Chicago historically was a proven incubator from which cultural creativity arose from various sources, institutionally, organizationally, and individually. The city also had established itself as magnet, locus, wellspring, and actualization of cultural expression, appearing as an especially nurturing hostess.1 Ignored from widespread historical recognition until the late twentieth century, then, was the saga of black Chicago’s civic and cultural elite as an aesthetic trendsetter, the emergence of a clearly defined class structure based on discernible lines of accumulating and celebrating wealth, and the rise of entrepreneurial and business classes both supportive and exploitative of the arts. Several major factors contributed to these phenomena. First, demographic transformation propelled a minuscule minority population into a burgeoning audience for the arts, with a range of interests that stretched from the cosmopolitan to the parochial. Second, class evolution paralleled twentieth-century business growth and professional development, both wellsprings from which socioeconomic differentiation and class structure naturally derived. Third, the appreciation of aesthetics for its own sake, the individual’s limits of enjoyment, and racial affirmation all existed simultaneously and bestowed their own peculiarities to the linkage of spirit, mind, and heart to artistic taste. The most cogent example of this was the influence of the sojourners of the Great Migration that further strengthened the black Chicago artist’s search for independence from external directives affecting his or her aesthetic creativity. With the advent of the Jazz Age in the 1920s, black Chicago’s literary production unfortunately drifted into a penumbra of relative unimportance in contrast to the rising interest and support given to the performing arts. Contemporaneously, an upsurge of creativity manifested itself in the performing arts and, to a lesser extent, was complemented in the visual arts. When economic depression and reform dominated life during the succeeding decade, literary revitalization matched growing musical versatility and visual production, producing a Black Chicago Renaissance.2 Changes in the socioeconomic class structure found elite, middling, and proletarian interests often coinciding around several aspects of the arts but still most often dividing.
During the 1920s, a contrarian view emerged, disquieting the artists who had built on several generations of creative activities within the city. With canonical preciseness, the usually perceptive and accurate social analysts Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier depicted black Chicago as devoid of an intelligentsia and a creative, supportive, cultural milieu. According to Johnson in 1923:
The intellectual life has numerous excuses for not existing. The frontier mind is too suspiciously sentimental about the virtues of mother wit and too brutally contemptuous of culture. . . . [L]ittle literature comes out of the city. No, the kingdom of the second ward has no self-sustaining intelligentsia, and a miserably poor acquaintance with that of the world surrounding it. But it leads these colored United States in its musical aspirations with, perhaps, the best musical school in the race, as these go. The city has developed many accomplished artists who incidentally have been forced to seek recognition in the “Loop.”3
His fellow researcher at the University of Chicago concurred later in the decade:
Chicago has no intelligentsia. It is true she has the largest Negro newspaper in the country . . . [but] the direction of her energies [gravitate] towards practical accomplishments. . . . At the recital given by George Garner, who returned from triumphs abroad to entertain the home folks in Chicago, many an old woman struggled up the stairs of Orchestra hall after the day’s work to hear him sing. Some of them were uncouth and greasy and thought he was singing an English number on the program when he was singing Schubert’s Der Linderbaum. But they were happy to hear one of their own.4
For reasons lost to posterity, the conclusive bases for their combined lack of awareness of what historical evidence has revealed about the previous decades—creativity, innovation, independence—are unknown. A priori assumptions, personal inclinations, and perhaps a preoccupation with the celebrity of Harlem during the 1920s provide answers.5
Examination of the historical record proved them thoroughly misinformed. As early as the World’s Columbian Exposition, black Chicago’s population was introduced to aesthetic expression’s most dynamic element, that of external contact and interaction. Scott Joplin brought ragtime; Henry Ossawa Tanner and George Washington Carver took to canvas and produced genre and natural productions; Paul Laurence Dunbar, along with Hallie Q. Brown and Harry Burleigh, contributed from the beaux arts, in poetry, elocution, and music. The Fon people of Dahomey, more than one hundred strong, broadened America’s appreciation of syncopated music through drumming and other instrumental playing.6 At the Haytian Pavilion, Frederick Douglass barred Fon drumming, heard nightly at home in Haiti as the music of Vodun, but encouraged the beaux arts. The Great Sage threw his lot in completely with a European-based mode of cultural expression and thereby continued to demonstrate his classism through his disdain for any part of African-based, popular culture.7
The arts as defined extend beyond grand culture, or the beaux arts, which encompass classical music, dance, painting, sculpture, and theater, all European grounded. The arts in their totality include African-based popular forms in music, dance, painting, sculpture, theater, and other expressive modes. Specifically in music, the genres included ragtime, “coon songs,” spirituals, gospel, swing, progressive jazz, or bop, and the first phase of the blues, now known as classical, and after World War II, modern blues. Literary production among the expanding refined element of society advanced slowly from biography and political history to poetry, drama, fiction, and criticism, all destined to flower during the New Deal period and afterwards. Sculpture and painting blossomed and then flowered at their own pace. Lastly, even technology advanced to become a major influence in the creative process.
Among the foundations of culture in black Chicago were the various, mixed-class, weekly church forums, along with the elite-oriented Prudence Crandall Club and the Frederick Douglass Center, established in 1905 by Reverend Celia Parker Woolley, with assistance from Fannie Barrier Williams, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and others.8 As Chicago’s first interracial center attracting both the white middle class and the black middling class, it contributed to better racial understanding. As an intellectual fulcrum, it stimulated thought in a variety of areas beyond race and informed the foundations of a literati. This organization contributed mightily to the establishment of artistic-support groups among African Americans in the city, with one of its primary reasons for being the establishment of a meeting place for the learned among the African American elite to interact with their counterparts across the racial divide and to elevate the appreciation of beaux arts culture among African Americans. Housed in a three-story, attractive, white-stone building with twelve rooms, it contained “a beautiful assembly room filled with books . . . [and featured] a fiction class in literature, now studying George Eliot.”9 The members of the Prudence Crandall Club belonged as did other college-trained blacks. Fannie and S. Laing Williams, Ferdinand and Ida Barnett, George Cleveland and Fannie Hall, and Edwin and Florence Bentley all belonged.10
Fannie Barrier Williams continued to write critically for various black and white publications and continued to garner recognition based on her erudite oratory on “The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation” at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.11 That Williams had ventured to link intellectual development and not mere intelligence with African American progress was revealing in itself. Careful in her thought and lectures, she challenged prophetically the assessments of black Chicagoans from scholars far ahead in time. For example, Louis R. Harlan’s short description of these folk as belonging to a population composed “mostly of the inarticulate, the unskilled working and servant class” told only a part of their collective socioeconomic character as well as the saga to improve their lives.12 If they were inarticulate, Williams found that their activities belied any ignorance associated with this trait. She reported that hundreds of young men availed themselves of church-sponsored literary-club and other social activities in efforts to improve themselves. When Johnson and Frazier condemned black Chicago because of, as they claimed, its lack of high intelligence, yet alone intellectual interests and abilities, neither provided evidence of any sort nor compelling arguments on the subject, only assertions.
The formation of the Washington Intercollegiate Club in 1909 brought together young adults who attended area colleges in proximity. The Wabash YMCA opened in 1913 and also served as meeting place of the inquisitive as well as the dilettante to higher learning and various forms of cultural expression. During his summer visits to Chicago after receiving his doctorate in history at Harvard University, Carter G. Woodson resided at the Y. There, he engaged in discussion and strategic planning with fellow Harvard graduate, A. L. Jackson, the Y’s administrative leader, who held the position of secretary. Woodson, along with Jackson, James Stamps, H. B. Hargrove, and Dr. George Cleveland Hall, organized the first modern body to scientifically study the life and culture of people of African descent. It was aptly named the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Impressive in its own right, it was not the case of a new idea bearing fruit. Reverend Richard R. Wright Jr. (who was trained at the University of Chicago in religion and sociology) organized his own Negro history club at Trinity Mission Church, and Wells-Barnett, assisted by Harvard-trained Richard T. Greener, organized a history club at Grace Presbyterian Church as early as 1908.13
One critical point in black Chicago’s interest in critical thinking occurred in 1903 after Harvard-trained Du Bois’s destined classic, Souls of Black Folk, appeared in print. Its raising of substantive issues informed dialogue at Reverend Woolley’s home as well as the intellectual coterie formed at the competing Men’s Sunday Forums at the local AME churches—Bethel, Quinn Chapel, and Institutional. Reverend Wright participated in the discussions firsthand at the Institutional AME Men’s Sunday Club and in the split developing between the two intellectual currents and among fence straddlers. While half agreed with Du Bois’s assessment of higher education as well as black life and its leadership needs, only one quarter sympathized with Booker T. Washington’s position, which ranked as anathema to assertive northern blacks.14
Paralleling an interest in learning and the promotion of education that had proceeded steadily forward since antebellum days, a close-knit circle of African Americans within the ranks of the elite was slowly building a literary tradition. True, by this early date, black Chicago had not produced a formal literati, but, nonetheless, a foreshadowing of the potential held in the literary arts appeared. Notable for their intellectual and musical appreciation were the Bentleys, who “were engaged in a highly active social life which included on Sunday afternoons, fashionable assemblages of artists, literary figures, [and] musicians. . . . Bentley’s [concert] vocal renditions were part of the entertainment of these salons. . . . Many black and white personages, who at the turn of the century were students in the Chicago area, held fond memories of the Bentley’s sociability and hospitality.”15
Journalists such as Fannie Barrier Williams, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Ferdinand L. Barnett, and Robert S. Abbott among others exchanged ideas and on occasion transferred them into prose beyond the pages of newspapers. Moreover, an intelligentsia had been forming since the late nineteenth century that produced intellectual and creative pieces, some semblance of scholarship in critical essays and autobiographical narratives.
