Alice Browning’s cultural entrepreneurship and dedication to local literary production provided important contributions to Chicago’s Black Renaissance. A shrewd literary gadfly, and a modestly gifted writer, Browning symbolized the inclusive spirit of the Renaissance as well as its paradoxical tendencies toward both critical engagement with pressing social issues of the day and overt commercialization of African American culture. Her primary work as editor and publisher also signifies the rise and expanding impact of the Black Press during and after World War II.
The daughter of a minister, Browning was a graduate of Chicago’s Englewood High School, Chicago Normal School, and the University of Chicago. Published records and private files from Ms. Browning do not disclose her maiden name (her mother’s surname was Marshall). In an unpublished autobiographical sketch written in 1961, Browning wrote that she wanted to be an author from the age of eight when she began to read the classics. She cited the influence of British novelists like Thackeray and George Eliot, but also noted the impact of reading Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles Chesnutt, and Jessie Fauset at an early age. Fauset’s work, she wrote, motivated her to try to represent the Black middle class, an ambition realized in her later short stories. At nineteen, Browning began study at the University of Chicago in pursuit of her bachelor’s degree. There she began writing short stories and took a home-study course in writing from the University. After graduation, she worked as an elementary school teacher and married Charles Browning, then director of the Division of Works Projects of the Illinois National Youth Administration. Her byline first appeared in a fashion column in the Chicago Defender in March, 1938, where she was described as a “young socialite-teacher.” In 1941, she took a sabbatical from her teaching position at Forestville Elementary School to work on a master’s degree in literature at Columbia University, where she came under the direction of Vernon Loggins. Loggins, a pioneer in African American literary history, was the author of The Negro Author: His Development in America to 1900, as well as a biography of musical composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk. He became friend and mentor to Browning and later published short fiction in Negro Story. Originally intending to write an MA thesis on the Negro novel before 1900, she began writing short stories and showed them to Loggins, who encouraged her to submit for publication. In 1941, she submitted a short story called “Tomorrow” to Esquire, which rejected it. In 1942, she published her first story, “New Year’s Eve 1942,” in the Pittsburgh Courier under the pen name Lila Marshall. She also began work on a novel, never published. Browning pursued the ambition to publish a novel well into her adult life, at one point receiving publishing advice from Nelson Algren, who attempted to help her find an agent. She also endeavored to publish her MA thesis but was not able to do so. Later in life she took writing courses at Northwestern University in hopes of finding a publisher for her work.1
Eager to expand publishing opportunities for Black writers, herself included, Browning returned home and founded N.Y.P.S. (Negro Youth Photo Script), a glossy magazine dedicated to publishing photographs and stories about Black life in Chicago. Shortly thereafter, she began discussion with her friend Fern Gayden about the possibility of starting yet another magazine, one that would provide opportunities for Black short story writers. Thus was born Negro Story, Alice Browning’s most important and singular contribution to Chicago’s Black literary renaissance. Negro Story was imagined by Gayden and Browning to be the African American equivalent to Story magazine, the leading mainstream, and predominantly white, literary journal of short fiction begun in 1933 by Whit Burnett. But how to build a new magazine? Browning and Gayden had no national literary reputations to speak of and virtually no publishing experience. Gayden, a social worker from Kansas, had entered Chicago literary circles through her relationship to Richard Wright. In 1935, Gayden had helped move Wright and his family into a South Side apartment. The two became friends, and Wright invited Gayden, herself an aspiring writer, to join the newly formed South Side Writers Group.
To cover start-up costs of publication, Browning borrowed $200 from her husband Charles, now working as vice president for public relations for the Chicago Defender, and the two set to work on the production of their new magazine. Vol. I, N. 1 appeared as the May–June issue in the summer of 1944. The simple, inexpensive and unadorned sixty-four–page issue had been assembled by Browning and Gayden in Browning’s home at 4019 Vincennes Avenue. Subtitled “A Magazine for All Americans,” the first issue was prefaced by “A Letter to Our Readers” coauthored by Browning and Gayden. “For a long time, we, the editors,” they wrote, “have been attempting to improve our writing techniques and to express ourselves through the short story. The other day, the idea struck us that among thirteen million Negroes in America, there must be many who were eager to write creatively if they had a market.” The letter also bespoke editorial principles significant of larger currents of Chicago’s Black Renaissance. Gayden and Browning argued that “good writing may be entertaining as well as socially enlightening.”2 They encouraged contributors to write well-crafted stories on timely themes that would reflect the desire of African Americans to both assimilate into and change for the better the social fabric of the United States. They also encouraged novice writers to see the magazine as their first opportunity to publish.
