The Chicago School of Sociology and the Black Chicago Renaissance represent two defining elements of the African American experience in early twentieth-century Chicago. On an empirical level, methods and attitudes developed in the sociology department of the University of Chicago during the first decades of the twentieth century helped shape local and federal policy on racial matters, and thereby affected black-white race relations in the city. On an artistic level, black authors writing in and/or about the city of Chicago in the period between 1935 and 1959 (a slight modification of Robert Bone’s definition of the era) brought the landscape of the South Side to life with a richness and intensity matched only in descriptions of Harlem in classic texts of the Harlem Renaissance. While equal in power to the best Harlem works of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, and Rudolph Fisher, Chicago texts by authors like Richard Wright, William Attaway, Willard Motley, and Gwendolyn Brooks also convey a quality of grittiness largely absent from the best-known works of the Harlem Renaissance. For critics like Bone and Carla Cappetti, the grittiness of the writing provides evidence of the influence that Chicago sociology, which focused on how environmental factors in the city determined human behavior, had over the writers of the Chicago Black Renaissance.
Certainly one can learn much from pairing this sociological methodology with literary works from the Black Chicago Renaissance era. As Bone and Cappetti have argued, Wright’s fiction and his fictionalized autobiography, Black Boy/American Hunger, lend themselves well to Chicago sociological readings. As Wright himself notes in the introduction to Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake’s landmark sociological study of Chicago, Black Metropolis (1945), he saw the principles of Chicago sociology as defining his experience and giving it meaning. He further suggests that one can best understand his writing by first understanding basic principles of the Chicago School. This approach works well for reading Wright, who aligns himself with the Chicago sociologists and seeks to give their ideas about environment and behavior life in his literary renderings of the city. For all of that, however, the Wright model becomes a Procrustean bed if one attempts to read other Chicago authors of the era through the same lens. Close consideration of work by Brooks, Motley, Frank Marshall Davis, Theodore Ward, and Frank London Brown complicates the notion that black Chicago writers working between 1935 and 1959 felt the influence of the sociology department at the University of Chicago on their work in any unified sense. Ultimately, then, one best understands the sociologists and writers as making common cause around understanding Chicago life but taking a variety of approaches to achieve that shared end.
In order to best understand this relationship, one must grasp some of the basic principles traditionally grouped under the heading of the Chicago School. Arguably, at least, the term is itself problematic, according to University of Chicago alumnus Howard S. Becker’s history of the sociology department. He suggests that one can use the term “Chicago School of Sociology” in its narrowest sense to refer to the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago; more often, though, students and scholars use the term to reference a coherent body of ideas about urban life generated by faculty and graduate students of the Sociology Department and a concomitant pattern of research practices developed to implement those ideas. In fact, the diverse body of scholars who made up the department pursued their various interests, sometimes in direct conflict with the work of their peers. This detail demonstrates the simplification and mythologizing of the Department of Sociology’s scholars and their work—which in turn reinforces the notion of how difficult it is to assess the influence of the sociological school on the literary work.
In all fairness, however, one can point to certain methodological innovations that arose at Chicago as hallmarks of the department’s work. One can also identify prominent individuals whose ideas and undertakings advanced the department’s status. In the case of Louis Wirth (1897–1952), Cayton, and Wright, one can even draw specific connections between particular individuals whose relationships provide the foundation for Bone’s and Capetti’s arguments.
To be sure, Wirth is an important figure in the development of the Chicago School; his contributions build, however, on the foundations established by Ernest Burgess (1886–1966), W. I. Thomas (1863–1947), and Robert Park (1864–1944), the scholars who took the department Albion Small (1854–1926) founded in 1892 and transformed it in the 1910s and 1920s into the leading national institution for sociological study. Prior to Burgess’s, Park’s, and Thomas’s ascendancy at Chicago, the fledgling discipline of American sociology concerned itself primarily with theorizing about social conditions and formulating abstract models upon which to test hypotheses. Early scholars in the field, with the notable exception of Small, largely rejected empirical research in favor of generating broad theoretical foundations that would help establish sociology as a viable, independent field of study.