At critical junctures in the settling of Chicago, black intellectual progression, literary interest, critical appreciation, and educational advancement for both children and adult learners achieved incremental movement forward. It was not monumental to be sure, but progress was evident. Importantly, in some aspects it anticipated the interest some of the writers of the postwar Harlem renaissance had in examining the inner dynamics of black life. African American interaction within a communal setting overshadowed aesthetic curiosity in racial reaction and relationships. According to the 1910 census, their numbers included ten editors and reporters to be added to scholarly and critically minded individuals such as Major John R. Lynch, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. The census cited fifteen persons who were identified as artists of one variety or another with a visual artist such as William Edouard Scott moving to perfect his techniques in genre (locally focused or indigenous) art. This approach concentrated on the everyday goings of rank-and-file African Americans that brought so much pride, joy, and excitement into the black world. In the area of the literary arts, the same development proceeded forward. The performing arts included 54 actresses and 136 musicians.16
By the 1910s, conditions appeared ripe for building a serious literary tradition. A local committee of writers and authors coalesced into a formal body affiliated with an even-larger national grouping, the National Association of Negro Authors and Writers. Physician M. A. Majors and others took the lead in seeking a greater appreciation in writing, reading, and critical thinking. Their one major aim was to elevate their group to a level at which independent, indigenous thinking emerges, less dependent than ever before on friendly whites for support and less vulnerable to harmful, racist-based, white criticism. In seeking racial self-definition and hoping to capture the popular imagination, they eschewed mimicry of whites while promoting an earnest interest in the group’s essence, sometimes in the dynamics of everyday, working-class life. Further, they sought to stimulate a racial consciousness that would withstand all abuse and engender a higher sense of unity. In this endeavor, their efforts would parallel advancements in politics, business, and fraternal life.
Majors assumed the presidency sometime during this period and was in office in 1915 when the Chicago committee hosted the national conclave. Majors’s educational background extended beyond his medical training at Meharry Medical College. Majors was a Texan by birth, physician by training, an organizer of the 1893 Columbia Exposition offering by African Americans, and a writer through avocation. He embarked on his second career in the arts by heading the Department of Penmanship at Meharry Medical College in Nashville. Next he edited the Western News in California and returned to Texas by 1890, where he began compiling Noted Negro Women, Their Triumphs and Activities. This effort afforded him the opportunity to commit himself to elevating his race’s perception of itself by honoring African American women.17 His earliest vehicle of expression, after his commitment to medicine at Meharry College, was literary, demonstrated through his compilation of data for this book. Once in Chicago by the world’s fair year of 1893, he found a publisher for his work and laid the foundation for a writing tradition that would bloom within two generations.
Over a two-day span in mid-August, Majors and his committee of Professor Greener, George W. Ellis, Major Lynch, W. H. A. Moore, Hiram Holland, and Henry David Middleton played host to one hundred writers. Their purpose was clear-cut and indicative of the times when an aroused sense of racial destiny was evident: “impress the rest of mankind with his literary prowess . . . while with poetic and literary grace he tells his story—a wonderful story; one that will carry the listener wherever human thought has evolved an idea.”18
Greener, who holds distinction as the first African American graduate of Harvard University, in 1870, arrived in Chicago in 1906 upon his retirement from public service with the U.S. Department of State. Overseas, he served at diplomatic posts in Bombay, India, and Vladivostok, Russia. Earlier, Greener had built a successful career in education and law. He earned a law degree at the University of South Carolina, practiced in Washington, D.C., and served as a librarian and professor of Greek, mathematics, and constitutional law. In addition, he assumed an associate editorship with the Encyclopedia of American Biography. Once in Chicago, Greener joined the prestigious Harvard Club and devoted himself to civic matters. No doubt, he met Woodson on Woodson’s summer sojourns to the University of Chicago before he finished his work toward a doctorate at Harvard in 1912. Jackson was to be found at the Wabash YMCA, and W. E. B. Du Bois was a regular visitor to Chicago, speaking at Jane Addams’s Hull House, the black Wendell Phillips Center on the West Side, and numerous religious and secular venues on the South Side.
Rivaling Greener’s credentials were those of George Washington Ellis, an attorney, author, and diplomat, who served for eight years as secretary to the U.S. legation to Liberia. Born in Missouri, “at an early age he evidenced unusual studious application to his books, showing a strong desire for knowledge.” During his adult years, he acquired an education at Howard University and New York City’s Gunton Institute of Economics and Social Science. As part of an emerging intelligentsia, he displayed a “cultured mind and philosophical viewpoint [that] made him acceptable in the company of the most critical minds.” His scholarship included Negro Culture in West Africa: A Social Study of the Negro Group of Vai-Speaking People, with Its Own Alphabet and Written Language, Islam as a Factor in West Africa, Liberia in the Political Psychology of West Africa, and The Psychology of American Race Prejudice.19
Critically, as an author on African peoples, recently he has been labeled as a “racial romanticist,” his writing being too sympathetic to the humanity of his black subjects. However, the University of Chicago anthropologist writing his introduction assessed Negro Culture in West Africa thus: “As a scientific investigation, as a contribution to social problems, as a basis for political action, it has a definite mission.” Further, to a contemporary, his writing evinced a “clarity of vision” and “that sympathizing interest which is always calculated to do justice to the cause under consideration.” In contrast, his only novel, The Leopold’s Claw (1917), was uncharacteristically patronizing to Africans and focused on love and adventure. Ellis’s early and unexpected death in 1919 dealt a blow to black Chicago’s evolving intellectual climate.20
Yet, another contributor to this incipient literary tradition and circle appeared when former Mississippi Reconstruction congressman and now Chicago resident (since 1912) John R. Lynch published his perspective on that turbulent time in U.S. political history. As an introspective view of American politics from the freedman’s viewpoint, Lynch’s Facts of Reconstruction, published in Chicago in 1913, was a turning point in African American literary production. He acquired a taste for learning early as a slave but lacked formal educational training. By chance, a friendly slave master allowed him to learn the rudiments of reading and writing despite a Louisiana law prohibiting the practice. Further efforts at self-education followed, and in adulthood he became an insatiable reader of ancient and modern Western literature. The New York Times even took note of this freedman who demonstrated “an unquenchable thirst for knowledge.” He soon transformed himself into a master of parliamentary procedure and an effective Republican party leader in Mississippi. By 1872, ambition and rigorous discipline and self-training allowed him to pass the Mississippi bar. After success in southern politics, in his later years in Chicago he would make up for his nearly invisible role in local politics with his pen and interest in writing his race’s version of its role in the Reconstruction.21 With a sense of purpose, Lynch assumed a role as the black voice on what transpired and why during that pivotal epoch in a way no other contemporary, black written works did. Repeatedly in the twentieth century, he would challenge academicians who posed as serious a threat to black advancement as Reconstruction-era racists did in his young adult years. In at least three instances, he produced written refutations to the racist Dunning-Burgess-Rhodes schools of race prejudice that tainted scholarship for decades. Using the academic framework his friend Woodson’s journal, the Journal of Negro History, provided, he constructed a formidable point of challenge. As to his critical skills, one of William A. Dunning’s students, J. W. Garner, assessed Lynch’s work as balanced in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review: “On the whole, the book is a fair and temperate presentation of the case of the reconstructionists.” Garner, despite his support for the prevailing negativism toward Reconstruction-era interpretation, wrote that Lynch’s piece was objectively presented, being devoid of emotionalism: “There is no evidence of bitterness or vindictiveness.”22 New York publisher Walter Neale, who saw something quite positive on the horizon for black writing and American race relations, wrote to Lynch, “Once give your race in this country a literature of its own—an adequate literature—and the problem of the races will have been solved. And, I am glad to say, there seems to me to have been greater activity among Negro writers in America during the past five years than during the 200 preceding years. Why, I now have before me, recently submitted to our house, the manuscript of a superb work by a member of your race, George W. Ellis [of Chicago].”23 When Woodson evaluated Lynch’s integrity and contribution to letters upon his death in 1940, he noted, “Lynch emerged as a clean man whose enemies eloquently testify as to his honesty and sincerity of purpose. Although denied the opportunity for education which many of his contemporaries enjoyed, no man of his time had a better grasp of the meaning of the political drama in which he participated or the ability to express his thought in more forceful and convincing language.” Perhaps, Woodson’s declaration that “he [Lynch] must take his place in History as a statesman to whom historians will inevitably direct attention” bore fruit most productively in the works of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) and John Hope Franklin’s Reconstruction (1963), who both built upon Lynch’s clear-cut work to provide another scholarly position from which to assault racism in the American academy as well as the national mind.24
While Henry David Middleton was being acclaimed as another Dunbar with a style so similar that “many of his stray gems are mistaken for Dunbar,” and James D. Corrothers was rising to fame, the youthful Fenton Johnson deserved recognition as another of black Chicago’s earliest exponents of genre poetry.25 His exploration of the black lifestyle in dialect also made his name reflective locally of Dunbar’s works, but a major difference was Johnson’s being credited with employing the medium of free verse. He was born in Chicago in 1888 to a Pullman porter and homemaker who owned their home. But the network of patronage support for his fledgling artistic ambitions encompassed his entire family, including his wealthy uncle, the infamous gambling czar John “Mushmouth” Johnson. Even before his matriculation at the University of Chicago in 1910, the younger, talented Johnson had published in the Broad-Ax newspaper in 1900 and written dramas that were presented at the Pekin Theater. He later taught English at the State University at Louisville in 1910–11 and by 1913 had his first collection of poems, A Little Dreaming, published. The theme was consistent with black Chicagoans’ interest in the dynamics of their lives, and so it celebrated elements of African American and African life.26 In 1915, his Visions of the Dusk explored in dialect the horrors of the slavery experience. The next year, he published the first of two magazines devoted solely to poetry, The Champion Magazine followed by The Favorite Magazine. These early years of his literary production became more limited after 1920.
