Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DAVARIAN L. BALDWIN is associate professor of history and African and African Diaspora studies at Boston College.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

As early-twentieth-century Chicago swelled with an influx of at least 250,000 new black urban migrants, the city became a center of consumer capitalism, flourishing with professional sports, beauty shops, film production companies, recording studios, and other black cultural and communal institutions. Davarian Baldwin argues that this mass consumer marketplace generated a vibrant intellectual life and planted seeds of political dissent against the dehumanizing effects of white capitalism. Pushing the traditional boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance to new frontiers, Baldwin identifies a fresh model of urban culture rich with politics, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chicago's New Negroes

The University of North Carolina Press

Contents

Acknowledgments...........................................................................................................xiIntroduction "Chicago Has No Intelligentsia"?: Consumer Culture and Intellectual Life Reconsidered.......................1One Mapping the Black Metropolis: A Cultural Geography of the Stroll.....................................................21Two Making Do: Beauty, Enterprise, and the "Makeover" of Race Womanhood..................................................53Three Theaters of War: Spectacles, Amusements, and the Emergence of Urban Film Culture...................................91Four The Birth of Two Nations: White Fears, Black Jeers, and the Rise of a "Race Film" Consciousness.....................121Five Sacred Tastes: The Migrant Aesthetics and Authority of Gospel Music.................................................155Six The Sporting Life: Recreation, Self-Reliance, and Competing Visions of Race Manhood..................................193Epilogue The Crisis of the Black Bourgeoisie, Or, What If Harold Cruse Had Lived in Chicago?.............................233Notes.....................................................................................................................243Bibliography..............................................................................................................297Index.....................................................................................................................355

Chapter One

A CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE STROLL

* * *

We can end this review of the institutions, businesses and life of the Negro in Chicago with much self-contentment, if the review of this big city has unsealed the eyes of many, regardless of where they live, who contend that the race has no field for its capital. -Howard A. Phelps, "Negro Life in Chicago," Half-Century Magazine, May 1919

The Map of Colored Chicago: Showing the Streets, Street Car Lines, and especially featuring the Colored section, giving the location of all the principal Colored Churches, Colored Hospitals, Lodges, Colored Clubs, Colored Y.M.C.A., Colored Y.W.C.A., and other public places of amusement, recreation and interest. -Progressive Book Company advertisement, Half-Century Magazine, April 1922

Chicago ... was a real us-for-we, we-for-us community. It was a community of men and women who were respected, people of great dignity-doctors, lawyers, policy operators, bootblacks, barbers, beauticians, saloonkeepers, night clerks, cab owners and cab drivers, stockyard workers, owners of after-hours joints, bootleggers-everything and everybody. -Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington, Music Is My Mistress, 1931

THE SPATIAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF RACIAL RESPECTABILITY Six years before cultural critic Alain Locke made an almost identical (and more famous) claim about the Harlem Renaissance, the impact of the Great Migration encouraged writer Howard Phelps to remark, "Professional men are leaving the South on the trail of their clients and patients who have settled in Chicago." In the same 1919 essay, Phelps offered an extensive documentation of prominent black church and amusement landmarks complemented by the individual accomplishments of black entrepreneurs and leaders as indications of racial respectability in the city. His Half-Century Magazine essay, "Negro Life in Chicago," was followed by the Progressive Book Company's 1922 advertisement for a map of the same community. Finally, when musician/composer Duke Ellington visited in 1931, he was equally impressed by Chicago's black institutions and its "community of men and women who were respected" (emphasis added). These various cultural mappings highlight the consistent symbolic importance of black "enterprise" in constructing notions of race pride and in securing the desire for a many times elusive respectability. And yet on first sight, Ellington's inclusion of policy (illegal lottery) operators, saloon keepers, and bootleggers as enterprising might seem out of place and glaringly incommensurate with both Phelps's and the Progressive Book Company's vision of racial respectability.

Such divergent mappings of the same place and the inclusion of different figures and institutions under the same banner of respect and dignity are significant. They reveal the larger spatial transformations, class conflicts, and ideological struggles that took place in both the physical and conceptual space of the emerging black metropolis. The contested highlights and oversights in the various geographical representations of the metropolis by white observers and black old and new settlers reveal contested interpretations of what a black modernity could mean. These embattled mappings became the terrain upon which Chicago's New Negro life was built.

At the center of the emerging "metropolis" vision stood Chicago's black commercial amusement and business district, the "Stroll." This chapter examines the same space and time of the Stroll from three different conceptual vantage points, three simultaneously generated and overlapping planes of existence, each competing for community (re)cognition. The space and meaning of the Stroll was pushed and pulled as a battleground over the three basic images of black primitivism, racial respectability, and leisure-based labor. Amid this representational struggle, the Stroll became the spatial articulation of different New Negro intellectual positions on the meaning and use of the black metropolis as both a built environment and an ideal. Yet, the Stroll was not an island unto itself but must be understood as a spectacular manifestation of the international transformations affecting both the community and the city at large.

FROM BLACK BELT TO BLACK METROPOLIS: SLUMMERS, SOCIAL SCIENTISTS, UPLIFTERS, AND ENTERPRISERS

By 1910 and especially after 1915, the ranks of Chicago's black citizenry were rapidly swelling within the cramped spaces of what was called the Black Belt, a narrow strip of land on the south side of the city from 18th Street to 39th Street and bounded by State Street on the east and the Rock Island Railroad tracks and LaSalle Street on the west. As the population exploded from 44,130 in 1910 to 233,903 by 1930, a trend of spatial consolidation restricted the Black Belt's expansion primarily to the south, west to Wentworth, and a few streets east with some black residents as far east as Cottage Grove. Black residents were faced with the "dynamic of choice and constraint" and therefore, unlike other immigrants, were more restricted to residential space along the lines of ethnicity instead of class.

The force of racist restrictive covenants and racial violence helped materialize the notion of racial restraint quite clearly. Restrictive covenants became legally binding agreements, usually between white real estate agents and owners, to prevent the renting or sale of housing to nonwhites, with threat of civil action. The neighboring Hyde Park, Kenwood, and Woodlawn areas to the south had more available and...