Small saw the need for empirical research, though he was not himself an empiricist. He found in Burgess, Thomas, and Park collaborators who brought empirical research to the forefront of their department’s methodology. Under their guidance, the department emphasized methodologies of qualitative analysis, including relying on subject’s personal accounts, conducting field work, undertaking social mapping, and performing “ecological analysis,” the study of how factors in the environment determine human behavior.
As a part of this ecological analysis, or human ecology, approach, members of the department looked on the city of Chicago itself as a laboratory. In studies like Park’s “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment” (1915), Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920), Charles Johnson’s The Negro in Chicago (1922, with considerable input from Park), Nels Anderson’s The Hobo (1923), Burgess’s “The Growth of the City” (1925), and Wirth’s The Ghetto (1928), members of the department focused on understanding the features of the city, particularly its racial and ethnic composition and the resultant local communities that formed within it, the social problems that arose within and among the local communities, and the impact of these conditions on human behavior. The dual ends of this approach were to increase knowledge about the city as an entity and to provide some means of countering the social malaise that these researchers believed the urban environment fostered.
In Park’s case, this orientation resulted at least partially from his prior experience as a journalist. Working in that capacity for over a decade before pursuing his career in sociology at Chicago, Park developed an acute sense of the usefulness of careful observation and close contact with the subjects of one’s analysis. He also learned firsthand that other sorts of observers, including writers of fiction, could provide useful insights into urban life. One writer whom Park particularly admired was Theodore Dreiser, whose novel Sister Carrie (1900) paints Chicago almost as a character itself, a powerful force in the drama of Carrie Meeber Madenda’s fall and rise. In Carrie, as in his other works, Dreiser advances the principles of American literary naturalism, which recognizes the increasing mechanization and urbanization of American life as forces too powerful for individual characters to either control or even escape. In many ways, Dreiser’s writing has a sociological cast, which makes Park’s receptivity to it unsurprising; it also points to one of the major connecting points between Chicago sociology and the Black Chicago Renaissance. When Park identified Dreiser as a legitimate source of information about Chicago, he laid the foundation for relationships between sociologists like Wirth and novelists like Wright.
As biographer Michel Fabre notes, the immediate cause for Wright’s in-depth exposure to Chicago sociology was the chance assignment of social worker Mary Wirth, Louis Wirth’s spouse, to the Wright family’s case. She introduced the aspiring author to her husband, who provided Wright with an informal curriculum in sociology and, along with his research assistant Cayton, discussed the readings with his new protégé at some length. As a part of this discussion, Wirth introduced Wright to the concept of “urbanism,” which the sociologist defined in a landmark study entitled “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (1938). Building on Park’s 1915 “The City,” Wirth suggests the existence of a mode of experience that unites the denizens of a particular urban environment and thereby shapes patterns of behavior in the given city.
At the heart of this idea of urbanism is the conviction that individuals experience greater alienation and isolation in urban environments because, although they interact with larger numbers of people than rural residents do, their interactions tend to be highly specialized and superficial. In Bone’s view, Wright’s exposure to urbanism and his influence as the primary figure among the writers of the Chicago Black Renaissance makes Wirth’s theory the foundation of all the work (or at least all the work Bone deems significant) produced by Wright and his Chicago compatriots.
Whether or not Bone’s characterization is accurate, recognition of Wright’s bond with Wirth, and through him indirectly with Park, illuminates elements of two of Wright’s most sociological works: his best-selling Native Son (1940) and his commentary on the Great Migration, 12 Million Black Voices (1941). The recognition of these elements shows, in turn, Wright’s resistance to simply adopting sociological principles that either excused white society too easily or too fully dehumanized blacks.