Chicago businessman Anthony Overton contributed to the advancement of literary interests through his sponsorship of Half-Century Magazine, which began publication in 1916. While Half-Century began primarily as a business organ promoting the emerging Overton financial empire as well as across-the-board South Side entrepreneurial and business operations, it also presented the literary strivings of unknown Chicagoans. It further challenged any publication that relegated its pages only to the literary renderings of high brows, indicating that it was willing to compete with Du Bois’s Crisis with its New York leanings. During the 1920s, Half-Century Magazine focused heavily on publishing local writers of short stories and poetry. Majors soon assumed the helm as an associate editor and contributed articles, and Middleton produced several interesting short stories. Significantly, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was serialized during this period. For his part, Greener added his support through these encouraging words: “Half-Century Magazine outstrips anything published by the race, and it ought to.” The editors blushed and further reacted, “Words of gold falling from a philosopher’s lips, almost stunned us.”27 Fellow Harvardite Du Bois’s comments from the Crisis, if available, would have been equally interesting to report. At this time, it was reported that “contributions to the Crisis and other magazines, give evidence of a remarkable ability for writing.”28
Beyond the ranks of Majors’s writers’ committee, publisher Abbott introduced a new style of journalism to the city in May 1905 when he first produced his Chicago Defender. Beyond the sensationalism that allowed him to build his national readership steadily over the years, he contributed to aesthetics through his innovative ideas and broad cultural appreciation. Perhaps the city’s sixth black newspaper since the founding of the Conservator in 1878, the Chicago Defender promoted protest for civil rights as well as race pride through various forms of black culture. Abbott’s fullest interest in the literary arts personally would be realized in the next decade when he published Abbott’s Monthly.
Contemporarily, Abbott demonstrated his evolving critical skills in analysis on his editorial page. He also unfortunately showed his tendency to engage in hyperbole and outright propaganda. The Defender’s mainstay in the early years was, of course, its sensationalistic and deliberately lurid articles that appealed to the masses. Overall, the assessments of Charles S. Johnson and Carter G. Woodson of Abbott were most telling as they agreed that he had succeeded in making good on his pledge to make the Defender the world’s greatest weekly, at least for African Americans. Johnson wrote, “My personal judgment at the time was that the progress of the racial movement, supported by the Defender, exceeded the Defender’s own calculated designs; that paradoxically, if Mr. Abbott had had more of the discipline of formal education, he would have achieved less, because he would have been restrained by history and precedent.”29 In concurrence, Woodson analyzed, “Abbott deserves credit especially for what he did for the Negro press. Prior to the success of The Chicago Defender Negro newspapers were ordinary sheets which had little influence upon the locality in which they printed. Not a single one had a circulation exceeding 25,000 and most of them considered themselves doing well if the circulation ran as high as 5,000. When Abbott demonstrated, however, the possibility of the newspaper that would cater to the wants of the Negro people in publishing news concerning them and in a way that they could understand and appreciate it, the publications changed their methods and imitated Abbott.”30
From outside the city, an impressive array of talented, lecturers visited constantly, sharing their thoughts with receptive minds. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter were frequent visitors. Peripatetic Du Bois spoke on numerous occasions, such as at Hull House on Lincoln’s birthday in 1907 and at the 1912 NAACP convention session, and in 1913 at an Emancipation Half Century celebration at Orchestra Hall.31 Trotter, editor of the Boston Guardian and president of the National Equal Rights League, to which novelist Charles Chestnutt and journalist editor Ida B. Wells-Barnett belonged, also spoke on numerous occasions.32 Aspiring novelist J. A. Rogers wrote From Superman to Man (1917) while on one of many extended stays in Chicago.33
If the elite and the middling classes appreciated the need for a literati, the arts—performing, visual, and literary, and especially aspects related to musical presentation—fully captured a greater segment of the general population’s fancy. All classes enjoyed music’s variety and entertainment value. Before jazz or blues rose to prominence, choral music and individual song performance dominated. Whether appearing in public venues, churches, or private venues (including as far north as on the exclusive, white Gold Coast), the professional voices of choral groups seemed to dominate the musical horizon. Musical pioneer Pedro T. Tinsley formed the Choral Study Group, which was accompanied on occasion by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. When newcomer Abbott sought acceptance into Chicago’s socially active musical elite, he joined Grace Presbyterian Church and the Choral Study Group.34 Yet, perhaps the most notable musical group was the Chicago Umbrian Glee Club, seen by some as the premier choral group of the early twentieth century as well as a group from S. I. Lee’s Coleridge-Taylor School of Music.35
Venues in which creative activities found encouragement along with nourishment included both the sacred and the profane. Churches such as Bethel AME Church led the way with Professor James A. Mundy at the rostrum. Quinn Chapel, Olivet Baptist, and Grace Presbyterian also formed impressive choirs. Organizing a chorus of six hundred voices from these churches, Mundy led the group at the Lincoln Jubilee of 1915. Two years earlier, Mundy successfully directed the first black choir to sing at famed Orchestra Hall, home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The director followed these triumphs with a presentation by a mass choir of five hundred at the Auditorium Theater, another first.36
Secular spaces, such as theaters, saloons, cabarets, and conference sites as well as crowded apartments, hosted other forms of musical expression. The Pekin Theater, opened in 1905 as the nation’s first black-owned theater, was credited with giving “the start to most of the theatrical performers of the race on the stage to-day,” according to a local newspaper reporter.37 Its owner was Robert “Bob” Motts, who was described within theatrical ranks as “a man of broad vision and a big heart [who] opened an extended hand of welcome to all Negroes on the stage and as the spot on the bank of the Chicago river where . . . De Saible built his humble cabin bears mute evidence of a history-making shrine to members of the race, so does the old Pekin Theater building.”38 The Pekin Theater’s troupe carried an executive staff numbering eighteen that “included everything from manager to house physician . . . [and was] manned on both sides of the footlights by men and women of his race, [while] presenting the product of colored composers and librettists.”39 The Pekin’s stock company also boasted of a house comedian, dramatists, and composers.
In the various smaller venues, several musicians made a mark in composition, most of the time without widespread public recognition. Notable were Tony Jackson, Clarence M. Jones, Spencer W. Williams, Shelton Brooks, and Alfred Anderson. Even without professional training, cabaret pianist Jackson produced the hit “Pretty Baby,” which was featured in Ziegfeld’s Follies of 1916. Innovator Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton considered Jackson “maybe the best entertainer the world has ever seen.”40 In contrast to Jackson, Jones had received technical training in musical composition. This background afforded him the opportunity to stretch his talents to the limit as he played piano in a theater at nightly film presentations and worked daily at writing music at one company and making piano rolls at another. Contemporarily, he was described as having the ability of “tak[ing] down by shorthand a whistled or hummed melody and play[ing] it from the notes as a stenographer would write a letter. He [could] run through the score of an opera once and after that play it by ear. [And he could] call any note as it sounded on a musical instrument.”41 Jones composed such notable selections as “One Wonderful Night,” “Just Because You Won My Heart,” and “La Danza Appassionata.” Williams, who worked as a full-time Pullman porter, had aspirations beyond rail service. He doubled as a composer, being credited with writing the popular “I Ain’t Got Nobody” and “Chemise Chihuahua.” Brooks could claim credit for the compositions “Walkin the Dog,” “All Night Long,” and “Some of These Days.” Last, Alfred Anderson collaborated with DeKoven Thompson in writing the lyrics and arranging the music, respectively, to “If I Forget.” Thompson also wrote “Dear Lord, Remember Me” and “My Twilight Dream of You” along with lesser-known musical creations. Later, he would try his hand at filmmaking with some success.