Their combination of marketing pluck, grassroots consciousness, and commitment to literature as social engagement marked the diverse currents and influences that had brought Browning and Gayden to their collaboration. The contents of the first issue reflected this as well. Contributors included Browning herself, still writing under the pen name Lila Marshall; Langston University Professor and literary critic Nick Aaron Ford, and West Indian writer Roger Mais, a member of Norman Manley’s People’s Socialist National Party. Also included were prose contributions by Gwendolyn Brooks, a friend to both Gayden and Browning, and Richard Wright’s “Almos’ a Man,” originally intended for publication in his proletarian-style novel, never completed, Tarbaby’s Surprise. Wright’s appearance in the magazine was in part serendipitous. Wright had purchased a house for his mother just two doors down from the Browning home on Vincennes Avenue; Browning and Gayden visited Wright at the apartment of Horace Cayton during a visit by Wright to Chicago in early 1944, seeking his permission to use a story for their inaugural issue.3
The balance of Negro Story’s premier issue were contributions by largely unpublished friends of the editors, many of them working women and teachers from Chicago’s South Side. This blend of writers—established, emergent, and amateur—became the magazine’s hallmark during its two-year run from 1944 to 1946. Among the contributors to Negro Story were Langston Hughes, Frank Marshall Davis (already a published poet), Ralph Ellison, and Chester Himes. Himes was perhaps the magazine’s most popular contributor. He published six stories in the magazine, many anticipating the themes of his 1945 debut novel If He Hollers Let Him Go. Other stories by less heralded local writers highlighted important social and political themes such as the racist treatment of black soldiers during the war and the conditions of black women domestic workers. The magazine was also a home for contributions by radical and progressive white writers. They included Chicago proletarian novelist Jack Conroy, author of The Disinherited and a fixture on Chicago’s progressive interracial South Side culture scene, and ex-Communist Earl Conrad, also a columnist for the Defender. Indicative of the interracial atmosphere of collaboration generally during the Chicago Renaissance, Conrad replaced Fern Gayden as “associate editor” when she left the magazine after the publication of its fourth issue in early 1945. In addition, Black visual artists such as WPA painter and lithographer Elton Fax and Chicago painter and organizer Margaret Goss Burroughs published visual and literary work in the magazine.
Negro Story was circulated by hand on the South Side, by mail to Black soldiers overseas, and to a select number of libraries at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Browning’s entrepreneurial and activist energies, meanwhile, were ever-expanding. In 1945, she was appointed president of the National Negro Magazine Publishers Association, a sister organization to the National Negro Newspaper Association. On July 30 and 31, 1945, the NNMPA met at Harlem’s Hotel Theresa, where Browning led a call for “adaptation in story and article form of case histories of Negro life to cover civil liberties, housing, individual health, socialized medicine, and fascism—native and foreign.” She was joined by editors of Opportunity, Color, and other black periodical editors who vowed that “magazines and newspapers should work together in a united front for the Negro.” In July, 1945, Browning initiated a plan for “Negro Story Book” clubs and announced publication of a new children’s magazine, Child Play, published by the new Negro Story Press, her own enterprise. In August, 1945, the Press published Lionel Hampton’s Swing Book, a glossy commercial magazine modeled after Vogue intended to capitalize on Hampton’s status as the recurring winner of Chicago Defender reader polls on favorite swing band leaders. Browning also continued to publish commentaries and stories in Negro Story under a variety of surnames, most commonly the anglicized, and male, name “Richard Bentley.” She simultaneously sent photographs and press releases heralding new issues to the Defender, and rose to modest celebrity in South Side cultural circles.4
Browning’s contributions as a writer to Negro Story also merit attention as reflective of social and literary concerns of both African American and African American women writers of her time, as well as reflecting the ambitions of a broad range of Chicago writers to participate in the short story genre. Browning’s stories appeared regularly in Negro Story. Nearly always she wrote under the pseudonym “Richard Bentley.” This possibly reflected her desire to mask her role as editor and writer for the magazine. It also was a symbolic reminder, for readers and friends who knew her, of the impetus for starting the journal: namely the feeling that Black women and women writers in particular were being shunned by mainstream literary markets. The pseudonym also gave Browning perhaps playful free rein to write and publish stories that foregrounded taboo gendered and racial themes. For example, in the March-April 1945 issue of Negro Story Browning published “The Slave,” a short story featuring as protagonist a white woman named Sue who is the daughter of a plantation master and privileged child of the slave system. Sue returns home from college one summer and for the first time takes physical notice of a fair-skinned slave named Dan, whom she has known since childhood and alongside whom she has grown up. The two begin a covert courtship and then love affair. They plan Dan’s escape and a reunion in the North where they hope to carry on their illicit relationship. The story turns when Sue becomes pregnant. She confides her secret, including her relationship to Dan, to her familial Mammy, and vows to her to be with Dan forever. The import of slavery, race, and her affair come crashing down when Mammy reveals to her that Dan is her half-brother. Sue’s “lovely Southland of sunshine,” as Browning describes it, becomes a site of deep mourning and recognition. The story, anticipating both potboiler romance novels of a later era and more serious engagement by African American writers with the quagmire of miscegenation is also notable for Browning’s efforts to write about slavery from a white, and white female, perspective.
