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Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance

Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance

New Negro Writers, Artists, and Intellectuals, 1893-1930

Edited by Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed

Contributions by Richard A. Courage, Mary Jo Deegan, Brenda Ellis Fredericks, James C. Hall, Bonnie Claudia Harrison, Darlene Clark Hine, John McCluskey, Amy M. Mooney, Christopher Robert Reed, Clovis E. Semmes, Margaret Vendryes and Richard Yarborougha

Published by: University of Illinois Press

Imprint: University of Illinois Press

23 black & white photographs

Digital download
9780252051913
Published: May 2020

Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

The Black Chicago Renaissance emerged from a foundational stage that stretched from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition to the start of the Great Depression. During this time, African American innovators working across the landscape of the arts set the stage for an intellectual flowering that redefined black cultural life.

Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed have brought together essays that explore the intersections in the backgrounds, education, professional affiliations, and public lives and achievements of black writers, journalists, visual artists, dance instructors, and other creators working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Organized chronologically, the chapters unearth transformative forces that supported the emergence of individuals and social networks dedicated to work in arts and letters. The result is an illuminating scholarly collaboration that remaps African American intellectual and cultural geography and reframes the concept of urban black renaissance.

Contributors: Richard A. Courage, Mary Jo Deegan, Brenda Ellis Fredericks, James C. Hall, Bonnie Claudia Harrison, Darlene Clark Hine, John McCluskey Jr., Amy M. Mooney, Christopher Robert Reed, Clovis E. Semmes, Margaret Rose Vendryes, and Richard Yarborough

Cover

Title

Contents

Foreword / Darlene Clark Hine

Acknowledgments

Introduction / Richard A. Courage

1. The Rise of Black Chicago’s Culturati: Intellectuals, Authors, Artists, and Patrons, 1893–1930 / Christopher Robert Reed

2. Journey to Frederick Douglass’s Chicago Jubilee: Colored American Day, August 25, 1893 / John McClus

3. Fannie Barrier Williams, the New Negro, and Black Feminist Pragmatism, 1893–1926 / Mary Jo Deegan

4. James David Corrothers and Henry Demarest Lloyd: Black Poet and White Patron in 1890s Chicago / Richard Yarborough

5. Fenton Johnson, Literary Entrepreneurship, and the Dynamics of Class and Family / Richard A. Courage and James C. Hall

6. Strategies for Visualizing Cultural Capital: The Black Portrait / Amy M. Mooney

7. The Black Creole Vision of Archibald J. Motley Jr.: Hybrid Identity and New Negro Consciousness / Bonnie Claudia Harrison

8. Black Chicago Pioneers in the Training of Dancers / Clovis E. Semmes

9. Becoming Barthé: The Chicago Years, 1924–1930 / Margaret Rose Vendryes

10. King Daniel Ganaway: Master Pictorialist Photographer / Brenda Ellis Fredericks

11. Chicago’s Letters Group and the Emergence of the Black Chicago Renaissance / Richard A. Courage

Literary Selections

“Auditions” / John McCluskey Jr.

From “Illinois: Mecca of the Migrant Mob," The Messenger 5 / Charles S. Johnson

“Entering Chicago” / J. M. [Frank Marshall?] Davis

Notes on Contributors

Index

Back cover

Richard A. Courage is a Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York, and a professor of English at Westchester Community College/SUNY. He is the coauthor of The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932–1950. Christopher Robert Reed is a professor emeritus of history at Roosevelt University. His books include Knock at the Door of Opportunity: Black Migration to Chicago, 1900–1919 and The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1920–1929.

Certificate of Excellence, Illinois State Historical Society, 2021
— Illinois State Historical Society