Native Son chronicles the life of Bigger Thomas, whose attempted transgression of racial and class boundaries in Depression-era Chicago proves lethal for Bigger’s two victims, Mary Dalton and Bessie Mears, and leads to Bigger’s own demise. Generations of readers have reacted with horror to Bigger’s crimes; however, the novel resists simplistic interpretation. Even as Wright demonstrates Bigger’s brutality, he emphasizes the impact of racist socioeconomic forces on his character’s development. This orientation, which draws on Wirth and Park’s human ecological claims that environment determines behavior, suggests an almost exculpatory lack of agency on Bigger’s part. While Wright certainly sees the importance of environment in his tale, he also recognizes that to give Bigger over entirely to that line of argument negates his individuality. As Wright sought not only to chronicle the horrific conditions under which blacks lived but also to emphasize blacks’ humanity, complete acceptance of this sociological orientation proves untenable. The author’s struggle with this paradox provides much of the energy that propels the narrative.
As a condition of his family’s maintaining their public assistance income, Bigger takes a job as chauffeur to the wealthy Dalton family. Mr. Dalton, a successful businessman whose holdings include Bigger’s slum tenement, and his blind wife see themselves as philanthropists, although their actual help to African Americans is in fact quite limited. Their daughter, Mary, aspires to philanthropy of her own, as she dallies with Communism and with a particular Communist organizer named Jan Erlone. Mary and Jan’s well-intentioned but fundamentally misguided attempts to befriend Bigger take a tragic turn the first night of his employment. The white couple insists on eating with Bigger in a South Side restaurant, insensitively overlooking Bigger’s discomfort with this transgression of the social code. In an attempt to relax, Bigger shares a bottle of rum with Jan and Mary. When he later takes Mary home, she is so intoxicated that Bigger must carry her up to her room. Once again frightened, but also aroused, by another violation of the social code, Bigger fondles and kisses Mary as she lies drunk on her bed. When her blind mother enters the room, Bigger’s overwhelming sense of transgression leads him to cover Mary’s mouth with a pillow. He accidentally kills her and then, to avoid detection, burns her corpse in the Dalton’s furnace.
The heart of Bigger’s difficulties in Book One lie in Chicago sociological theory. Wright attributes Bigger’s inarticulate rage and his tendencies toward violence to his environment, although he complicates that notion by distinguishing Bigger’s predisposition for violence from the milder hostilities that his peers Gus, Jack, and G. H. feel. The author also further tests the principles of human ecology by moving his subject into a foreign realm within the city. Because of his socialization on the South Side, Bigger can only see the Daltons and Jan Erlone in the most superficial terms, as extensions of the white mass that he has feared and hated his entire life. Similarly, the Daltons and Jan view Bigger superficially, although one can argue that the young Communists at least want to bridge the gap. These notions, which echo the work of Park, Burgess, and Wirth, propel the narrative forward to the moment of the first murder and set up further sociological consideration of both the protagonist and his environment.
Book Two describes Bigger’s being identified as the murderer, his flight through Chicago’s slums and his eventual capture by the police. Bigger’s flight affords Wright numerous opportunities to chronicle the particular conditions under which black Chicagoans lived during the 1930s. In recounting difficulties finding housing, describing the frustrations of being forced to buy overpriced, substandard food in South Side markets, and chronicling the police force’s terrorizing of the black community, Wright incorporates elements of the life history that is a foundational element of the Chicago School’s methodology.
Even as Wright makes use of these features of Chicago sociology, he resists the temptation to simply embrace them wholesale. One sees this clearly in the representation of newspapers in the novel. In “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” (1938) Louis Wirth argues that the media outlets of a city must necessarily serve as a “leveling influence.” In contrast, Wright notes that the manipulation of the media to racial ends prevents any meaningful leveling from occurring. From after he murders Mary until he has been jailed for his crime, Bigger obsessively seeks out and reads newspapers. Clearly, his primary objective is to determine what the authorities know about his actions and whereabouts. In going consistently to the Tribune, though, Bigger effectively makes the paper the authority on who and where he is. In the court of public opinion, the paper tries and convicts him immediately, thereby shaping how the general public sees him as well. In the process of detailing his saga, the paper also relies on racist formulations of identity that shape perceptions of Bigger that are often contrary to reality. Although he did not rape Mary, for instance, the paper brands him as “rapist” and “Negro sex-slayer,” labels that “exclude him utterly from the world.”1 From this point on, his reality is determined entirely by the impact of that terminology, as he is captured, tried, and sentenced to death.