Outside of the confines of the black belt, farther north in and near the Loop, Orchestra Hall, the Auditorium Theater, Kimball Hall and the Coliseum provided stage exposure. Correspondingly, the number of musicians continued to increase as the market for black cultural production expanded. As early as the turn of the century, black musicians considered the advantages to be accrued through formal organization as an independent union and so sought affiliation with the newly formed Chicago Federation of Musicians. Led by members of the Eighth Infantry Regiment’s band, the musicians carried through on their plans. On July 4, 1902, after being rejected by the general body of white musicians in what the African Americans considered a disingenuous offer in the first place with their talent level, the black performers moved forward as Musicians Protective Union, Local 208, a part of the national body within the American Federation of Musicians.42 Their creativity was expressed first in minstrel productions, where songs of all variety flourished.
These innovative musicians were proud of their creative productions and, no doubt, were equally impressed with their influence over both white musicians and patrons. True to the spirit and skills they possessed, they played original music to their satisfaction and mesmerized their audiences to their will.43 The number of musicians continued to increase as the market for black cultural production expanded. Certain names appear as instrumental in promoting black artistic expression. Notable among this group was Oklahoma native Major N. C. Smith, who in 1905 created his famous Ladies Orchestra.44 As part of a wave of immensely talented migrants from the Plains and Midwest states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri, Smith injected into the Chicago musical scene a vibrancy that built upon itself to reach impressive levels of proficiency and creativity. Beulah Mitchell Hill, a talented musician of the period, wrote that “the passing of the years has drawn a veil of glamour and illusion over the events of the past and we are wont to think only of the achievements and to forget the hard work and trouble which made those achievements possible. It was a decade of high things, a time when our musicians banded together and did great things for the sake of art, rather than individual achievements for individual glory.”45
In the midst of this second decade of creativity, 1915 proved to be another year of musical excitement. The second annual All Colored Composers’ Concert was held at Orchestra Hall on Friday, April 23, 1915, where the popular Umbrian Glee Club performed.46 By the summer of 1915, on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of slavery by law, the Lincoln Jubilee and Exposition was held at the Coliseum outside the Loop.
New technology entered the sphere of the performing arts as the enterprising William Foster embraced a new medium—motion pictures—in 1913. As a press agent for local vaudevillians, he knew the scope and abundance of talent available to capture the vibrancy of black performance on celluloid. Foster was also aware of the New Negro’s assessment of himself [and herself], writing that “nothing has done so much to waken race consciousness . . . as the motion picture. It has made him [the African American] hungry to see himself as he has come to be.” The next step was for Foster to begin his own business, Foster Photoplay Company, making him owner and operator of the first African American film production company in America. Committed to turning out “nondegrading comedies about black urban life,” his efforts resulted in his being lauded by the African American press. Foster produced a dozen films, including The Railroad Porter (1913).47 Politician Louis B. Anderson joined with a dentist, W. F. Watkins of Montgomery, Alabama, to form the Anderson-Watkins Film Company. By February 1913, they had produced and were ready to distribute a three-reel, thirty-three-hundred-foot film entitled A Day at Tuskegee. The first showing was scheduled for the Washington Moving Picture Theater on State Street.48 Additional filmmakers joined the business including the Unique Film Company (1916), Peter P. Jones Film Company (1916), Birth of a Race Photoplay Company (1917), and the Micheaux Film and Book Company (1918). Black America’s response to the distribution of the infamous Birth of a Nation was the formation of the Birth of a Race Photoplay Company.
Painting and sculpture remained popular among the visual arts. Art trendsetter and city founder Jean Baptiste Point DuSable covered the walls of his homestead at the mouth of the Chicago River over a century before.49 In subsequent generations, wealthy matron Mary Richardson Jones and rising maven Fannie Barrier Williams displayed their taste in artistic creations in their homes. By the twentieth century, aesthetically inclined African Americans could purchase works and adorn their homes with the works of their fellow African Americans. The most well-recognized figures of the day were William Edouard Scott and Archibald Motley Jr.
Scott arrived in Chicago in 1904 from Indianapolis and engaged in five years of training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, followed by a stint at independent production. He then ventured to Paris to study with Henry Ossawa Tanner and other artistic masters at several French institutes, including the École des Beaux-Arts.50 He returned to Chicago in 1913 (but only for two years), at which time he initiated a decades-long journey in which the production of portraits, murals, and genre (everyday folk life) dominated his works. Back in Chicago and free from the artistic constraints imposed with training in America, Scott painted black America as he perceived it in all its poignancy, flavors, and vibrancy. Consistent with the spirit of the city and the tradition that black Chicagoan artists would develop and engender, Scott followed an independent course in that he painted his subjects as he saw them and not as mainstream America imagined them to be. Moreover, these emboldened, if sometimes impoverished, African Americans assumed an awareness of their conditions but never a resignation to fate. Sensitive always to their humanity, Scott’s subjects exude an optimism born of inner strength and rooted in the indomitability of the human spirit.51 In his pursuit of artistic authenticity, he importantly achieved historical accuracy.
The demographic onslaught known as the Great Migration (1916–18) brought fifty thousand newcomers who represented an expanded talent pool as well as eager consumers of popular, African-based culture. Beyond what polite society enjoyed in choral production, ragtime provided the entre of a new type of music into the public’s heart, and feet. Morton, the self-proclaimed inventor of jazz, thrilled audiences throughout the city during this transitional period. When the end of the war ended employment opportunities, it fortunately did not end migration as numerous musically talented individuals from New Orleans, the Mississippi Delta, St. Louis, and Kansas City headed to Chicago. Not to be overlooked within this wartime migration were the professionals and educated persons who supported the arts in their totality, producing even more aesthetically interested black consumers, customers, and enthusiasts. As to their tastes, they leaned more toward their own cultural productions, for example, the first phase of blues from the Delta to join with vaudeville and song. For film, they looked to producer and director Oscar Devereau Micheaux, pronounced by John Hope Franklin to be “the most important and prolific producer of black film during the 1920s.”52 Micheaux filmed on the streets of the South Side and chose his characters from passersby, from millionaire Abbott to the average pedestrian.
An African American business directory, Black’s Blue Book (1918), affirmed the economic growth. So not only was a business base extant but it also appeared to thrive and provide the foundation for the unbridled success of black businesses in the following decade. Important for the arts, African American businesses lent essential support for the arts by building venues for the performance and enjoyment of the arts, maintaining a workforce with money to spend on entertainments, donating directly to artistic enterprises, and providing a class of persons who felt they elevated themselves through their rising sense of appreciation of the arts, primarily of the indigenous, or popular varieties.
Nonetheless, the artistic production from such painters as Scott and Motley found only a limited market among African Americans. Scott resorted to selling his services wherever his paintings were accepted, in public buildings, churches, and schools. Although he originally focused on French-genre scenes, back home in his adopted Chicago, he pioneered “a school of racial art” a decade before Alain Locke’s call for such an endeavor.53
These developments and events contributed immediately to the making of the Jazz Age of the 1920s. Various new forms of aesthetic expression bloomed, and significantly, a distinct “Chicago style” of this mesmerizing music appeared. Jazz, which had entered the musical sphere in the form of ragtime, was now transformed into the most influential musical form of the times. It was so dominant a cultural phenomenon that it lent its name to the decade. Individualistic, syncopated, invigorating—it was prone to leave the listener moving expressively and dancing in wild abandonment. Originally centered around the piano, string bass, and drums, now the cornet (or trumpet) and saxophone evolved as lead solo instruments. Structurally, the attention given the individual performer now rivaled that previously accorded the ensemble.
Fueling the spirit of independence in creativity was the mindset of the period described aptly by African American intellectual Alain Locke, both a Harvard graduate and a Rhodes Scholar. It was one that demanded equitable treatment in enjoying one’s own artistic production. It appeared under the sobriquet of the “New Negro” and had its locus in
the younger generation [which] is vibrant with a new psychology; the new spirit is awake[ning] in the masses [too as both transform] what has been a perennial problem into the progressive phases of contemporary life. . . . For generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned, or defended. . . . With this renewed self-respect and self-dependence, the life of the Negro community is bound to enter a new dynamic phase, the buoyancy from within compensating for whatever pressure there may be of conditions from without . . . [even] the migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city, hurdle[d] several generations of experience at a leap.54
Locally, Abbott’s Defender offered its analysis in 1920 of this transformed personality with its indomitable resolve and titanic abilities. “Much is said of the ‘New Negro,’ we haven’t seen such a critter, just the same old tinted individual, roused into self-consciousness, awakened to his own possibilities, with stiffened backbone, and new ambitions, new desires, new hopes for the future.”55 At Northwestern University, Frederick H. H. Robb, a law student, wrote: “He is a new type of Homo sapiens psychologically. . . . He has no narrow religious creed, supports human principles instead of race prejudice, ignores the unfounded flattery heaped upon the Negro, does not boast, but achieves [and] has a scientific mind. . . . He does not seek philanthropy but an opportunity.”56 As to aesthetic preferences, he or she was working class, middle class, or “dicty” (snobbish) and determined to enjoy the black aesthetic to the fullest, and whenever he or she desired, the beaux arts, also.
