The Black Chicago Renaissance

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.|

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|