The third section of the novel, which recounts Bigger’s incarceration and his trial, lacks the emphasis on physical flight that drives the first two sections of the narrative. Nevertheless, it takes the reader on another sort of sociological tour, this time in the shape of attorney Boris Max’s argument that Bigger’s environment is entirely responsible for his actions in murdering both Mary Dalton and Bessie Mears. For much of this section, Wright gives himself over to the human ecology argument, making a strong case for Bigger’s being a product of his environment. Ultimately, however, he pulls the reader back from that, affording his character a moment of individual awareness that comes from the creation of a meaningful human relationship. That does not, of course, change the outcome of Bigger’s story, but it does complicate the narrative. Had Bigger known this real connection earlier, then what might his life have been? With that question hanging unresolved at the end of the narrative, the reader cannot rest easily with the notion that human relationships in the urban environment are necessarily superficial. In the end, then, Native Son is undeniably a sociologically inflected novel, but it is not at all a wholesale adoption of Chicago sociological principles.
In his introduction to Drake and Cayton’s Black Metropolis (1945), Wright notes that Chicago has “an open and raw beauty … that seems either to kill or endow one with the spirit of life.”2 If Native Son reflects the killing edge of Chicago, then 12 Million Black Voices brings the spirit of life to the black community. To be sure, Wright brings many of the grim details of Cayton’s Chicago research to bear in his account of the Great Migration, a text which once again employs the life history model of reportage, although Wright blends particular life histories together into the overarching narrative of a community “we.” In his discussion of the power of the Lords of the Land and the Bosses of the Buildings, and most pointedly in his lyrical assessment of the kitchenette apartment as “the funnel through which our pulverized lives flow to ruin and death on the city pavements,” one sees the darkness of determinism, the suggestion that the human ecology of the South Side harms, perhaps irreparably, black youth.3 And yet, for all of that, the narrative does not end here, but moves instead to a final note of hope that counters the pervasive despair of Native Son: “We are with the new tide. We stand at the crossroads. We watch each new procession. The hot wires carry urgent appeals. Print compels us. Voices are speaking. Men are moving! And we shall be with them….”4 In this formulation, where the media notably is something of a leveler, Wright shows a hopeful outcome to the urbanist way of life, suggesting in the process that while environment may shape experience, it does not determine fate—indeed, transcendence is not only possible, it is also inevitable.
In examining these two texts, which appeared within a year of one another, one can see the complexities of Wright’s own relationship to Chicago sociology; fascinated with its theories and its methodology, he nevertheless cannot fully embrace the implications of its principles because of what they cost him and his fellow blacks in individuality and agency. Recognition of his situation necessarily complicates scholarly readings of him as the conduit of Chicago sociological theory and methods to his peers in the South Side Writers Group and to successive generations of Chicago writers.
Among Wright’s fellow participants in the South Side Writers Group were poet Frank Marshall Davis and playwright Theodore Ward. Ward’s best-known work of this period, Big White Fog (1938), was selected for production by the Federal Theatre Project’s Chicago unit in 1938 and then ran again in New York in 1940. This important, if somewhat cumbersome, play recounts the misfortunes of the Mason family, who struggle against the largely invisible backdrop of Chicago’s South Side to achieve and sustain individual dignity and empowerment in the face of persistent white oppression. Victor Mason, the central character, is a Garveyite, so disillusioned by American racism and so desperate to believe in Garvey as a messiah that he squanders his family’s fortunes on stock in the Black Star Line on the very day that officials deem the first Black Star liner unseaworthy. His brother-in-law, Dan Rogers, is a ruthless capitalist, who makes a significant fortune by opening a kitchenette building, loses his money to the Depression, and loses his wife, Juanita, to the boarders that she takes in to make ends meet. Ella, Vic’s long-suffering wife and Juanita’s sister, defends her husband from Juanita’s mockery about his Garveyite beliefs and from her mother Martha Brooks’s color-struck hostility toward the “black, evil fool” that took her and her daughters from the security of the South to Chicago and now aspires to move them to Africa.