Well-defined territorial boundaries defined the Black Metropolis (an African American “city within a city”) that existed as a physical affirmation of the African American tendency toward gregariousness as well as a confirmation of white hostility.57 Within the South Side black community, a new sentiment affecting artistic appreciation and enjoyment among the masses, the petit bourgeoisie, and elite prevailed. In jazz clubs throughout the South Side, indigenous music reigned free from the cultural compromises dictated in Harlem. Racially, whites and blacks mingled as well in “black and tan clubs.” In the latter venues, “sophisticates, street mongrels, businessmen, and chimney sweeps alike were in love with [jazz]. It transcended race and class like few other art forms.”58
Positioned along major half-mile thoroughfares such as Thirty-First Street were pugilist Jack Johnson’s stamping ground, the Club du Champion’s Cabaret, and the Lincoln Gardens Café. On Thirty-Fifth Street, the Grand Terrace, the Sunset, and the Plantation held sway; on State Street with its famous “Stroll” that millionaire publisher Abbott deigned to walk, 59 the Vendome, the Dreamland Café, the Elite Café, and the Deluxe Café stood supreme. With droves of multicultural, mixed-race, and cross-class patrons always at the doors, the major drawback found in Harlem had been overcome for the most part in Chicago as black patrons had as much direct access to black entertainers as others.60
Significantly, Harlem historian David Levering Lewis found that artists in Chicago performed in a manner suitable to them rather than to meet the desires of their patrons, white or otherwise.61 Aesthetic compromise was avoidable, thereby eliminating the restrictions imposed by a white racial protocol over black creative production. In music, whites, in fact, became imitators of blacks. Tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman remembered, “I feel I owe a great debt to black people because it was through the music of Louis Armstrong and King Oliver that I got my best inspiration and direction. I didn’t learn anything from just ordinary black musicians. It was the geniuses of jazz music who really gave me my lessons . . . King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines and Bessie Smith. When you heard Bessie Smith sing, you heard a whole symphony of jazz in one song.”62
While true independence in performance might have reigned in Chicago, production was another story. As the number of homes owning phonographs grew, so did recordings of African American performers. Joseph “King” Oliver earned the credit for making the first black recording on April 6, 1923, which was in reality the second jazz recording produced. The actual manufacture of records was in the hands of outsiders at studios such as Okeh, Paramount, and Vocalion.63 Nonetheless, the tastes of the masses were being satisfied along with that of other groups.
Musical giants such as Oliver leading his Creole Jazz Band, Jimmie Raglund, famed clarinetist Jimmie Noone, and Louis “Pops” Armstrong and his talented wife, Lillian “Lil” Hardin, among others, perfected and then re-created over and over again America’s only indigenous musical genre. On block after block, male and female musicians contributed to the musical vitality of the Jazz Age, while sharing the black belt’s landscape with the intellectually inclined New Negro. King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band performed at the Royal Gardens Café (renamed the Lincoln Gardens Café), which accommodated eight hundred music listeners, and then the Dreamland Café between 1917 and 1922 to be followed by pianist Earl “Fatha” Hines at the Grand Terrace.
In 1917, Hardin preceded her later husband of choice, Armstrong, to Chicago. An accomplished pianist and composer, she played with Freddie Keppard’s Original Creole Orchestra and then King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. Later in life, she led an all-female orchestra. When Armstrong arrived in Chicago, she encouraged and molded him socially while encouraging him professionally to reach his full potential free of his mentor Oliver’s influence. He grew restless and headed to New York to seek his fuller recognition playing with the renowned Fletcher Henderson. Instead, he found disappointment because of the comparatively stagnant (in relation to Chicago) music scene. Hardin convinced him to return, and when he did, he took the city by storm, becoming the city’s and globe’s preeminent jazz cornetist. Wherever he played, the crowds flocked to hear this premier soloist’s brash, loose, and propulsive rhythms. Together again, Hardin and Armstrong recorded as part of his Hot Five, later expanded to become the Hot Seven. Yet for total creativity found beyond the latter two artists, the name of Wilbur Sweatman reigned supreme.
Farther south, in what had been a white residential domain for decades, the Savoy Ballroom (1927), the Regal Theater (1928), and the Metropolitan Theater emerged on elegant South Parkway near Forty-Seventh Street as magnets for black consumers of culture. The scope of the Regal’s musical fare was exemplified by the opening year’s regular lineup. Fess Williams led the jazz component on stage, while Dave Peyton led the musicians in their complementary responsibilities as they returned to the pit to play European-style symphonic music in the commodious theater. Diagonally and across the thoroughfare, Erskine Tate’s orchestra handled pit duties at the Met.
The clamor for jazz had to share its enthusiasm with the blues, which rose to musical prominence during this period, also. Migrants from the south were often reluctant to totally discard their musical heritage, so they more often than not promoted a musical tradition beloved to them. At times, older settlers with a class bent toward high culture disparaged the newcomers’ love of “plantation melodies,” southern revival music, work songs, and boogie-woogie—the ingredients that made the blues that Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith sang so popular. Of this cultural-class clash, the newspaper Chicago Whip observed, “It’s no difficult task to get people out of the South, but you have a job on your hands when you attempt to get the South out of them.”64
Before the days of commercial radio broadcasts, remote productions from hotels and nightclubs were common. Significantly, African Americans enjoyed great exposure. As early as 1922, Clarence Jones and his Wonder Orchestra appeared on Westinghouse station KYW. It was radio station WBBM radio that led the way in broadcasting of African American bands, but it was to white audiences.65 Then, Earl “Fatha” Hines could be heard live from the Grand Terrace Hotel in the mid-1920s.
With a burgeoning Jazz Age population of 109,458 persons, who accounted for 4.1 percent of the city’s population of 2,701,705 persons, variety in aesthetic preferences could be anticipated. More and more working-class persons expressed their predilections for African-based music and dance, while a smaller number saw fit to visit the activities at Orchestra Hall as Frazier has described. When Frazier criticized a local washerwoman who attended the Orchestra Hall recital of a black man, the academician failed to appreciate the meaning of her attendance. The scholar misinterpreted an act of racial vindication—in that one of their own had achieved great musical heights recognizable by high-status whites—and she wished merely to give him her racial support. Frazier assumed that she (and others of this occupational grouping) lacked a background of musical appreciation individually or collectively to appreciate the performance because of presumed aesthetic deficiencies related to class and a background of southern or urban cultural and educational impoverishment. Given the exposure of laboring-class persons to high culture even throughout the previous century, the scholar’s view was most likely inaccurate.66 Whether motivated by group recognition of a member’s achievement in the highest rungs of white society or full appreciation of mastery over high culture’s musical forms, the case is intriguing. Probably unknown to Johnson and Frazier, black Chicagoans would even organize the Imperial Opera Company in 1930 and present Bohemian Girl in the Loop’s Kimball Hall. To these accomplished classical singers and musicians seeking recognition in the Loop at Orchestra Hall and the Auditorium, this opportunity to perform seemed simply a case of receiving acknowledgment from the most prestigious arbiters of culture within the artistic sphere.
Financially undergirding the various forms of the arts in Chicago was a small group of African American patrons of the arts who provided a level of financial support that stimulated independence and eliminated the need to compromise. Incomparable to Harlem’s patronage network, Chicagoans, nonetheless, through the likes of Abbott, Jesse Binga, Overton, Dr. Charles E. Bentley, and others, financially supported the arts. Several merited recognition as part of Chicago’s who’s who. From their ranks and from various strata—entrepreneurs, businesspersons, and professionals—a discernible elite grew with money to satisfy the aesthetic tastes that matched their growing wealth. Carroll Binder reported on this aesthetically supportive arrangement, when in 1927 he wrote, “Well-to-do Negroes patronize the arts and letters and have country estates and country clubs like those of white people of the same economic and cultural status.”67
Overton, cosmetics magnate, banker, and publisher, had already proven himself supportive of black Chicago’s literary strivings by publishing Half Century Magazine, which promoted the arts as an indispensable part of urbanity and refined living. By 1925, he had transformed the monthly Half Century Magazine into the Sunday weekly Chicago Bee newspaper, which was geared toward the more refined elements of African American society. He left an example for his family to emulate. The actions of his granddaughter (and a daughter of prominent patrons of the arts, Dr. and Mrs. Julian Lewis), Gloria Lewis Evans—in promoting popularly based African American music forms while also sharing an interest in the fine arts, supporting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Goodman Theater, and the Lyric Opera of Chicago—speak to exposure to this model of familial benevolence.68
For the Bentleys, their interest in and support for the beaux arts remained strong even as the doctor’s health began to fail.69 Bentley’s library dealing with African American history and literature grew, and in his will, he bequeathed the three-hundred-book collection to a proposed community repository in order to establish a Special Negro Collection in the Black Metropolis. Following his death in 1931, his widow donated the collection over to the newly constructed George Cleveland Hall Library as the core of its future Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature.70 Others, such as Drs. A. Wilberforce Williams and Ulysses G. Dailey, identified closely with and supported the beaux arts with the former holding life membership in the Chicago Fine Arts Association.