Browning also situated gendered themes in more contemporary settings, as in her story “Tomorrow” published in the December-January, 1944–1945 issue of the magazine. The story centers on Jack, a tall, handsome white soldier desperate to find female companionship after an extended tour of duty with the eighteenth regiment in New York. Browning refers to the soldier as “Corporal Bryant” to underscore his rank and secure social standing. At the beginning of the tale he picks up a kindly woman named Helen for a date. She is initially awed by his good looks, uniform, and grace. This brief reverie quickly gives way as Jack tries to rape Helen on their first date. The description of the attempted rape is visceral and, by standards of the era, explicit. Helen fends him off by biting his arm. The soldier curses her, and women, and the story ends by invoking the title, “Tomorrow,” as Bryant’s optimistic promise to himself that another day and another girl are just around the corner. The story weaves a complex subtext of nationalism, chauvinism, violence, and aggression that was consistent with Negro’s Story’s larger editorial commitment to point out the abuses of World War II against all but white men.
Yet by early 1946, Negro Story was also losing readership ground to larger, better-financed publications like John Johnson and Johnson Publishing Company’s Negro Digest, which first appeared in 1943, and Johnson’s watershed Ebony, modeled on Henry Luce’s Life Magazine. Browning had in fact anticipated the emergent black middle-class readership Johnson famously captured and helped to create, as well as its mixture of integrationism, social protest, and commercial savvy. She had also helped to demonstrate the need for a Black periodical market to cater to that readership.
Negro Story published its final issue in April, 1946. What is the legacy of Alice Browning and Negro Story? Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, and Gwendolyn Brooks all clearly profited from exposure provided by the magazine prior to the publication of their first books. No fewer than seven stories first published in 1945 editions of Negro Story were also listed in Martha Foley’s 1946 edition of Best American Short Stories, including Ralph Ellison’s “The Birthmark,” Chester Himes’s “The Song Says ‘Keep on Smilin,’” and two pseudonymous stories by Browning herself: “The Slave” and “Tomorrow”—the same story turned down by Esquire that motivated Browning to begin the magazine. In part for this reason, Robert Bone has called the magazine “for a brief moment … the focal point of black writing in America.” In 1947, Earl Conrad described Negro Story as the fulcrum of a “Blues School of Literature.” “Negro Story,” he wrote, “frankly presents all of the issues of segregation and protest, the complexities of Negro-white labor relationships, intermarriages, and all matters of color, ‘race,’ caste, class and sex.” Conrad aptly summarizes the stated objectives of Gayden and Browning in 1944. Clearly, the magazine crystallized not just the literary entrepreneurship of Chicago’s Black Renaissance, but more especially the central role aspiring Black writers, publishers and artists played in advancing their own version of cultural rebirth.5
Alice Browning’s career and public visibility in Chicago recessed with the end of the war and the end of Negro Story. Both were temporarily revived by the Black Arts Movement in Chicago. In 1970, Browning formed two new literary ventures inspired by the upsurge in Chicago Black Arts: the International Black Writers Conference in Chicago, an annual meeting of poets and authors, and Browning Press, a small publishing company. In 1972, Browning Press published New Voices in Black Poetry, an anthology of poems written by members of the annual conference. When she died in 1985, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote an eponymous tribute poem to Browning.
Browning’s public and behind-the-scenes work as a cultural worker, writer and organizer bespeaks the significant pioneering role played by Black women in Chicago’s Black Renaissance. Her desire to change the production, publishing, and consumption habits of Black writing and reading dovetails neatly with the Chicago Renaissance’s practical goal of fostering autonomous networks of local cultural production and cultural pride. Browning’s bourgeois standing in Chicago’s rapidly evolving Black social hierarchy of the 1930s and 1940s and her shrewd use of economic and cultural capital also bespeaks the commercial empowerment that attended Black literary culture in the wake of the sensation of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son. Indeed, Browning’s major contribution to the Renaissance is perhaps as a reminder of how widespread and contagious was the spread of literary culture in Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s.
1. Mullen, Bill V. Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–1946. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999, 106–7.
2. Negro Story, V. 1, N. 1. Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970, 1–2.
3. Mullen, Popular Fronts, 106–26.
4. Ibid., 121.
5. Ibid., 121–26.
Bone, Robert. “Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance.” Callaloo 9.3 (1986): 446–68.
Browning, Alice C. Interview with Horace Cayton. Horace Cayton Papers. Vivian G. Harsh Collection. Carter Woodson Library, Chicago, Illinois.
Browning, Alice C. Black n’ Blue. Chicago: Browning Press, 1972.
———, ed. Child Play: A Magazine for boys and girls 4 to 14. V. I, N. 1, Negro Story Press, July–August, 1945.
———, ed. Lionel Hampton’s Swing Book. Chicago: Negro Story Press, 1945.
Browning, A. C. and H. Honore, eds. New Voices in Black Poetry. Chicago: Browning Press, 1972.
Conrad, Earl. Jim Crow America. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947, 59–60.
Negro Story Magazine. V. II, N. 1–3. Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970.
Travel News. V. 1, No. 2. Zip Magazine. Zip Publishing Company (Dec.–Jan., 1968–1969).