In the course of the play, Vic rises through the ranks of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association while his family experiences a parallel decline. His daughter, Wanda, turns eventually to prostitution to provide the rent money that will keep the family from finally being evicted. His son, Les, moves from the disillusionment of being denied a college scholarship because of his race, through involvement in his Uncle Dan’s real estate scheme, to radicalization and membership in the Communist Party, which he sees as the only chance to save his family. Ironically, it is the presence of Communist eviction-resisters that leads the police to open fire on the Masons in the final scene of the play, and Victor falls, shot in the back while wearing his now tattered Garvey uniform. As he lies dying, Victor resigns himself to despair and declares the white oppressor victorious. In a move consistent with leftist drama, Ward answers this outcry with the image of Les’s comrades, black and white, gathered at Victor’s bedside to comfort him as he dies and to lead his family into a brighter future. Although he clearly sees something appealing in this image, Ward resists the complete fix, as Victor declares that his vision has failed him and he cannot see the unity of the races. This might well be the final proof of the character’s blindness, the ultimate illustration of his overblown and destructive fidelity to Garvey; alternately, it might well foreshadow the impermanence of the American Communist Party’s commitment to racial equality, a sea change that was well underway by the time Ward wrote Big White Fog.
Ward’s ambivalent resolution of Big White Fog, like Wright’s mixed picture of Max and Jan in Native Son, suggests again literary Black Chicago’s uneasy relationship with the Communist Party. Ward breaks with Wright, however, in that his characters all have agency; their suffering is not determined by their environment so much as it is the result of their individual choices. At several points during the play, Victor has opportunities to sacrifice his Garveyite beliefs for the good of his family; but he never makes that choice. This stubbornness on his part costs him the love of his wife, his son’s education, and his daughter’s virtue, which gives the play a sense of tragedy not unlike what one sees in the deterministic landscape of Wright’s most sociological texts. The key difference, and the one that marks Ward outside the boundaries of the sociological school, is that arguably little, perhaps none, of this suffering is inevitable. If he has a scientific model behind his play, it is more likely the scientific Socialism that the American leftist Popular Front brought to Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s.
As the relative obscurity of Ward’s play demonstrates, critics interested in the influence of Chicago sociology on the Black Chicago Renaissance often focus their attention primarily on the fiction of that era, perhaps because Wright was himself primarily a fiction writer. But Wright began his literary career as a poet, and several of his most prolific associates in the South Side Writers Group were poets. One among them, Davis, bears close assessment in relation to this question of how Chicago sociology affected black Chicago writers.
Davis’s Black Man’s Verse (1935) demonstrates two features of Chicago sociological methodology: close empirical observation of an environment, and reliance on the personal stories of informants in the studied environment. And yet, Davis does not restrict himself to dry reportage, as one sometimes finds in Native Son. Poems like “Chicago’s Congo” and “Gary, Indiana” render close observation of regional phenomena in aesthetic terms that at least complicate and at most dismantle any sense of “science” in the work. The notion of Gary’s steel mills as “hoboes,” for instance, undermines the sense of the mechanistic forces of a social order at work against its residents. This might well be attributable to formal differences, as the demands on the poet, even one who works in free verse as Davis does, necessarily shape the work away from the clear-cut empiricism of the sociological study. Given that, one must turn to the underlying message of the verse to determine what, if any, sympathies Davis might have with Park, Wirth, and their peers.