Banker Binga’s Christmas Ball was a “cultured person’s” delight to attend, if one were fortunate enough to get an invitation. Noted muralist Scott was commissioned to produce a mural for the Binga State Bank at the newly built arcade on the corner of State and Thirty-Fifth Streets.71 The Bingas’ taste for the beaux arts had risen to a level where they commissioned professional artists to complete portraitures, and Binga initiated a prize in his name for outstanding painters.
As exhilarating as the Jazz Age was in stimulating creative production in the performing arts, development of a literary foundation continued its slow growth. Poet Fenton Johnson began with For the Highest Good in 1920 and ended with Tales of Darkest America in 1929 or 1930. Locally, black Chicagoans promoted their own young literary aspirants who specialized in poetry and short stories.72 Outlets existed aplenty: It was reported that by 1927, black Chicago supported a field of twenty printers, four magazines, and six newspapers.73 Nationally, the major African American outlets for literature, The Crisis and Opportunity, edited by Du Bois and Charles S. Johnson, respectively, contained almost no Chicago contributions. Seeking, ironically, to credit black Chicago with a critical, scholarly breakthrough, some twenty-first-century scholars have included the writings of Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier, who during the decade were visiting scholars at the University of Chicago, as examples of African American productivity. Johnson is now acknowledged to have authored the tome The Negro in Chicago in 1922 (credited officially to the Chicago Commission on Race Relations in accordance with racial protocol); and Frazier’s 1929 dissertation was later turned into a book, The Negro Family in Chicago.
Abbott, as would be expected for his part, continued his interest in letters. He invited the city’s young literati—black and white Americans, Haitian, Chinese, and African—into his two homes to stimulate thought and write (the second of these homes being a mansion on elegant, patronage-rich Grand Boulevard, now Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive). The nouveau patron then started Abbott’s Monthly in 1927 (which did not survive the depression years) and contemplated publishing ReflexUs (“Reflects us”). He wrote a ten-part series on his 1923 sojourn to Brazil that informally gained support for but did not merit Spingarn Award recognition. Evaluation of the former was that it was too “observant and not critical” enough for formal consideration, failing to reach a level of acceptable, high-quality nonfiction. In order to establish his credentials as a person appreciative of the arts, he maintained memberships in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Historical Society, and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. One especially positive result of his journey to Paris was his induction into L’Institut Litteraire et Artistique de France.74 Meanwhile, Abbott’s pea-green Rolls Royce quite frequently carried his wife and him to the doors of the Chicago Civic Opera building, where he pretended to enjoy the music.
With such attention being given the other spheres, the visual arts were not ignored. In fact, Frazier acknowledged, “Art has become the proper subject of conversation among a certain class who condemn the idle women who spend their time over bridge. . . . Chicago’s artists are making significant contributions; among them are Scott, Farrow, Dawson, Barthé, and Motley, who brought the latest Harmon Award to Chicago. The recognition that was given to Negro art during the Negro in Art Week has created a new appreciation of racial contributions in this field and is gradually being reflected in the homes of the Negro community.”75 Encouraged by rising black interest and the suggestion of Locke, the Chicago Woman’s Club (virtually all-white with the exception of art patroness Fannie Barrier Williams) sponsored a “Negro in Art Week” between November 16 and 23, 1927, and extended it to December 4, 1927. Another goal of the event was to expand “knowledge of the accomplishments of the Negro in the various fields of arts [which] would improve the relationship between the two races.”76 Importantly, a penniless and near-starving Richmond Barthé made his debut at the event.77 Emerging architect William T. Bailey, who did not exhibit, helped in the organizing and welcoming eight thousand people to the Art Institute. For his part, William A. Farrow won major awards in 1928 and 1929 for his etchings that were on display at the Art Institute.78
Muralist Scott’s star continued to rise for he was now considered the dean of African American painters. His reputation soared, and his repertoire broadened during the 1920s. Of his talent, it is written, “Although Scott had a special interest in genre scenes portraying the black experience, portraiture and mural painting were his principal livelihood.”79 He virtually painted the town as his works were seen from the far North Side to the South and West Sides in public buildings, art galleries, and churches. In recognition of his high level of artistic production, Scott was awarded the Binga Prize in 1931.80
Public art became another sphere used as a channel of expression in which the creativity of the individual reflected an entire community’s consciousness and appreciation of art. In 1926, a movement began and gained impetus to honor the fallen dead and service of members of armed services during World War I. The proposed monument was eventually built at Thirty-Fifth Street and South Park Way. Concerted black legislative pressure both at the city and state levels succeeded in bringing completion to the Black Metropolis’s famed Victory Monument.
The era of the Great Depression produced both economic and technological disruptions that counterbalanced artistic promise. The dream of the Black Metropolis foundered, unfortunately, on the rocks of the Great Depression, which began in earnest in 1930. The two black banking giants failed as did one of the three community insurance giants with so many smaller businesses. The consumer base for entertainment was adversely affected. At theaters such as the Regal, talking movies also eliminated the need for massive amounts of live music.81 The African American population had reached 233,903 persons, representing 6.9 percent of the city’s 3,376,438 citizens.
Jazz was transforming to meet popular interests as swing music became dominant. Aesthetic bright spots continued, nonetheless, illustrating that the link between any art form and economics was tenuous at best. Armstrong advised trumpeter and band leader Floyd Campbell that if he wanted work, there was only one place to go. Campbell recalled,
When I finally came to Chicago on May 9, 1930, there was plenty of work for musicians. . . . I used to say that there were at least one hundred and ten full-time musicians working on salaries of up to seventy-five dollars a week within a one block radius of 47th Street and South Parkway. There were two bands at the Regal Theater and three large orchestras working at the Savoy Ballroom. Bud Byron’s ten-piece band was working at Chin Chow’s Restaurant on the second floor at 4709 South Parkway, and across the boulevard at the Metropolitan Theater there was Erskine Tate’s large pit symphony orchestra. Chicago was a musician’s town.”82
Duke Ellington lived through these same times in the city. He reminisced, “Chicago always sounded like the most glamorous place in the world. . . . By the time I got there in 1930, it glittered even more . . . the Loop, the cabarets . . . city life, suburban life, luxurious neighborhoods—and apparently broken-down neighborhoods where there were more good times than any place in the city.”83
So, at least the music continued.
In 1929, Frazier editorially challenged Chicago literati to reach Harlem’s heights: “Song and story and poesy have spread the fame of Harlem beyond the seven seas, but the story of the South Side of Chicago still awaits its Van Vechten or McKay or Fisher to give it expression through the medium of literary art.”84 Unknown to Frazier at the time was the emergence of a writing club, among whose ranks was Richard Wright, who had arrived in the city in 1927 with a thirst for writing. The intermittent Chicagoan, Langston Hughes, met this challenge by being the first writer to examine the effect of the Great Migration on the newcomers’ lifestyles and adjustment to big city life in his Not without Laughter (1930), based on his 1917 stint in Chicago.85 The opening of the George Cleveland Hall Library in 1932 brought good times and a salutary venue for the African American literati. Its guiding force was the first African American librarian in the city, Vivian G. Harsh, who distinguished herself as a bibliophile, early and constant supporter of Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, preserver of African American literature, and inspiration to a renaissance on the horizon. Totally unlike the “Niggerati manor” described in Wallace Thurmond’s Infants of the Spring, the Hall Library would accommodate the likes of Hughes, Wright, and Arna Bontemps, who researched the subjects of their writings at the facility and drew inspiration to fully explore all dimensions of the African American experience.
Finally, an external boost came from the public sector and at the national level. With the federal largesse opened to promote artistic production, the South Side Community Arts Center, at Thirty-Ninth Street and Michigan Avenue, emerged at the end of the depression decade as a center dedicated to the perpetuation of the arts. Dancers, painters, and writers, such as Katherine Dunham, Bontemps, Wright, Margaret Burroughs, Motley, and others, benefitted from their associations and encouragement to remain productive from the WPA-sponsored center. Wright would lead the “Chicago Renaissance.” Meanwhile, Chicago’s dean of painting, Scott, “completed thirty murals for the field houses in the Chicago park district and forty murals for Chicago churches.”86 Middle-class artists had arrived as an artistic element in their own right.
In commercial undertakings that promoted African American aesthetic interests, Jack L. Cooper hosted on white radio station WSBC on Sunday evenings with his own radio program, The All-Negro Hour. He was followed into radio by Samuel J. Evans, who, aided by his wife, Gloria Lewis Evans, promoted all varieties of black music and artists including up-and-coming blues greats Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley. While the Evanses promoted popularly based African American music forms, they also shared an interest in and supported the fine arts. In their dual interests, they represented the latest phase in the variegated linkage between class and the arts.
