In February 1927, Matilda McEwan of Hubbard Woods, Illinois, read an issue of the Chicago Defender, America’s leading black newspaper of the day. She took particular notice of an item in The Bookshelf, the Defender’s book review column and self-styled “literary club.”1 The item was a request from a reader in Dallas, Texas, for information on a half-remembered poem.2 Matilda’s response ran in The Bookshelf on February 19, 1927: “I saw in ‘The Bookshelf’ where someone is asking for the complete poem ‘The Face on the Barroom Floor.’ Having memorized it years ago, I shall be glad to send it to the person as I remember it.” She included her address.3
A month later the column ran another letter from Matilda: “Dear Readers of ‘The Bookshelf,’ I only meant to send the poem to the person who asked for it in the column. But to date I have received over 50 letters asking that a copy be sent to them. Since I am only a working girl and haven’t much leisure time, it would be impossible for me to answer them all.” She added: “If there are those who are very anxious for a copy and will send a small contribution with their letters, I shall be glad to make a special effort to send it to them.”4 A literary club was in full swing.
On May 14, 1928, the anonymous editor of The Bookshelf announced in the column that “the West” was finally speaking “in the realm of letters.”5 The Bookshelf’s contribution to this realm in fact dated back to November 14, 1925, when the column, then three years old, began to offer a question-and-answer forum for readers alongside its existing selection of book reviews and literary gossip. The new forum included sections called “Defender Forum” and “Who Can Answer This?” And, after its introduction, readers immediately used the new question-and-answer feature to support their own book clubs, perhaps inspiring the official metamorphosis of the column into a “literary club” in January 1926. On December 26, 1925, a reader wrote to The Bookshelf about “a speaker at our forum” and in the following issue a reading group began to use the column as a source for its selections, writing: “Our literary club is planning a birthday program the last Sunday in this month. Can you tell us which poets were born in January?”6 Two weeks after publishing this request, The Bookshelf’s editor removed the part of the column’s banner that had proclaimed: “In the small space allotted we will try to touch upon subjects generally of interest to readers.”7 Instead appeared a new line: “If you are a book lover and like the idea of a literary club that meets through ‘The Bookshelf’ column, you are welcome.”8 The column’s new status as a literary club was official.
The imaginative space of a “literary club” then expanded the “small space allotted,” as the earlier banner put it, to make room for Matilda, the fifty readers who wanted her poem, and potentially hundreds of thousands of others. By 1920 the Defender was the most widely read black newspaper in America, with a circulation of 283,571, according to a circulation pamphlet distributed by the newspaper. No other black newspaper of the time claimed a circulation of more than half this number. The issue of March 14, 1925, apparently ran to 247,867 copies (though the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which guarantees newspaper circulation, did not then include the Black Press, so the accuracy of this figure is impossible to verify) and each copy of the newspaper sold was likely read by four to five African Americans, putting its actual readership at close to a million people each week. In 1931 black newspaper circulation reached 1,600,000 and by 1950 it was at 2,440,000, with the Defender still prominent. Robert Sengstacke Abbott, who had produced the first issue of the Chicago Defender on May 5, 1905, became the first black publishing millionaire.9
In 1922 Frederick Detweiler compared the Black Press to a public work of art and a church or lodge, a symbol of aspiration and an embodiment of group life.10 Black newspapers did not just reflect life but helped to create it. This was still the case in 1944, Gunnar Myrdal believed. The press defined black people to themselves, so that the individual shared in the lives of the millions beyond the local community: “The press, more than any other institution, has created the Negro group as a social and a psychological reality to the individual Negro,” he argued.11 And the Defender was particularly active in helping to create this race consciousness.12 The newspaper’s motto was “American Race Prejudice must be destroyed” and advertisements for the newspaper proclaimed that “if you have race pride you can’t afford to miss it.” Other advertisements described the Defender as the “Mouthpiece of 14 Million People,” echoing the founding editorial of Freedom’s Journal, America’s first black newspaper, which famously declared in 1827: “Too long have others spoken for us.” A black migrant interviewed by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations in 1922 recognized that the Defender fostered race feeling, stimulating “self-respect, character and initiative” and the Commission’s report went on to trace the origins of the Chicago riots of 1919 in feelings of race consciousness emphasized by a defiant and assertive Black Press.13 Certainly Defender editorials were fiery, especially during the race riots (for example, instructing black people to kill any member of a white mob that attacked them).
