fatal error of swimming across an imaginary line onto the "white side" of Twenty-Fifth Street Beach in Chicago. Williams died from injuries sustained in the attack of white ruffians. Black Chicagoans fought back, rejecting the mantle of a bewildered, defeated, and disillusioned people. In the ensuing decades, they worked to shape a new sense of black identity and to create and secure autonomous spaces from which they proudly proclaimed their humanity and claimed rights to full citizenship and protection from violence and called for an end to economic exploitation and discrimination.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Black Chicago Renaissance Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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