Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance

Steven C. Tracy

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780252093425
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance comprehensively explores the contours and content of the Black Chicago Renaissance, a creative movement that emerged from the crucible of rigid segregation in Chicago's "Black Belt" from the 1930s through the 1960s. Heavily influenced by the Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago Renaissance of white writers, its participants were invested in political activism and social change as much as literature, art, and aesthetics. The revolutionary writing of this era produced some of the first great accolades for African American literature and set up much of the important writing that came to fruition in the Black Arts Movement.

The volume covers a vast collection of subjects, including many important writers such as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry as well as cultural products such as black newspapers, music, and theater. The book includes individual entries by experts on each subject; a discography and filmography that highlight important writers, musicians, films, and cultural presentations; and an introduction that relates the Harlem Renaissance, the White Chicago Renaissance, the Black Chicago Renaissance, and the Black Arts Movement.

Contributors are Robert Butler, Robert H. Cataliotti, Maryemma Graham, James C. Hall, James L. Hill, Michael Hill, Lovalerie King, Lawrence Jackson, Angelene Jamison-Hall, Keith Leonard, Lisbeth Lipari, Bill V. Mullen, Patrick Naick, William R. Nash, Charlene Regester, Kimberly Ruffin, Elizabeth Schultz, Joyce Hope Scott, James Smethurst, Kimberly M. Stanley, Kathryn Waddell Takara, Steven C. Tracy, Zoe Trodd, Alan Wald, Jamal Eric Watson, Donyel Hobbs Williams, Stephen Caldwell Wright, and Richard Yarborough.

RICHARD WRIGHT

(September 4, 1908–November 28, 1960)

Robert Butler

When the eminent sociologist Robert Park met Richard Wright in Chicago in 1941 he exclaimed, “How in hell did you happen?”¹ For a relatively conservative thinker like Park who believed character was a function of environment and environment was slow to change, Wright was indeed a puzzle. For Wright, who had a year earlier achieved national prominence as writer with the publication of Native Son, had grown up in the worst possible environment, the brutally segregated world of the Deep South, but had somehow risen well above the society that had tried to put severe limitations on his development.

By the time Wright died in 1960 at the age of fifty-two, he had achieved extraordinary success as a writer, political thinker, and cultural critic, becoming one who changed the course of American and African American literatures. He published seven novels, including Native Son, a book that transformed the ways Americans envision race by revealing truths that previous writers were either blind to or lacked the courage to confront. His two collections of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children and Eight Men, are noteworthy for their formal artistry and honest treatments of social problems that continue to startle and disturb their readers. Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy/American Hunger, has established itself as one of the seminal texts in American autobiographical writing. Moreover, he published more than 250 newspaper articles, book reviews, and occasional essays. His groundbreaking critical articles such as, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” and “The Literature of the Negro in the United States,” set high aesthetic standards for black literature and established a solid theoretical framework that exerted strong influence over several generations of African American writers. Wright was also one of the first novelists to put American racial dilemmas into a global perspective, publishing three penetrating studies late in his career: Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain. He also achieved success as a poet, writing a powerful series of political poems at the outset of his career and creating a large body of haiku verse at the very end of his life. Very few other major American writers have achieved more success in such a wide variety of literary forms and intellectual inquiry.

Born to Ella and Nathan Wright on September 4, 1908, on Rucker’s Plantation near Roxie, Mississippi, Wright was raised in a world of stark poverty and systematic discrimination, a rigidly segregated society that was designed by those in power to make sure that he and other black people would stay forever in their “place.” And as Wright would later reveal in all of his writings about the South, this “place” was calculated not only to deprive him of the education he needed to rise in American life but was also intended to reduce him to a subhuman level and relegate him and his people to the extreme margins of American life. As Wright stressed in Black Boy, the social environment he experienced growing up in the Deep South put the most extreme limits on him, becoming a world “ringed by walls,”² which would make him feel “forever condemned.” The South, therefore, was to Wright not only a naturalistic trap depriving him of economic opportunities and social development but also a Dantean hell that threatened his very soul. But Wright’s life, which has been so ably captured by biographers such as Michel Fabre, Margaret Walker, and Hazel Rowley, can also be regarded as the extraordinary American success story that astonished Robert Park. Facing long odds that very few, if any, major American writers had to face, Wright eventually used his extraordinary talent and will to overcome the repressive environment, which would have crushed many lesser writers. In the process, he became a seminal writer who changed the course of American and African American literatures. As Keneth Kinnamon has observed, Wright became “one of the most important figures of twentieth-century American fiction.”³ He revolutionized American and African American literatures because he was courageous enough to attack old taboos that previous writers dared not approach and created startling new images of black experience that continue to inspire writers and disturb readers.