Both Abbott’s tone and style were groundbreaking. His was the first black newspaper to have bold large print for headlines, and he added the parenthesis “white” to any mention of a white person, in answer to white newspapers’ practice of including the word “Negro” as a prefix. The Defender referred to African Americans as “Race men and Race women” and Abbott banned the word “Negro.” He frequently declared himself for the “masses” not the “classes,” printed editorials questioning why black people should fight for a country that did not protect them, during World War I, and called until his death in 1940 for a black cabinet member in the White House. He campaigned relentlessly for antilynching legislation, pushed for fair housing and equal employment for blacks, and protested against institutionalized racism and Franklin Roosevelt’s discriminatory New Deal relief initiatives throughout the 1930s. This radicalism prompted articles in the white press and scholarly journals attacking it as antisocial. A reader’s letter to the Defender on May 3, 1930, even asked if the newspaper was produced “with the sole object in view of fomenting, maintaining and perpetuating the hatred of the white and Negro race for one another.”14
But while it was important on a national level, the Defender was also famously committed to the local black community of Chicago, in part because of the newspaper’s role in the Great Migration. The black population of Chicago increased by 148.5 percent between 1910 and 1920, and had doubled again by 1930. Reaching more than 500,000 southern readers a week by 1917, the Defender’s migration campaign played a role in stimulating the exodus of an estimated one million to northern cities. Editorials encouraged African Americans in the South to migrate north, and, as a result, the newspaper was banned in numerous southern cities. Abbott asked railroad porters to carry his newspaper down nonetheless and published train schedules and job listings to further assist migration. The Chicago Commission on Race Relations highlighted the news-paper’s role: “the Defender’s policy prompted thousands of restless Negroes to venture North, where they were assured of its protection and championship of their cause. Many migrants in Chicago attribute their presence in the North to the Defender’s encouraging pictures of relief from conditions at home…. [The newspaper was] largely responsible for stimulating migration to the North.”15
During the peak years of the migration (1916–18), the Defender’s circulation rose from 50,000 to 125,000. Many new readers were the migrants, now segregated in the Black Belt, on the South Side of Chicago. Abbott, dubbed the “Black Joshua,” thought they needed what he frequently called “acclimatization.” He committed his newspaper to instructing and guiding the newcomers, offering a legal help column and advertising fund drives. Even the newspaper’s first attempt at a book review, before the launch of The Bookshelf, opened with a description of “the thousands of books annually thrust upon an unsuspecting public,” as though the new community might need defense from literary as well as civil and physical assaults.16 Then, once acclimatized, Abbott thought the migrants needed race pride to gel as a community. So he set about creating “Defenderland,” his new name for a South Side bound together in its identity by the newspaper. Eugene F. Gordon, in the New York–based black magazine Opportunity, commented in January 1927 that the Black Press was doing more than any other agency to cultivate race consciousness in its readers and the Defender remained a voice for the city’s black community throughout the Chicago Renaissance.17
The Bookshelf, which usually ran on the front page of the features section, was a popular item in this race-conscious Defender and a significant cultural gatekeeper during the early years of the Chicago Renaissance. Many of the other major black newspapers did not print book columns, and Chicago’s black Half-Century Magazine ran only one book review throughout its entire existence.18 Gordon’s Opportunity article of January 1927 listed the Defender as one of the best black newspapers, highlighted The Bookshelf as a good original feature, and expressed hope that it would be a permanent fixture. It would end up being one of the longest running book-review columns of the twentieth-century Black Press (only coming to an end in 1948), with new additional sections like “Observations: The Trend of Current Thought and Discussion.”
The column was important because—far from the Harlem’s hub—black Chicagoans seemingly felt their relative cultural poverty. In The New Negro, Alain Locke had described Harlem as the epicenter of “common consciousness,” “the greatest Negro city in the world,” the race capital where “Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination.”19 And in one column of 1926, a Bookshelf reader asked wistfully: “Is it true that a large New York bookstore recently gave over its entire display window to books concerning the Race?”20 A few months later, another reader expressed envy of “Harlem, with its intimate contacts with liberal-minded men and women of letters.”21 But the editor of The Bookshelf believed that the Defender’s imaginary book club could furnish Chicago with intimate contacts and perhaps a renaissance and literary scene of its own. He knew that “many of the best books by Race authors some of the guests see here [in the column] for the first time,” as he put it in January 1928, and he strove to offer Chicago the equivalent of Harlem’s literary salons and group expression. He painted a picture for his readers: “On the walls, lettered artistically, a quotation from Cullen’s The Dark Tower and Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues are read as the diners sip their ginger ale.” The Bookshelf was a place where black Chicagoans might find “pleasure and freedom, culture and refinement” and explore a “cabinet, with ‘Books by Negro Authors.’”22 On other occasions he further encouraged readers to imagine themselves coming together to share time with books.