Despite the period’s economic dismalness and political paralysis of various levels of government, a Black Chicago Renaissance was clearly in the offing. With the advent of the New Deal in 1933, government agencies such as the WPA and Farm Security Agency encouraged aesthetic efforts. Private patronage continued as well, inspiring artistic production, although it was limited in scope. Moreover, ideological influences, such as those exerted by the Communist Party, served to generate interest in the arts if only intended toward political goals. With the aesthetic juices and nascent talents of Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, Katherine Durham, and many others emerging, the South Side’s aesthetic horizon loomed ever so bright.
1. Carroll Binder, who describes the city’s landscape and the status and activities of African Americans, wrote in countervailing fashion to Johnson and Frazier: “Chicago’s Negro community includes a number of men and women of high professional and intellectual distinction. It shelters writers and artists whose work is favorably known among both whites and Negroes, but from both a literary and artistic standpoint there is no group in Chicago comparable to the Harlem Negro literati.” Chicago and the New Negro (Chicago: Chicago Daily News, 1927), 22. Jack Conroy discusses the historical dimensions to this claim of a budding literary tradition in three successive drafts in “African American Literature in Illinois, 1861–1941,” folders 1, 2, 3, box 46, Illinois Writers Project, WPA, 1941, Vivian G. Harsh Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, Chicago. The current chapter is indebted to the monumental and comprehensive Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition, edited by Patricia A. L. Hill and Bernard W. Bell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), which posits the influence of a black aesthetic as the centerpiece of any dialogue on African American art. Chicago’s early pre-jazz and pre-blues development is explored contemporaneously in volume 2 of Frederick H. H. Robb, ed., The Negro in Chicago, 2 vols. (Chicago: Washington Intercollegiate Club Books, 1927).
2. Arna Bontemps, “Famous WPA Authors,” Negro Digest, June 1950, 47. English professor Richard Courage collaborated with Robert A. Bone (author of the renowned The Negro Novel in America) before the latter’s death in completing a comprehensive view of the Black Chicago Renaissance. Their joint publication has now appeared as The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932–1950 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011).
3. Charles S. Johnson, “‘These Colored United States,’ VII—Illinois: Mecca of the Migrant Mob,” Messenger, December 1923, 926. The Messenger was a noted magazine of the 1920s with high name recognition. Countervailing evidence to this scholar’s condescending impressions appeared a decade later, when the circumstances of economic depression and subsequent recovery in various areas, including the arts, brought forth the Illinois Writers Project (IWP), a component of the Federal Writers Project during the late 1930s and 1940s. The existence of this voluminous archive, compiled by scholars and rising literary figures and known as the “Negro in Illinois Papers,” along with contemporary documents, lay bare many of Johnson’s observations as to the superficiality of African American life and culture during the period in which he wrote. Displaying classism, Johnson could write disparagingly of the “peripatetic Knights of the Whisk-broom,” when, in fact, from the ranks of these intrepid workers the likes of writer-historian J. A. Rogers and banker–arts patron Jesse Binga would emerge. “‘These Colored United States,’” 928. And for that segment of other Chicago-bound Pullman porters who demanded more out of life than their racially prescribed occupational status accorded, their cultural pursuits knew no limits.
4. E. Franklin Frazier, “Chicago: A Cross-Section of Negro Life,” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life 7 (March 1929): 73. Based on the experiences with high culture in black Chicago’s history, quite possibly some of these women were accustomed to both attending the Orchestra Hall and listening to opera. See Christopher Robert Reed, “All the World Is Here!”: The Black Presence at White City (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000),107–10, and Black Chicago’s First Century, Vol. 1, 1833–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 396–400.
5. See Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Perhaps Gaines’s chapter 6, entitled “Urban Pathology and the Limits of Social Research,” holds the answer to how eager, young researchers (in the mold of a young Du Bois) could so easily reach the unfavorable conclusions they did about any particular African American population they were observing. Perhaps they conform to some academically rooted racial personality overlooked in [Charles S. Johnson], “Some Racial Types,” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life 5 (January 1927): 4, or acutely overanalyzed in E. Franklin Frazier, “The Mind of the American Negro,” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life 6 (September 1928): 264–66, 284.
6. See Henry Edward Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs (1913; rpt., New York: Frederick Ungar, 1967), 60, 64–66. See also Howard Reich, “Hotter near the Lake: From King Oliver to Nat ‘King’ Cole and Beyond, Chicago Has Been a Wellspring of Great Jazz,” Chicago Tribune Magazine, September 5, 1993, 14.
7. Christopher Robert Reed, “All the World Is Here!”, 144, 150–51, 157, 168, 194.
8. Depending on the source, either Fannie Barrier Williams or Ida B. Wells-Barnett was instrumental in helping Celia Parker Woolley establish the center. See Koby K. Lee-Forman, “The Simple Love of Truth: The Racial Justice Activism of Celia Parker Woolley” (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, June 1995). See Alfreda M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 280–81, and June O. Patton, “Fannie Barrier Williams,” in Women Building Chicago, 1790–1990: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Ruma Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 978. See also St. Clair Drake, Churches and Voluntary Associations in the Chicago Negro Community (Chicago: WPA, 1940), 145 (asterisked note).
9. Fannie Barrier Williams, “The Frederick Douglass Center,” Southern Workman, 35, June 1906, 335–36.
10. Benjamin Brawley, The Negro Genius: A New Appraisal of the Achievement of the American Negro in Literature and the Fine Arts (New York: Apollo, 1937; repr., New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1972), 180. These club members could have been expected to have been aware of and visited the Art Institute in 1906 to view a $500 prize-winning painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner.
11. An example of her scholar-like production is Fannie Barrier Williams, “Social Bonds in the ‘Black Belt’ of Chicago,” Charities 15, October 7, 1905, 40–44. Reflective of her detached self-analysis is “A Northern Negro’s Autobiography,” Independent, July 14, 1904, 91–96. On Williams’s cerebral qualities and position as a female pragmatist, see Mary Jo Deegan, ed., The New Woman of Color: The Collected Writings of Fannie Barrier Williams, 1893–1918 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 2002), xvi, xxxiii. For her communication skills, see N. F. (Mrs. Gertrude) Mossell, The Work of the Afro-American Woman (1894; rpt., Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1971), 110–11.
12. Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard Of Tuskegee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 98, and Williams, “Social Bonds in the ‘Black Belt’ of Chicago,” 40–44.
13. Richard R. Wright Jr., 87 Years behind the Black Curtain: An Autobiography (Philadelphia: Rare Book, 1965), 107, and Drake, Churches and Voluntary Associations, 129.
14. Wright, 87 Years behind the Black Curtain, 96.
15. Clifton O. Dummett, Charles Edwin Bentley: A Model for All Times (St. Paul, Minn.: North Central, 1982), 41.
16. “Colored Chicago,” Crisis, September 1915, 236.
17. Monroe A. Majors, Noted Negro Women, Their Triumphs and Activities (Chicago: Donohue and Henneberry, 1893), v–x.
18. “America’s Noted Authors to Meet Here in August,” Chicago Defender, March 13, 1915, 4. Several years later, Majors expressed his lingering concerns: “We need books, and we need a deal of race pride to go with them. We need elevation of minds to go along with our better pride. . . . Initiative is lacking both as to spirit to write and to read what we write. . . . Let us read our own authors!” “Why We Should Read Books Written by the Negro,” Half-Century Magazine, June 1918, 13.
19. A. N. Fields, “Early Chicagoan in U.S. Legation: G. W. Ellis, Author, Lawyer and Diplomat, Climbs Ladder of Success from Humble Beginning,” Chicago Defender, April 1, 1933, 17.
20. Ibid.; Vernon J. Williams, “A Gifted Amateur: The Case of George Washington Ellis,” American Anthropologist 104 (June 2002): 544–50; Frederick Starr, introduction, Negro Culture in West Africa (New York: Neale, 1917), 15.
21. New York Times, March 4, 1872; William C. Harris, introduction, The Facts of Reconstruction, by John R. Lynch (Chicago: Neale, 1913), xiv–xx.
22. Review by J. W. Garner, “The Facts of Reconstruction,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 3 (June 1916): 112.
23. Walter Neale to Major John R. Lynch, January 13, 1913, George W. Ellis Papers, Chicago History Museum (formerly the Chicago Historical Society).
24. Carter G. Woodson, “Personal [Remarks],” Journal of Negro History 25 (January 1940): 137.
25. [Jack Conroy], “African American Literature in Illinois,” folder 3 (Lit II), box 46, 4, Illinois Writers Project; and “America’s Noted Authors to Meet Here in August,” Chicago Defender, March 13, 1915, 4.
26. Fenton Johnson, in Hill and Bell, Call and Response, 621–24.
27. Editorial, Half-Century Magazine, August 1916, 3, and “The Making of A Great Magazine,” Half-Century Magazine, June 1918, 3.
28. Louise DeKoven Bowen, The Colored People of Chicago (Chicago: Juvenile Protective Association, 1913), n.p. [20].
29. Roi Ottley, The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955), 2.
30. Carter G. Woodson, “Personal [Remarks],” Journal of Negro History 25 (January 1940): 262.
31. Jane Addams to [W. E. B.] Du Bois, January 26, 1907, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Amherst Library, University of Massachusetts (Amherst); “NAACP Conference at Hull House,” Crisis, May 1912, 80; “NAACP Conference at Hull House,” Crisis, February 1913, 244.
