Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance

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

Richard A. Courage, Christopher Robert Reed, Richard A. Courage, Christopher Robert Reed

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780252084928
  9780252043055
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252051913
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: Social Sciences

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

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Rise of Black Chicago's Culturati: Intellectuals, Authors, Artists, and Patrons, 1893–1930
• 2. Journey to Frederick Douglass's Chicago Jubilee: Colored American Day, August 25, 1893
• 3. Fannie Barrier Williams, the New Negro, and Black Feminist Pragmatism, 1893–1926
• 4. James David Corrothers and Henry Demarest Lloyd: Black Poet and White Patron in 1890s Chicago
• 5. Fenton Johnson, Literary Entrepreneurship, and the Dynamics of Class and Family
• 6. Strategies for Visualizing Cultural Capital: The Black Portrait
• 7. The Black Creole Vision of Archibald J. Motley Jr.: Hybrid Identity and New Negro Consciousness
• 8. Black Chicago Pioneers in the Training of Dancers
• 9. Becoming Barthé: The Chicago Years, 1924–1930
• 10. King Daniel Ganaway: Master Pictorialist Photographer
• 11. Chicago's Letters Group and the Emergence of the Black Chicago Renaissance
• Literary Selections
• Contributors
• Index