This community-building through literature accompanied an encouragement of literary kinship through reading. The editor wrote of acquaintance and friendship with literary characters, saying of one character: “if you do not know her you ought to be acquainted at once.” Another review recommended a book because it would make “you feel as though you were being introduced personally at tea and then having the advantage of being led off into a quiet corner to hear the intimate gossip that follows.” Yet another promised the reader would feel as anxious about the characters “as if they were your own kith and kin.”23
In the nation’s biggest black newspaper, which was the South Side’s major exponent of race pride, the column was fostering a collective consciousness through literature. Readers responded to this attempt. Their published letters included details about their identities and the literary discussions in which they engaged person-to-person, creating a sense of real-life community beyond the printed page. They wrote of their upcoming talks before high school public speaking classes, described the quotations on the reading rooms of their local libraries, and inquired about the existence of free evening schools on the South Side. Frequently they would request details on books mentioned by other readers the previous week. As Chicago’s black readers answered each other’s questions and shared information on their favorite books, reading became more of a social practice than a solitary activity. The Bookshelf also assisted in the creation of an alternate creative space. Readers asked for advice on writing style and requested information on publishers, one seeking an audience for a 100,000-word novel. Others submitted poems for publication in the column itself.
The literary club of The Bookshelf, though without a common fireplace beyond the pages of the Defender, was becoming the kind of “knot” described by Opportunity in 1926: “We who clink our cups over New York fireplaces,” the writer noted, “are wont to miss the fact that little knots of literary devotees are in like manner sipping their ‘cup o’ warmth’ in this or that city in the ‘provinces.’”24 And the Bookshelf’s imaginary literary club seemed also to bring about real communal “fireplaces,” where Chicagoans might sip together a cup of their burgeoning Renaissance. As Matilda and the birthday-author letters demonstrate, the Defender apparently helped form numerous other book clubs in black Chicago as the Renaissance flourished. The reader who wanted a list of writers born in January for a book club birthday program wrote again to ask for the names of writers born in March, and repeated her request in May, June, September, October, and December. Eventually, perhaps inspired by the example of this reader’s real literary club, a second reader seemed to launch a similar book club, suddenly writing to ask which literary characters had died in the month of December. More real book club activity was evident when a reader asked for information on how to conduct literary clubs, or when another requested material that might help the organization of a reading group and was told to send a self-addressed envelope to The Bookshelf. The editor sometimes suggested that a book be the subject of club discussions, and the readers asked for the correction pronunciations of authors’ names, as though really in conversation. Many readers used The Bookshelf as the arbiter in literary debates, asking the editor to settle arguments about authors and novels, as though he was the host of a bookish gathering.
Through the pages of the newspaper a community had developed. And, as the column evolved, it charted the growth of the Black Chicago Renaissance and watered the seeds of what Locke called in 1929, the “second … crop” of black expression.25 Before 1925, an average of only 25 percent of the books discussed each month were by or about blacks and three-quarters of this small percentage were studies by white authors of black life, Africa, or the West Indies.26 This focus was not necessarily at odds with the newspaper’s tone. In addition to racial equality, the complex Abbott also championed polite society, good manners, and the gradual acquisition of culture. He would occasionally offer a Blue Ribbon Prize to readers who kept their lawns tidy. In a regular feature entitled “Things That Should Be Considered” he would editorialize on correct language and manners, and the newspaper’s column “Better English” was full of what he considered to be current idiomatic expressions of the white middle class.
Yet the focus on white literature was at odds with much of the Black Press. Only slightly higher than the percentage of books about or by African Americans reviewed in the New York Times, The Bookshelf’s early average contrasted the 90 percent black literature content of contemporaneous book-review columns in Harlem Renaissance periodicals like The Crisis or Messenger. The Negro World, a radical black New York newspaper, ran a short-lived book column that focused almost all of its reviews on books by or about African Americans, and another major black New York newspaper, the Amsterdam News, ran a column called “The Negro in World Literature,” which reviewed only black writers. The Bookshelf was initially the antithesis of such columns and of those like the Pittsburgh Courier’s “Your History,” which listed black cultural and political achievements. The Defender’s column also seems incongruous when set next to contemporary black publishing houses. For example, the founding statement of Associated Publishers from 1921 reads: “During the recent years the Negro race has been seeking to learn more about itself…. The Negro reading public has been largely increased and … any creditable publication giving important facts about the race now finds a ready market.”27
From 1925 onward, however, this “ready market” did begin to include Chicago. Throughout the whole period of the question-and-answer forum, seven out of every ten questions that readers asked and tried to answer were about black literature. They asked for histories of “the Race’s leading men,” lists of “the best Negro historians,” and books “dealing exclusively with Race poets.”28 Frequently they queried whether an author was a member of “the Race.” Eventually, in the same issue that ran Matilda’s second letter, a reader wrote: “I think it would be a good idea to print lists of books written by Race writers from the earliest known to the contemporary. By doing this, the readers of your column could select books written by Race men or women.”29 This persistent interest of his readers in black writers struck the editor of the column powerfully. Immediately after the introduction of the readers’ forum in 1925, the review percentage of black writers rose from a monthly average of 25 to 65 percent. The reviews gradually came to echo the readers’ questions and interests, so that by 1926 a book review would regularly follow on the heels of a reader’s inquiry about that book. By the end of the decade the editor was acknowledging in the column that an amazing number of books discussing black life and thought were being printed and that what had seemed a mere fad for books by and about black Americans was in fact a permanent interest.