Davis’s poetic universe does show signs of diversity, as indicated in poems like the ebullient “Jazz Band,” the starkly grim “Lynched,” and “Five Portraits of Chicago at Night.” This last poem proves particularly noteworthy in this light, as it moves from the splendor of the Loop to the squalor of the South Side. His black community is hardly monolithic, and in the “Ebony under Granite” section of the work (which clearly resonates to Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology), he provides the life histories of a surprisingly broad cross section of the black community. And yet, for all of their diversity, they have met the same fate—this speaks to the human condition, of course, but it also points to a pervasive undertone in Davis’s work, a suggestion that race determines the broad contours of individuals’ experiences and a concomitant intimation that while the particulars of various black lives in Chicago might differ, the city becomes for its black residents an environment that breeds suffering and frustration. One sees that undertone again in “Mojo Mike’s Beer Garden,” where the visible diversity of the population underscores their common disillusionment and reliance on the “two yellow gals” who deliver the “beer and wine and gin.” In this poetic universe, environment does indeed seem to determine human behavior.
For Ward, Davis, and the Wright of Native Son and 12 Million Black Voices, their temporal context is as important as their geographic locale. By 1945, after the end of World War II, Chicago saw heightened racial tensions as the participants in the Second Great Migration clashed with returning soldiers who sought their old jobs and comfortable homes for their families. At the same time, the institution of the G. I. Bill brought an influx of students to the University of Chicago generally, and to the Department of Sociology in particular. This boost of student population, many of whom were schooled about human behavior in the theater of war, gave rise to a second wave, or a Second School, of Chicago sociology. This represents a refinement of Wirth, Park, and Burgess’s innovations in response to an increasingly complicated environment. Black creative writers similarly modified their reactions to the pressures of the sociological worldview, yielding an even greater diversity of responses to the questions of human ecology driving their predecessors.
How different a picture from Davis’s one gets in the poetry of Chicago’s most famous black woman writer, Gwendolyn Brooks. Like Wright, and more so than Davis or Ward, she carefully examines the social conditions shaping the lives of blacks in her city. Unlike Wright, however, she resists a simple correlation of environment and action and provides strong evidence for the argument that Chicago Sociology’s influence on Chicago’s black literati was more limited than Bone and Capetti suggest.
Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, to David and Keziah (nee Wims) Brooks, residents of Chicago’s South Side, who had returned home for the birth of their first child. They subsequently moved back to Chicago, where Brooks lived for most of her life. Despite her family’s poverty, which necessitated both of her parents’ foregoing career aspirations, Brooks grew up in a nurturing home environment. Unfortunately, her community experience was not similarly positive. In the face of intraracial prejudice aimed at her because of her appearance, Brooks found solace and self-confidence in her writing. Her mother was especially sensitive to her daughter’s plight and encouraged Brooks to develop her creative talents. She also took Brooks to readings by authors such as James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes; Hughes strongly encouraged her in her attempts to establish a poetic career.
By the age of 13, Brooks had already published a poem, “Eventide,” in American Childhood magazine. At the age of 17, she became a regular contributor to the Chicago Defender, where eventually she published 75 poems. Heartened by her early success, Brooks continued to hone her craft, enrolling in Inez Cunningham Stark’s poetry workshop at the South Side Community Art Center. That extremely challenging and supportive work environment yielded her a first prize for her work in the Poets’ Class contest, her first publication in Poetry magazine, and many of the pieces for her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945).
In that volume’s series of polished, graceful poems, Brooks takes readers inside the world of the black poor, portraying the harsh realities of economic injustice without ever losing sight of the basic human dignity of her subjects. Arguably, Brooks shares Wright’s goal in 12 Million Black Voices of striking a balance between portraying the collective hardships of black life in Chicago and affirming the dignity of individuals responding to those tribulations. Through her portrayals of the individuals who inhabit her nameless street, she succeeds where Wright struggles, perhaps because of the absence of sociological theory undergirding her work. As she chronicles the difficulties and injustice woven into the fabric of South Side life, she maintains a focus on the individuals who inhabit that landscape; this orientation provides a strong counter to the sense of alienation that marks Native Son.
