Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance: New Negro Writers, Artists, and Intellectuals, 1893-1930

Richard Courage and his co-author Christopher Reed have done an excellent job of gathering and writing a beautiful collection of essays that provide additional context for the blossoming of the black Chicago renaissance starting roughly in 1930 during the U.S. depression. Richard goes back to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to illuminate the gathering of black artists, writers and performers in a section of the Exposition which encouraged them to express themselves and tell the story of their time.He also retells the story of the CHAMPION MAGAZINE which set out to appeal to black readers with a mix of articles on theater, music and athletics. The publication is particularly noteworthy because of the high quality of editing, layout and noteworthy contributors.This book will serve general interest readers as well as students of black history well by filling in a noteworthy gap that explains how the cultural explosion of artistic creativity in the 1930’s was preceded by the building blocks of artists, events and history that enabled it to grow and flourish.

An abundance of images of urban Black ghettos in newspapers and periodicals has tended to obscure a significant fact in African-American history: Blacks were liberated by cities, not simply trapped in them. The exodus to northern cities enabled a growth, a “flowering,” of the cultural potential of African descendants that was previously suppressed by their sharecropper existence in the Jim Crow South. This liberation, in many of its myriad forms, is recorded and celebrated in this collection of essays edited by noted scholars Richard Courage and Christopher Robert Reed. So stimulating is the data these new essays uncover that a reader feels duty-bound to share the news. Lay audiences may not know that Frederick Douglass--a dominant figure in the period covered by the book—was importantly occupied by an attempt to appropriate Egyptian culture for Africa rather than Europe, or that he was both of and before his time in cultivating strategic portraiture, all in the service of racial “uplift.” Black intellectuals— writers, editors, painters, and photographers—previously condemned to minor (or even unknown) status, come alive in this important scholarly work. And Chicago itself emerges as a personality—a practical, hard-working, high-achieving, entrepreneurial dynamo worthy of gainsaying its assigned role of “Second City.” In the inevitable comparison of the two Black Renaissances—Harlem’s and Chicago’s—this book, while not taking sides, refuses to take a back seat, either: The message is that cultural artisans in the energetic, feisty title city meant business. “Harlem had its brilliant dreamers,” we might whimsically imagine the spirits of the cultural heroes embraced by this book to be saying, “but Chicago walked the walk.” Highly recommended.