He had encountered in his readers a desire for access to black art and literature. Not only adjusting the ratio of black to white books reviewed, he also revised the column’s explicit attitudes. For example, in January 1926, as the column was establishing the readers’ forum and first included the “literary club” banner, one review expressed satisfaction that The Weary Blues allowed readers to forget that Hughes was black. But a year later, after thirteen months of reader interaction and influence, the editor reviewed Hughes’s newest work with a different kind of satisfaction: “We have needed someone to interpret the emotions … of the great masses of us who are so far down in the scale of things,” he wrote.30
By the early 1930s, the column would often recommend books by white authors only if they had clearly influenced black literature (New Negro poetry drew on Robert Frost’s New England poems, for example). As well, under the influence of the readers’ forum, The Bookshelf was noticeably more critical of books that valued too highly the perceived cultural standards of white Americans. The column expressed dislike for the black desire to imitate whites and railed against black shame of Africa and the folk tale heritage. It declared that a cultural revolution was in progress and explicitly relegated to an earlier cultural moment the tendency toward imitation. It celebrated the recent discovery by black Americans of their own self-consciousness and distinct means of self-expression. In the early 1920s, before the introduction of the readers’ forum, a book review would express distaste for poor black people and call for books to represent rags-to-riches stories of uplift, but now, as the Black Chicago Renaissance got underway, the editor criticized narratives of passing as unfortunate choices of subject: “just because we live in a white man’s country, eat his food, wear his clothes … work his factories and fight his battles is no reason why we should stand in his window and look wistfully into his house, thus giving the impression that we want to come in,” he insisted in one review.31 Once dismissive of what it termed the “eternal race problem,” and enthusiastic about Americanization societies, the column began to recommend books on segregation, lynching, and black labor, and ran three reviews of a book called What the Negro Thinks.32
But The Bookshelf did retain an ambiguous approach to the black literature associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Reviews repeatedly expressed a dislike of modernist literature and instead recommended books that made “pleasant as well as profitable reading” or were “both popular and excellent.”33 In one issue a review condemned “pretentious” and “meaningless” literature that was “handled far too consciously” and “incoherent” books that showed “a straining for effect” and necessitated “wading through [a] mass of words.” The books to which this particular review referred were James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Countee Cullen’s Copper Sun. Both books represented, as far as the column was concerned, the incoherent “spirit of the modernist.”34 The Bookshelf also avoided the white modernists, never mentioning writers like John Dos Passos or Gertrude Stein. One review asked: “Is it part of today’s realism to believe that discordance is necessary? Keats … did not do it.”35 Another referred scathingly to the “rampant activities of more modern writers” of which “New York has been the hotbed … as a rule,” going on to state a preference for “inspiration” over “literary value.”36 While black periodicals like The Crisis focused on experimental black literature, The Bookshelf reviewed outlines of black history and biographies of black leaders. It repeatedly recommended Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy, the great middlebrow Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC) success, which the editor felt would “capture the interest of the layman” as well as commanding “the respect of the most erudite PhD.”37
In fact, The Bookshelf was to the black avant-garde literary scene what the contemporaneous BOMC was to experimental white modernists. The Bookshelf may even have modeled itself on the BOMC: the literary club format was introduced just after the first phase of controversial and widespread advertising for the BOMC, and by the 1930s the column listed the Club selections and ran occasional reviews by Christopher Morley, one of the Club’s first board members. No evidence survives about the racial makeup of the BOMC’s membership but the editorial board’s responses to novels like Richard Wright’s Native Son indicate that they thought their members were mainly white.38 The Bookshelf therefore functioned as its middlebrow black counterpart—as well as being Chicago’s answer to Harlem’s literary salons. The editorial policies of The Bookshelf and the BOMC were similar: both tried to avoid books that depicted immoral characters, sought books that inspired emotion, and aimed themselves at what the column’s banner and the BOMC’s board described as “book-lovers.”39
Of course, the major middlebrow feature that The Bookshelf shared with the BOMC was its identity as a literary club. The idea of an interactive club appears in the column’s logo: a bookshelf with a small pile of books and some partially used leaves of note-paper, suggesting note-taking and preparation for discussion, or perhaps something unfinished to which the reader might participate. Offering to the Chicago Renaissance a middlebrow literary society, The Bookshelf’s logo contrasted the logo of “Turning Pages,” an early column in the Defender that ran for a month in 1922. This featured an open book lit by a single candle, indicating solitary bedtime reading and the personal and private experience of turning the pages of a book—the opposite of a literary club. It also contrasted the logo of the books column “What Books Tell Us,” in Abbott’s Monthly. This showed a book on a display stand, an authority to be respected but not challenged. In this Chicago Renaissance-era periodical, books “tell us” things.