His early life was spent shifting back and forth between a bewildering number of locations in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee as his family sought suitable work that would provide them with some degree of security and stability. His father, an illiterate sharecropper and mill worker, moved the family to Natchez in 1911 to work in a sawmill and two years later moved them to Memphis, Tennessee, where he became a night porter in a Beale Street drug store. He abandoned his wife and children in 1915, condemning them to desperate poverty. When Wright’s mother contracted a serious illness shortly thereafter, Richard was placed for a while in a Memphis orphanage, an experience that terrified him and left in him an enduring sense of his own loneliness and a tendency he notes in Black Boy to “distrust everything and everybody” (BB, 34). Wright’s maternal grandmother, Margaret Bolton Wilson, joined the family in Memphis in 1916, taking them back to her house in Jackson, Mississippi. Over the next few years Wright, along with his mother and brother Leon, lived in an assortment of places, staying for a while with his Aunt Maggie in Elaine, Arkansas, and later in West Helena, Arkansas. After his mother suffered a paralyzing stroke in 1919, which made her a semi-invalid for the rest of her life, the Wrights moved back to Jackson where they were forced again to move frequently because of their problems paying rent. Except for a short and unhappy stay in Greenwood, Mississippi, to live with his aunt and uncle, Clark and Jody Wilson, Wright spent the remainder of his boyhood in Jackson in his grandmother’s household.

Wright’s childhood thus was characterized by family disorganization, emotional anxiety, and physical deprivation, which often took the form of severe hunger. All of these problems were compounded by the racism he was forced to endure as a young black person living in the Deep South during one of the worst periods of racial discrimination and violence in U.S. history. The intricately fashioned Jim Crow laws of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee racially segregated all aspects of public life and many aspects of private life, harshly relegating black people to marginal existences, stripped of civil rights, economic opportunities and social equality. White and black children attended altogether separate but absolutely unequal schools. (Black schools were under-funded, poorly equipped, and often staffed by inadequately trained teachers. Jackson, like most southern towns and cities, had no public high school for black children.) Public accommodations, likewise, were completely segregated in restaurants, transit, restrooms, hospitals, and even cemeteries. Black people were also excluded from skilled trades and higher-paying factory jobs, leaving them to work at poorly paid menial jobs in cities and sharecropping on plantations. Jim Crow laws, moreover, strictly forbade marriage and sexual activity between the races.

This vast and intricate system of white dominance over blacks was enforced in a number of ways. First of all, black people were systematically disenfranchised through white primaries, poll taxes, literacy tests, and physical intimidation. Denied the vote, they possessed no legal mechanism by which they could modify or eliminate Jim Crow laws and practices. Secondly, the South’s segregated system was upheld by a court system that excluded blacks from juries and extralegal violence in the form of lynchings, beatings, and mob violence. Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and white citizens councils severely punished even the smallest deviations from Jim Crow law with terrorist violence. (Between 1882, when records of reported lynchings began to be kept, and 1950, 4,739 Americans, the majority of them black southerners, were lynched. Wright’s home state of Mississippi reported 539 lynchings during this period, far more than any other state in the United States.)

Wright experienced what he called the “horror” of southern racism in his own personal life, and it left an indelible mark on his consciousness and shaped his work in all of its phases. As many critics and biographers have pointed out, Wright’s southern experiences remained at the core of his personality and even though he traveled widely as an adult and lived in a great variety of places outside the South, he was never able to shake the alienation, fear, and anger that the segregated South induced in him as a child and young man. His uncle Silas Hoskins was murdered in 1917 by whites who resented his business success and Wright and his family had to flee Hoskins’s home in the middle of the night to avoid further violence being inflicted on them. Wright also knew a young black man named Ray Robinson who was castrated when he allegedly had sex with a white prostitute. As Hazel Rowley has pointed out, Wright would “never forget Ray Robinson’s fate” (39) and learned at a young age to distance himself from most white people. And Wright himself was once overwhelmed by the fear of being lynched when he worked as a handyman for a white family in Jackson and accidentally witnessed their daughter naked when he entered her room without knocking to deliver firewood. (He later revealed to psychiatrist Albert Wertham that this disturbing episode was the germ of the scene in Native Son where Bigger, fearing a fate similar to Ray Robinson’s, panics in Mary Dalton’s bedroom.)