32. Ida B. Wells-Barnett to Charles W. Chestnutt, May 15, 1915, folder 1, box 5, Ida B. Wells Papers, Regenstein/University of Chicago Library; Chicago Tribune, January 4, 1915, 4; Chicago Defender, January 9, 1915, 8.
33. [Jack Conroy], “African American Literature in Illinois,” folder 1, box 46, 22, Illinois Writers Project, Vivian G. Harsh Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, Chicago. Conroy considered its impact on literature minimal as he described it as more of a pamphlet reciting facts than a novel.
34. Drake, Churches and Negro Voluntary Associations, 108. See also “Music Schools and Teachers,” folder 10, box 48, Illinois Writers Project, Vivian G. Harsh Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, Chicago.
35. Beulah Mitchell Hill, “The History Negro Music and Musicians of Chicago” in Robb, Negro in Chicago, 2:45.
36. “Chorus Leader of 500 Voices,” in Robb, Negro in Chicago, 2:118. It is possible that one of the old women Frazier described on page 1 of this essay belonged to this assemblage, indicating a familiarity with both the venue and music.
37. Junius B. Wood, “Musicians, Artists, Writers and the Stray Genius,” in Robb, Negro in Chicago, 1:15.
38. Robb, Negro in Chicago, 2:234.
39. “Colored People’s Theater, Only One in World, Proves a Success,” unidentified article, n.d., n.p., in author’s possession.
40. Reich, “Hotter near the Lake,”14.
41. Wood, “Musicians, Artists,” 1:15.
42. William Everett Samuels, Union and the Black Musician: The Narrative of William Everett Samuels and Chicago Local 208 (Lanham, Md.: United Press of America, 1984), 10 (recorded by Donald Spivey).
43. Samuels, Union and the Black Musician, 39. The artistically satisfying, infectious atmosphere of the black theater, filled with responsive and interactive patrons, is captured in novel form in Langston Hughes, Not without Laughter (1930; repr., New York: Knopf, 1968), 315–20.
44. “Music and Musicians of Chicago, 1878 to 1910,” in Robb, Negro in Chicago, 2:42.
45. Hill, “The History Negro Music and Musicians of Chicago,” in Robb, Negro in Chicago, 2:45.
46. Chicago Defender, April 17, 1915, 4.
47. Arnie Bernstein, Hollywood on the Lake (Chicago: Lake Claremont, 1998), 46–60; Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migration to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 194–96.
48. Louis B. Anderson to Emmett Jay Scott, February 25, 1913, vol. 12, Booker T. Washington Papers, ed. Louis R. Harlan and Raymond Smock.
49. “Development of Negro Culture in Chicago,” folder 1, box 47, 7, Illinois Writers Project, Vivian G. Harsh Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, Chicago.
50. Margaret Burroughs, “The Four Artists,” in A Shared Heritage: Art by Four African Americans, ed. William E. Taylor and Harriet G. Warkel (Indianapolis, Ind.: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1996), 13.
51. Harriet G. Warkel, “Image and Identity: The Art of William E. Scott, John W Hardrick, and Hale Woodruff,” in Taylor and Warkel, Shared Heritage, 18–39; Edmund Barry Gaither, “The Mural Tradition,” in Taylor and Warkel, Shared Heritage, 124–31.
52. John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 7th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998), 376.
53. Warkel, “Image and Identity,” in Taylor and Warkel, Shared Heritage, 18.
54. Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro, ed. Locke (1925; rpt., New York: Atheneum, 1992), 2, 3.
55. Chicago Defender, January 3, 1920, 15. One result of this new self-consciousness led to the building of a civic infrastructure at a time when it supposedly didn’t exist. See Christopher R. Reed, “Black Chicago Civic Organization before 1935,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 14 (Winter 1987): 65–77.
56. Robb, Negro in Chicago, 1:16.
57. Allen F. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 26. See Christopher Robert Reed, The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1920–1929 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), for a complete exploration of this attempted transformation of a dependent community into a self-sustaining racial enclave.
58. Harry Schuchmacher, “Best of the Best of American Music: Louis Armstrong, Changing the World,” American Mix, May–June, 2001, 4 and Reich, “Hotter near the Lake,” 14. Reich wrote that the economic diversity was such that “mobsters, musicians, socialites and working people danced past dawn to rhythms of America’s only original art form.” “Hotter near the Lake,” 14.
59. Ottley, Lonely Warrior, 224. Abbott bridged the two worlds of culture. His stroll along his thoroughfare was an affirmation that he had not lost touch with the common person, upon whom he depended for both business and ego support.
60. For the jazz landscape, see “Alphabetical Listing of Chicago Jazz Clubs, ca. 1915–30,” Chicago Jazz Archives, 1999–2003, http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/cja/jazzmaps/listalph.htm. For a description and analysis of the activities and changes at the Regal Theater, see Clovis E. Semmes, The Regal Theater and Black Culture (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006); see also “Cab Calloway,” in Dempsey J. Travis, An Autobiography of Black Jazz (Chicago: Urban Research Press, 1983), 230, 231.
61. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 171, 172. See also William Howland Kenney, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 53, 54; Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 184. Moreover, the pressure to please white audiences, whether patrons, publishers, or readers, is well accepted as fact. See its exposition in both novel and scholarly forms in Wallace Thurmond, Infants of the Spring (1932; rpt., Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), and Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 184.
62. “Bud Freeman,” in Travis, Autobiography of Black Jazz, 324. Likewise, the great clarinetist Jimmy Noone is credited with teaching Benny Goodman his level of proficiency. See Reich, “Hotter near the Lake,” 18.
63. Kenney, Chicago Jazz, 120–46.
64. Quoted in James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 154.
65. William Barlow, “Black Music on Radio during the Jazz Age,” North American Review (Summer 1995), http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_n2_v29/ai_17534809/pg_3/.
66. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 30–32, 96–100. See also Christopher Robert Reed, Black Chicago’s First Century, Volume I, 1833–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 396–401.
67. Binder, Chicago and the Negro, 4. In contrast, Langston Hughes said of Harlem, “Harlem nights became show nights for the Nordics.” Certain writers were also affected and wrote to amuse white people. See Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (1940: repr., New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), 226–28.
68. Obituary for Gloria Lewis Evans, “Roots in Bronzeville,” Chicago Sun-Times, November 12, 1998, 62.
69. Dummett, Charles Edwin Bentley, 190, 201–2.
70. Doris Saunders, remarks on January 20, 2007, seventy-fifth anniversary of the opening of the George Cleveland Hall Library (author’s notes); interview with Michael L. Flug, November 24, 2006, in Chicago; Michael L. Flug, “Vivian Gordon Harsh, “in Women Building Chicago, 1790–1990: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Ruma Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) 359; and Dummett, Charles Edwin Bentley, 190, 201–2. Saunders was a former student assistant to Vivian Gordon Harsh during the 1940s and founder of the Special Negro Literature Collection at the Johnson Publishing Company of Chicago.
71. Theresa Dickason Cederholm, comp., Afro-American Artists: A Bio-Bibliographical Directory (Boston: Boston Public Library, 1973), 249–50.
72. See “Greater Poets in Chicago,” in Robb, Negro in Chicago, 1:86, 87.
73. Carroll Binder, “The New Negro In Chicago,” in Chicago and the New Negro, 11. See also Robb, “Race Publications in Chicago,” in Robb, Negro in Chicago, 1:124.
74. Ottley, Lonely Warrior, 224, 328.
75. Frazier, “Chicago,” 73, and Robb, Negro in Chicago, 1:223.
76. Charles Dawson, “Celebrated Negro Artists,” in Robb, Negro in Chicago, 2:27.
77. Roy Wilkins, Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins (New York: Viking, 1982), 157.
78. “William A. Farrow-Etcher,” Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life 7 (June 1929): 188.
79. Warkel, “Image and Identity,” in Taylor and Warkel, Shared Heritage, 27.
80. Alain Locke, The Negro in Art (1940; repr., New York: Hacker Art Books, 1979), 135; “Artist Paints Way to Fame via Landscapes,” Chicago Tribune, March 27, 1949, S4.
81. Semmes, Regal Theater, 39–41, and Reich, “Hotter near the Lake,” 18.
82. “Floyd Campbell,” in Travis, Autobiography of Black Jazz, 240.
83. Quoted in Reich, “Hotter near the Lake,” 12.
84. E. Franklin Frazier, editorial, Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life 7 (March 1929): 69.
85. Hughes, Not without Laughter, chapters 18–30, and [Conroy], “African American Literature in Illinois,” folder 1, 23, box 46, Illinois Writers Project, Vivian G. Harsh Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Carter G. Woodson Regional Library, Chicago. See Hughes, Big Sea, 304.
86. Warkel, “Image and Identity,” in Taylor and Warkel, Shared Heritage, 37.