Abbott had launched Abbott’s Monthly in 1930, and its circulation soon reached 100,000. Much of the magazine focused on gossip, photographs of racially indeterminate people, sensationalist hack writing, romance serials, and lowbrow detective fiction, including “the strange case of Anton La Rue” (which needed no literary merit to solve, as the banner in the issue of October 1930 promised). But Richard Wright published the story “Superstition,” his first Chicago publication, in the April 1931 issue, and the magazine featured J. Max Barber, Hughes, Robert Hayden, and Chester Himes. The 1930s and 1940s also saw the Defender itself publish the writings of W. E. B. DuBois, Hughes, Wright, and Margaret Walker. Walter White wrote a regular column; and Gwendolyn Brooks’s first published poems appeared in the newspaper between 1934 and 1936.
After Abbott’s death in 1940, his more culturally progressive heir and nephew John Sengstacke took over the Defender. In an early editorial, Sengstacke declared black artistic achievement a weapon in the fight for equality of opportunity, and on September 12, 1942, after Paul Robeson’s performance in Othello in Cambridge, the Defender affirmed victory for black America on the cultural front. Under Sengstacke, the newspaper featured a regular column written in jive talk, and another in rhyme. More famously, Hughes (who had published his early poems in the Defender on a page called “Lights and Shadows: A Little Bit of Everything”) now began a weekly column “From Here to Yonder,” which appeared from 1942 through 1962. Here he wrote sympathetically of the Soviet Union and printed radical verse, and in 1943 he introduced his famous working-class black character, Jesse Semple, into the column. Along the same lines, staff writer Bruce Reynolds contributed a serial weekly story, usually a topical and factual account of working-class life on the South Side. The Defender also showcased essays, short stories, and poetry by unknown authors: black school-teachers, ministers, and others.
The Depression hit the Black Press hard, and more than half of all black periodicals went out of business. But while the Defender’s circulation declined, it remained Chicago’s leading black newspaper, with branch offices across the country and in Europe. During the 1930s and 1940s, the editors maintained readership with long-running gossip columns, numerous illustrations, exciting front-pages headlines, serializations of novels, and popular sports columns. Social scientists from the Chicago School of Sociology contributed regular commentaries, and humorous anecdotes appeared in a column called “Adventures in Race Relations,” to which readers contributed. Articles listed music, literature, and art events, women’s and social club meetings. The newspaper ran a regular “Mayor of Bronzeville” contest, which awarded a column and symbolic office to personalities in the black community, and staged the annual Billiken festival, parade, and picnic, linked to its “Billiken Page” and Club. The Defender’s writers campaigned for integrated sports and editorialized on the Scottsboro boys, the war in Ethiopia, and World War II—in particular on racism in the military. To bring attention to the campaign for admittance of black men into the air force, the newspaper cosponsored the flight of two black pilots to Washington in 1939. Metz Lochard, editor-in-chief of the Defender, then published a controversial one-time supplement in 1942, the “Victory Edition,” with articles by black and white leaders on the two fronts of the war: fascism abroad and racism at home. The Defender’s war coverage boosted circulation, and the newspaper began to forge links with radio and TV stations, sponsoring a radio show until 1952.
Then, on February 6, 1956, Sengstacke turned the Defender into the Chicago Daily Defender, the largest black-owned daily in the world. He continued as the Defender’s publisher until his death in May 1997. He also founded the National Negro Publishers Association, known today as the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA). This Association unified publishers of black newspapers across the country, and Sengstacke noted in the founding documents of February 1940 that: “The Black press believes that America can best lead the world away from racial and national antagonisms when it accords to every person, regardless of color or creed, full human and legal rights. Hating no person, and fearing no person, the Black press strives to help every person in the firm belief that all are hurt as long as anyone is held back.”40 In the week of Abbott’s death, during a year when national circulation for black newspapers reached the all-time high of 1,265,000, seventy-five publishers from across the country met in Chicago to affirm these sentiments. Several months later, in June 1940, the Association was permanent and had its own trade magazine, The American Negro Editor. By 1944 the NNPA had a feature on NBC and CBS called “Newspaper Week Broadcasts,” which included music, drama, and political commentary.
In addition to the National Negro Publishers Association, the Defender, Abbott’s Monthly, and the Associated Negro Press (Claude Barnett’s highly respected Chicago-based national wire service), Chicago also boasted black weeklies like the Bee (published by Anthony Overton, with an all-women staff and a national circulation of 50,000) and the muck-raking Whip. Published by William C. Linton and edited by Yale Law School graduates Joseph D. Bibb and Arthur Clement MacNeal, the Whip sold 65,000 copies weekly. Its editors criticized white politicians, launched successful “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” and “Spend Your Money Where You Can Work” campaigns that lasted throughout the Depression (and helped to create more than two thousand jobs in South Side stores), and increased the Whip’s Chicago circulation to almost that of the Defender.