As Wright stressed in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” his growing up in the Deep South provided him with a series of traumatic experiences that shaped his consciousness and ingrained in him “gems of Jim Crow wisdom,”⁴ which always forced him to realize that he was a black outsider in a white-dominated world and that terrible punishments awaited him if he violated the harsh written and unspoken codes of the Jim Crow South. The fear that he knew as a southern black person would later turn into rage but, as John Reilly has pointed out, he would triumph over this potentially “self-destructive rage” by transforming it into powerfully controlled “art.”⁵

Wright’s sense of himself as a lonely outsider was deepened by chronic family problems. After his mother became a semi-invalid when Wright was eleven, Wright and his family moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where they became part of his grandmother’s household. Wright always felt like an outsider in this extended family, partly because of temperamental differences between him and his grandmother, but also because his grandmother was a staunch Seventh Day Adventist who tried to impose her sternly puritanical religious vision on his rebellious sensibility. This led to Wright distancing himself strongly from all members of his family, with the exception of his mother, and to developing what would become a lifelong distaste for formal religion and other forms of externally imposed authority.

Wright rebelled strongly against being placed in a Seventh Day Adventist grammar school under the tutelage of his equally pious Aunt Addie and by 1921 was enrolled in Jim Hill School, a public elementary school which his grandmother despised. Although Wright’s nomadic life had put him behind in his studies and he was placed at Jim Hill School two years behind his age group, he thrived in public education and began to develop a strong habit of reading, devouring detective magazines, dime novels about the West, and pulp fiction focusing on American success stories, especially the novels of Horatio Alger. Wright’s habit of reading opened up a new and liberating world for him that was in stark contrast to the harshly restrictive life he was directed to live by his family and southern society. He entered Smith Robertson Junior High School in 1923 and graduated as class valedictorian on May 29, 1925. While a student at Smith Robertson, Wright published his first short story, “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre” in the Spring 1924 issue of the Southern Register, Jackson’s black newspaper. Wright’s growing rebelliousness and individualism was later displayed vividly when he refused to deliver the graduation speech prepared for him by the school principal and instead wrote and delivered his own speech, “The Attributes of Life.”

Because Jackson’s segregated school system provided no high school for black students, Wright was unable to pursue his education further and worked in a number of odd jobs such as hotel bellboy, movie theater usher, and a janitor and delivery boy at American Optical Company. As he revealed in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” he tried to gain the skills necessary to attain better work in the optical company but was severely chided by his white coworkers for aspiring to have “white man’s work” (UTC, 10). Reminded again of the “boundaries” (UTC,11) that black people faced in the segregated South, he became determined to leave Jackson, and in 1925 he went to Memphis, Tennessee, where he boarded with a black family and worked a series of menial jobs as a dishwasher, delivery boy, and porter at the Merry Optical Company.

His experience in Memphis proved to be a turning point in life because he was free at last to read widely without his grandmother’s disapproval and was also able to begin imagining for himself alternatives to the “place” prescribed for him by Mississippi whites. Borrowing a library card from a white Catholic coworker who was not threatened by a young black man’s desire to educate himself, Wright withdrew many books from the Memphis Public Library, two of which would radically change his life, H. L. Mencken’s Prejudices and A Book of Prefaces. He was immediately impressed by Mencken’s iconoclastic mind and was especially intrigued by Mencken’s sharp criticisms of the American South as a backward society crippled by mindless prejudice and an irrational fear of modern freedom and individualism. Moreover, Wright found in A Book of Prefaces a reading list of modern masterworks, which became for him a program of self-education.

As Wright revealed in Black Boy, Mencken’s example and the works Mencken approved of convinced him that books could not only become “vicarious cultural infusions” (BB, 282), which could revive him after he had been devastated by a static and decadent southern culture, but he also learned from Mencken that words could be “weapons” to fight the “blind ignorance and hate” he had experienced in the South. Such books could provide Wright with “a sense of freedom” that he needed to liberate himself from “southern darkness” (BB, 282, 284).

The authors whom Mencken cited from the realistic and naturalistic traditions in modern literature proved particularly useful and inspiring to Wright. In Black Boy he stressed that “All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel and I could not read enough ...