{"title":"Literary Selections","authors":"","doi":"10.5622/illinois/9780252043055.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252043055.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"Editors’ Note: Our study concludes with a section comprising three literary selections that we intend to break new ground for a scholarly collection. None of the selections is a conventional academic essay, each belongs to a different genre of writing, and each amplifies the light already shone on the roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance....","PeriodicalId":439958,"journal":{"name":"Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121936415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Black Creole Vision of Archibald J. Motley Jr.:","authors":"B. Harrison","doi":"10.5406/j.ctv11cwb42.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctv11cwb42.12","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":439958,"journal":{"name":"Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132435250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Chicago’s Letters Group and the Emergence of the Black Chicago Renaissance","authors":"Richard A. Courage","doi":"10.5406/j.ctv11cwb42.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctv11cwb42.16","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter unearths the history of a literary circle formed in 1927 to publish a journal called Letters and foster appreciation of black literature. Its leader was Chicago Defender city editor Dewey Roscoe Jones, whose reviews in his weekly “Bookshelf” column established him as black Chicago’s premier literary critic and commentator on the Harlem Renaissance. Most participants in Letters were university students, but they were joined by several older writers, including poets Fenton Johnson and W. H. A. Moore. Future Black Chicago Renaissance luminaries Richard Wright and Frank Marshall Davis visited occasionally but felt unwelcome. Recovering this missing link in cultural history deepens scholarly understanding of the New Negro movement beyond 1920s Harlem and of early evolution of an African American literary tradition in Chicago.","PeriodicalId":439958,"journal":{"name":"Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125227715","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fenton Johnson, Literary Entrepreneurship, and the Dynamics of Class and Family","authors":"Richard A. Courage, James C. Hall","doi":"10.5406/j.ctv11cwb42.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctv11cwb42.10","url":null,"abstract":"Fenton Johnson was both poet and journalist. His Champion Magazine (1916-1917) pioneered a monthly digest format aimed at a nascent black middle-class audience interested in “Negro Achievement” from sports, theatre, and popular musical entertainment to business, politics, military service, and the professions, to art and literature. Although Johnson proved inept as a literary entrepreneur and contradictory in ideology, his first journal was richly cosmopolitan in scope and highly professional in writing, design, and layout. Johnson’s local collaborators included older African American intellectuals such as George Washington Ellis, Richard T. Greener, John Roy Lynch, and W. H. A. Moore. Besides more accurately locating Fenton Johnson in African American cultural history, this chapter sheds light on black writing and thought on the cusp of the Harlem Renaissance.","PeriodicalId":439958,"journal":{"name":"Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123238099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fannie Barrier Williams, the New Negro, and Black Feminist Pragmatism, 1893–1926","authors":"M. Deegan","doi":"10.5406/j.ctv11cwb42.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctv11cwb42.8","url":null,"abstract":"Fannie Barrier Williams brilliantly analyzed and participated in the tumultuous changes in black Chicago from 1887-1926. She specialized in essays and political advocacy for African American women. She compared them to “the new woman” and “the New Negro,” and by 1895, she had defined African American women as uniquely combining the characteristics of both groups. She also employed the concepts and ideas of pragmatists and feminist pragmatists and brought black women’s ideas and experiences to this social theory.","PeriodicalId":439958,"journal":{"name":"Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance","volume":"921 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126993001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Black Creole Vision of Archibald J. Motley Jr.","authors":"B. Harrison","doi":"10.5622/illinois/9780252043055.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252043055.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores how Archibald J. Motley Jr. developed into the successful, notably iconoclastic, artist he became. In 1918, Motley announced his aesthetic independence, his embrace of “art for art’s sake,” in a manifesto in the Chicago Defender -- a significant precursor to later debates associated with an artistically-inclined New Negro movement dominated rhetorically by W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Unlike such Chicago peers as William Farrow and Charles C. Dawson, Motley pursued his exceptionalist path without artistic, social, or financial support from Chicago's Black elite. Motley also described himself as a black Creole, or \"French Negro.\" This unique ethnic heritage, his racially-exclusive associations within the art world, and his residence in the overwhelmingly white Englewood neighborhood amplified his sense of uniqueness.","PeriodicalId":439958,"journal":{"name":"Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance","volume":"30 S1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133171038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Black Chicago Pioneers in the Training of Dancers","authors":"C. Semmes","doi":"10.5406/j.ctv11cwb42.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctv11cwb42.13","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the life of pioneer dance instructor Hazel Thompson Davis in early twentieth-century Black Chicago. Contextually, diverse venues for live entertainment in the broad spectrum of American society created significant demand for a trained theatrical workforce, of which varieties of dancers were major components. By 1916, Chicago’s Hazel Thompson Davis began to meet this demand through the school she created and the performing artists she trained. A pioneer and innovator in her field, the Chicago tradition in dance instruction and performance initiated by Davis would make Chicago a powerful force in the instruction of an African American theatrical workforce nationally and internationally, in the broader cultural renaissance taking place in Black communities across the country, and in the evolution of American popular culture.","PeriodicalId":439958,"journal":{"name":"Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125485360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Entering Chicago”","authors":"J. M. Davis","doi":"10.5406/j.ctv11cwb42.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctv11cwb42.19","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Editors’ Note: This prose poem appears as part of the introductory material in the first (1927) volume of Frederick H. H. Robb’s remarkable compilation, The Intercollegian Wonder Book or the Negro in Chicago 1779–1927. “Entering Chicago” is attributed there to “J. M. Davis,” but internal and external evidence convince us that this was in fact contributed by journalist and poet Frank Marshall Davis shortly after his arrival in Chicago from his native Kansas. As such, the piece marks the ongoing “migration of the talented tenth” to the Black Metropolis, highlights the ubiquity of the railroad train as icon of Chicago’s modern moment, evidences Davis’s early efforts in free verse influenced by Carl Sandburg and Fenton Johnson, and prefigures the documentary spirit that would animate the most memorable works by writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance....\u0000","PeriodicalId":439958,"journal":{"name":"Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127951044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From “These ‘Colored United States,’ VIII—Illinois: Mecca of the Migrant Mob,” The Messenger 5 (December 1923)","authors":"Charles S. Johnson","doi":"10.5406/j.ctv11cwb42.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctv11cwb42.18","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Editors’ Note: In our second literary selection—excerpts from Charles S. Johnson’s 1923 essay “Illinois: Mecca of the Migrant Mob”—the famed sociologist renders a broad-stroke account of consolidation and growth of the Black Metropolis. This essay, like many pieces of historical, sociological, and journalistic writing emanating from Chicago contributed to a literature of fact that was characteristic of early African American literary work in the city. While Johnson’s assertions about the paucity of black intellectual and cultural life are challenged throughout the current volume, equally important to note is the stylistic strategy with which he presents his analysis of “this Colored Chicago—the dream city—city of the dreadful night!” His elegant, high-keyed prose employs metaphor and other literary devices and arrays facts with novelistic selectivity and pacing. In this manner, Johnson’s essay looks ahead to a mutually beneficial interpenetration of fiction and sociological writing that would mark many of the most notable works of the Black Chicago Renaissance....\u0000","PeriodicalId":439958,"journal":{"name":"Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121674274","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}