Though it didn’t carry a books column, the Whip regularly reviewed theater and music and imitated the Defender’s columnist format, running widely read gossip columns like “Nosey Knows” and “Under the Lash.” Its sensationalist editorials, and a variety of legal and health sections, were also popular. But the Whip did not survive its own successes. White advertisers responded to its “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign by taking their business to the Defender, and the Whip folded in 1939. In his autobiography, the journalist Enoch Waters noted that the newspaper was a “victim of its own ingenuity and vigor.”41 Two other black newspapers that had endorsed local boycotts, The Negro World and the New York Interstate Tattler, also went out of business. The more conservative Chicago Bee, which largely ignored civil rights, weathered the Depression only to collapse in the wake of Overton’s death in 1946 after a brief tabloid-size reinvention.
Overton, an ex-slave and businessmen who founded and published the Bee, was pro-education, antisuperstition, and supportive of the National Negro Business League, racial improvement, and interracial cooperation. With Bee editor Olive Diggs, he was committed to what the newspaper termed “wholesome and authentic news.”42 The “honeybees,” as Waters remembered calling the all-female staff of the Bee, resisted sensationalism, wrote thoughtful and well-researched editorials, and championed decorum and refinement.43 Nurturing the development of a coherent black community in Chicago, they printed details of black Chicagoans serving in the army and a monthly supplement with glossy photographs of the South Side’s high-profile figures, and also sponsored the original “Mayor of Bronzeville” contest in the 1930s that gave rise to the name “Bronzeville” for the South Side. Like the Defender’s Bookshelf, the Bee encouraged literary community, selling black history and literature books directly to its readers. While the Defender brought local women’s groups together to form the National Council of Negro Women, the Bee covered the activities of the Black Women’s Club Movement.
Black magazines also thrived in Chicago. Negro Story was the first magazine to publish stories only by or about black Americans. Editors Alice C. Browning and Fern Gayden had ties to the South Side Writers Group and also to the Defender via Browning’s husband (who organized publicity for Sengstacke’s newspaper) and Sengstacke’s wife (who contributed to Negro Story). In addition, Browning had written a fashion column for the Defender in the late 1930s. Browning and Gayden used these connections to promote the magazine, sending regular press releases to the Defender and announcing the 1945 anniversary issue of the magazine in the pages of the newspaper. Around seventy pages long and costing forty cents an issue, Negro Story was subtitled “A Magazine for All Americans.” It featured Hughes in its masthead as an editorial advisor and included the column “Current Town Talk,” which at one point detailed Ralph Ellison’s activities in the marines. During its short existence between 1944 and 1946, it featured poems and stories by Himes, Wright, and Frank Marshall Davis, politically radical pieces by Hughes and Ellison, and some of Brooks’s first prose, including a series called “Chicago Portraits … Sketches of Chicago Life.” It also showcased unknown black and white working-class writers.
The editors theorized a new kind of documentary-style literature. They wrote in their inaugural issue of their belief that “among thirteen million Negroes in America, there must be many who were eager to write creatively if they had a market,” and expressed a faith that “good writing may be entertaining as well as socially enlightening.” The magazine was an “opportunity to participate in the creation of a better world,” and this world was one for which they felt “an obligation to work and to struggle.”44 In their fourth issue they asked “What Should The Negro Story Be?” and printed responses by Defender columnist Earl Conrad, white radical Jack Conroy, and Harlem Renaissance veteran Alain Locke. Over the next two years the editors then gave space to stories about current affairs and poems that used newspaper headlines, a literature that combined news and art to make what the magazine termed “plotless realism.”
In 1947 Conrad placed Negro Story at the center of what he called the “Blues School of Literature,” adding that this school showed “the negative in Negro life, with a view to reaching the positive conclusion of indicting a white supremacist society.”45 He believed that Negro Story had launched several writers and was widely read in the publishing world. Beyond this magazine, Browning continued her cultural politics as president of the National Negro Magazine Publishers Association, suggesting to members in 1945 that they encourage the adaptation in story and article form of black case histories, covering civil liberties, housing, socialized medicine, and fascism. Browning also planned what would have been the real equivalent of the Defender’s imaginary book club, in the form of “Negro Story Book” clubs.
Another important Chicago-based figure in the world of the Black Press was John H. Johnson, who in 1940 launched his first periodical, Negro Digest. In the style of Reader’s Digest, this sold 150,000 monthly copies by 1944. Johnson followed his success with Ebony in 1945, which again followed a tried-and-true formula and imitated Life. Ebony reached a circulation of half a million by 1950, and Johnson added the pocket news weekly Jet to his stable in 1951. Ben Burns, one of the first editors at both Negro Digest and Ebony, put the magazines’ popular success down to their focus on “four basic subject areas: interracial marriage, Negroes passing as whites, sex, and anatomical freaks.”46 In addition, white advertisers willingly brought their business to a publisher who announced in Ebony that his editorial policy was “to mirror the happier side of Negro life—the positive, everyday accomplishments from Harlem to Hollywood.”47 Johnson Publishing Company emerged from the Chicago Renaissance a powerful force in American journalism. Other pioneers in the field of publishing began and remained in Chicago, and city officials and candidates for political office began to woo the Black Press.
