A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago by E. James West (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago by E. James West Richard A. Courage A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago By E. James West (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022. Pp. xi, 282. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Clothbound, $110.00; paperbound, $24.95.) The history of Chicago’s Black press has been partially explored by scholars like Christopher Reed, Ethan Michaeli, and Gerald Horne, but E. James West illuminates its epic scope and significance through his book’s expansive time frame and its intertwining of accounts of individual media institutions—their leaders, milestone events, editorial policies, and ideological commitments—with [End Page 295] analyses of the geographical places and physical spaces within which Black newspapers and magazines grew and competed. West’s narrative extends from 1905 to the mid-1970s—from the year Robert Sengstacke Abbott founded the weekly Chicago Defender newspaper to the heyday of John H. Johnson’s media empire and its magazines Ebony, Jet, and Black World. This frames the subject against a backdrop of momentous events that these publications chronicled, influenced, and were in turn shaped by: the Great Migration, the emergence of a racially homogenous Black Metropolis on the South Side, the Black Chicago Renaissance, and the Black Power Movement. The intersection of spatial and temporal axes is signaled by two maps immediately preceding the introduction. One shows the locations of eight buildings that at different times housed offices of the focal enterprises: the Defender and Johnson Publishing Company. The second map expands the scope by showing the addresses of twelve other Black media enterprises (including the Associated Negro Press, Chicago Bee, and Chicago Whip), which collectively demarked what West calls “Chicago’s Black Newspaper Row.” Later, West writes that “the spaces inhabited by Black media concerns . . . came to embody the highly contingent and heavily contested relationships between Black literary and cultural production, business development, civil rights, and urban politics“ (p. 5). The focus on the built environment is fresh and provocative, creating openings for West to spotlight such relatively unfamiliar figures as Henrietta Lee and John Moutoussamy. Lee rented Abbott the single room where he slept and produced early issues of the Defender on a borrowed folding table. She typically figures in accounts of the newspaper’s origins as a benevolent maternal presence hovering vaguely in the background of Abbott’s self-making struggles. West amasses sufficient detail for a more rounded account of an independent woman with multiple institutional and community affiliations—a civic leader whose influence one could read between the lines of the newspaper she sustained for over fifteen years. If Lee is associated with the Defender’s tenuous early years, Moutoussamy is associated with Johnson Publishing at the apex of its influence and commercial success. A graduate of Illinois Institute of Technology, Moutoussamy, much influenced by Mies van der Rohe, had become the “Godfather of black architects in Chicago” by the 1960s (p. 185). Johnson hired Moutoussamy to design his new headquarters at 820 Michigan Avenue in the heart of the South Loop business and cultural district. Moutoussamy designed an “immediately recognizable” eleven-story structure, rooted in the Modernist International style but with distinctive architectural features paying tribute to Black history and physically embodying Johnson’s triumphalist celebration of Black entrepreneurship and consumer culture (p. 187). [End Page 296] In similar fashion, West connects sketches of other Black media enterprises to his overarching narrative of the Defender and Johnson Publishing. For example, we glimpse the Chicago Whip’s ferocious competition with the Defender in the early 1920s—turning the very success of Abbott’s newspaper into a seeming liability. Whip editors charged that, with the Defender’s new state-of-the-art production plant and launch of a national edition, the older publication had grown “too big to pay attention” to ordinary African Americans in Chicago (p. 64). Some readers might prefer more fleshed-out accounts of the other publications within “Chicago’s Black Newspaper Row,” but such expansion would risk loss of taut narrative pacing and sharp focus on the significance of the built environment. On balance, A House for the Struggle...