Throughout the Chicago Renaissance, the city’s black newspapers and periodicals had printed and reviewed thousands of stories and poems, and forged a tangible literary community on the South Side. Enoch P. Waters, who worked for the Defender between 1930 and 1945, noted in his autobiography that “Chicago Negroes did not have an atmosphere that encouraged cultural pursuits as Harlem had … because Chicago did not.” He insisted that the “ego of the Southside … was always in the shadow of Harlem.”48 Yet a 26-week investigative series that Waters spearheaded for the Defender during the Chicago Renaissance detailed a vast array of cultural activities and interests on the South Side. The editors titled the series “Is the South Side Doomed?” and concluded that it most certainly was not.49 Matilda McEwan, fielding requests from more than fifty readers for her poem in 1927, could have told them that.
1. From January 1926 onward, the following banner ran each week beneath the logo for The Bookshelf: “‘The Bookshelf’ is for the benefit of those of our readers who are interested in things literary. If you are a book lover and like the idea of a literary club that meets through ‘The Bookshelf’ column, you are welcome. You are urged to write in to this department any comments on current or past literature that you have in mind. If you see questions in this column you care to answer by all means do so. If you have questions to ask pertaining to prose, poetry or fiction in modern or ancient literature, send them in.”
2. The letter from S. B. A. of Dallas, Texas, ran in The Bookshelf on February 5, 1927, A1.
3. Chicago Defender, The Bookshelf, February 19, 1927, A1.
4. The Bookshelf, March 19, 1927, A1.
5. The Bookshelf, May 14, 1928, A1. The first few editions of The Bookshelf, in 1922, listed A. L. Jackson as the column’s editor. From 1922 onward, however, no editor’s name was attached to the column or listed in the newspaper. The Defender archives contain no clue as to the editor’s name after 1922. Because most of the newspaper’s editors were male, it is to be presumed that The Bookshelf editor was male too.
6. The Bookshelf, December 26, 1925, A1; The Bookshelf, January 2, 1926, A1.
7. See, for example, The Bookshelf, December 26, 1925, A1.
8. The Bookshelf, January 16, 1926, A1.
9. Circulation figures given in Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 185. For more on Abbott, see Alan D. DeSantis, “A Forgotten Leader: Robert S. Abbott and the Chicago Defender from 1910–1920,” Journalism History 23.2 (1997): 63–71, and C. K. Doreski, “From News to History: Robert Abbott and Carl Sandburg read the 1919 Chicago Riot,” African American Review 26.4 (1992): 637–50.
10. Frederick G. Detweiler. The Negro Press in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1922.
11. Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944, 911.
12. For one discussion of the newspaper’s racial politics, see T. Ella Strother, “The Black Image in the Chicago Defender, 1905–1975.” Journalism History 4.4 (1977–78): 137–41, 156.
13. The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot, by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922, 461, 477.
14. Lemos, Justo Fide. Letter to the Editor, Defender, May 3, 1930, 14. See also Gladstone H. Yeuell, “The Negro Press as a Factor in Education,” Journal of Educational Sociology 2.2 (1928): 92–98. In this analysis of three different black newspapers, the Defender was ranked the lowest for “social betterment” (37.11 percent of its copy, where The Age has 65.69 percent) and the highest for “antisocial” (25.32 percent to The Age’s 11.34 percent).
15. The Negro in Chicago, 86–87.
16. Defender, April 2, 1921, 16.
17. See Eugene F. Gordon, “Survey of the Negro Press,” Opportunity (January 1927): 7–11, 32.
18. The Age, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Savannah Tribune did not run book columns during this period. Nor did any of Defender’s black competition in Chicago: the Whip, the World, the Searchlight, the Metropolitan Post, the News Ledger, the Chicago Enterprise, the Chicago Globe, the Idea, the Chicago Bee, and the monthly American Eagle.
19. Locke, Alain. The New Negro: An Anthology. New York: Atheneum, 1925, 14.
20. The Bookshelf, June 19, 1926, A1.
21. The Bookshelf, September 11, 1926, A1.
22. The Bookshelf, January 28, 1928, A1.
23. The Bookshelf, March 25, 1922, A1; The Bookshelf, December 30, 1922, A1; The Bookshelf, April 15, 1922, A1.
24. Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life (October 1926): 322.
25. Locke, “1928: A Retrospective Review,” Opportunity (January 1929): 8–11 (8). Locke noted of New Negro literature that “as with many another boom, the water will need to be squeezed out of much inflated stock and many bubbles must burst…. The real significance and potential power of the Negro renaissance may not reveal itself until after this reaction, and the entire topsoil of contemporary Negro expression may need to be ploughed completely under for a second hardier and richer crop” (8).
26. Calculation made with reference to all the published columns, based on books reviewed each month with adjustments made for length of review (lines of space allocated).
27. Statement made in July 1921, quoted in Donald Franklin Joyce, “Reflections on the Changing Publishing Objectives of Secular Black Book Publishers, 1900–1986,” in Cathy N. Davidson ed., Reading in America: Literature and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 226–39.
28. The Bookshelf, March 5, 1927, A1; The Bookshelf, April 30, 1927, A1; The Bookshelf, April 2, 1927, A1.
29. The Bookshelf, March 19, 1927, A1.
30. The Bookshelf, February 5, 1927, A1.
31. The Bookshelf, June 8, 1929, A1.
32. For “eternal race problem” see The Bookshelf, April 15, 1922, A1.
33. The Bookshelf, August 20, 1927, A1.
34. The Bookshelf, September 17, 1927, A1.
35. The Bookshelf, November 12, 1927, A1.
36. The Bookshelf, November 26, 1927, A1.
37. The Bookshelf, June 19, 1926, A1.
38. For a detailed discussion of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s response to Native Son, see Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 286–87.
39. Quoted in Radway, 93.
40. Quoted in Roland E. Wolseley. The Black Press, U.S.A. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1971, 118.
41. Waters, Enoch P. American Diary: A Personal History of the Black Press. Chicago: Path Press, 1987, 120.
42. Quoted in Henry Lewis Suggs, ed. The Black Press in the Middle West, 1865–1985. Westport, Conn.: Greenward Press, 1996, 33.
43. Waters, 122.
44. Browning, Alice C. and Fern Gayden. “Letter to Our Readers.” Negro Story 1.1 (August–September 1945): 1.
45. Conrad, Earl. Jim Crow America. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947, 59.
46. Burns, Ben. Nitty Gritty: A White Editor in Black Journalism. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996, 114.
47. Quoted in Bill Mullen. Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–46. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999, 186.
48. Waters, 69, 190.
49. The Defender, October 21, 1939, 14.
Abbott’s Monthly Microfilm, 1930–33.
American Eagle Microfilm, 1921–25.
Appeal Microfilm, 1885–1923.
Associated Negro Press Microfilm, 1919–67.
Broad-Ax Microfilm, 1895–1935.
Chicago Defender Microfilm, 1905-present.
The Crisis Microfilm, 1920–29.
Danky, James P. and Wayne A. Wiegand, eds. Print Culture in a Diverse America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998.
DeSantis, Alan D. “A Forgotten Leader: Robert S. Abbott and the Chicago Defender from 1910–1920.” Journalism History 23.2 (1997): 63–71.
De Santis, Christopher C., ed. Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942–62. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Doreski, C. K. “From News to History: Robert Abbott and Carl Sandburg read the 1919 Chicago Riot.” African American Review 26.4 (1992): 637–50.
Drake, St. Clair and Horace R. Cayton. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1945.
Eagle Microfilm, 1889–1930.
Ebony Microfilm, 1945-present.
Free Lance Microfilm, 1895–1926.
Grossman, James R. Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Half-Century Magazine Microfilm, 1921–25.
Headlines and Pictures Microfilm, 1944–46.
Idea Microfilm, 1926.
Jet Microfilm, 1951-present.
Johnson, Abby Arthur and Ronald Maberry Johnson. Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of African-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979.
McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: The Lost History of African-American Literary Societies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.
Messenger Microfilm, 1919–28.
National Negro Publishers Association/National Newspaper Publishers Association Microfilm, 1940-present.
Negro Digest Microfilm, 1940–51.
Negro Story Microfilm, 1944–46.
Ottley, Roi. The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott. Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1955.
Pride, Armistead S. and Clint C. Wilson II. A History of the Black Press. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1997.
Scott, Emmett J. “Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916–1918.” Journal of Negro History 4.3 (July 1919): 290–340.
———. “More Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916–1918.” Journal of Negro History 4.4 (October 1919): 412–65.
Searchlight Microfilm, 1910–32.
Simmons, Charles A. The African-American Press: A History of News Coverage during National Crises, with Special Reference to Four Black Newspapers, 1827–1965. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Co., 1998.
Strother, T. Ella. “The Race-Advocacy Function of the Black Press.” Black American Literature Forum 12.3 (Autumn 1978): 92–99.
Vincent, Theodore G. Voices of a Black Nation: Political Journalism in the Harlem Renaissance. San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1973.
Vogel, Todd, ed. The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
Washburn, Patrick S. A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government’s Investigation of the Black Press during World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Whip Microfilm, 1919–39.
World Microfilm, 1900–32.