The second poem of Bronzeville, “kitchenette building,” establishes the volume’s tone. The speaker is, as Brooks was, a resident of a tenement on Chicago’s South Side; furthermore, like Brooks the speaker experiences creative urges—the reader sees her wondering whether or not a dream could “sing an aria” in the confines of rooms marked with the stench of “onion fumes … fried potatoes / And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall.” For all of her wondering, however, the speaker ultimately recognizes the futility of her speculation. First of all, there are practical needs to be met: “Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now, / We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.” Secondly, the speaker understands herself and her fellow residents as “things,” a notion that the reference to a fellow resident as “Number Five” strongly reinforces. So long as she accepts this vision of herself, the speaker cannot really afford to dream, especially not of a world that values aesthetic sensitivity. Not so for Brooks. As this and the other poems of A Street in Bronzeville demonstrate, Brooks sees making art as a viable, even a crucial, response to this environment. In short, making beauty in this world where it is so scarce becomes for the poet one means of surviving it.
Unfortunately, many of Bronzeville’s residents are not so lucky as the poet. From the aborted babies of “the mother,” to De Witt Williams, whose funeral procession the reader observes, to “poor Percy,” the victim of his brother’s violence in “the murder,” the number of characters who die in the volume is sobering. Of the ones who do survive, most are scarred by their experiences. One sees, for instance, Matthew Cole, a reclusive bachelor who “never will be done / With dust and his ceiling that / Is everlasting sad” or the subject of “obituary for a living lady,” who like Cole is among the dead living. These are adults so broken by events in their lives that they do not live, but only exist. As poignant as these portraits are, the children of Bronzeville are even more heart-wrenching. Percy perishes in flames of his brother, Brucie’s, creation. The fires of poverty and intraracial oppression burn others. Of these, none is better known or more moving than Mabbie, the subject of “the ballad of chocolate Mabbie.”
A shy seven-year-old whose dark skin suggested to others that she “was cut from a chocolate bar,” Mabbie develops a crush on classmate Willie Boone. Innocent enough to think “that the world was heaven,” Mabbie believes that declaring her feelings will win her young Boone’s devotion. What she does not realize is that he is prone to the intraracial prejudice about skin color that makes light-skinned blacks reject those with darker complexions. Waiting outside the schoolhouse, she encounters Boone and the new object of his affections, “a lemon-hued lynx / With sand-waves loving her brow.” The poem ends with an image of Mabbie’s isolation, her belief that she is most fit for “chocolate companions” like herself. Although not directly autobiographical, the poem does reflect a crucial part of Brooks’s experience: her own feelings of rejection and isolation associated with her darkness. Here, as in “kitchenette building,” the experiencing consciousness in the poem can ill afford beauty as solace: chocolate Mabbie faces a life of isolation because of her color, a reality that simple beauty cannot ameliorate. For Brooks, however, the opportunity to make art out of this painful experience is much more effective, perhaps even the best response that she has to injustice.
The ability to make art brings a balance to Bronzeville, as it shows in the lives of individuals who are not beaten by their environment, who instead make beauty in their lives despite the ugliness of their neighborhood. Such is the case for Satin-Legs Smith, the subject of “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith.” An undistinguished member of the community during the workweek, Smith dons his finery on Sundays and strolls through Bronzeville like a king among his subjects. Though perhaps petty in some aspects, such as in his fixation on the precision of his zoot-suit pants’ cuffs, Smith’s attitude is one of gentle beneficence and resistance to an environment that brings others around him to despair. Although different in her exterior, Hattie Scott has a similar attitude. Although burdened with a menial job doing day work for a thoughtless white woman, Scott resists resignation, choosing instead to nurture an interiority defined by her determination to enjoy the hours of her life over which she has control and her concomitant sense of herself as a person of worth, not simply a thing who does her employer’s bidding.
Perhaps the most moving portrayal of individual agency and human connection in Bronzeville appears in “when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story.” This poem, in which the poetic persona addresses her lifetime companion, is a testimonial to the power of meaningful human connection to overcome dire environmental straits. Details in the poem convey the sense that the lovers reside in a South Side kitchenette, as indeed Brooks and her husband Henry Blakely did for the first several years of their marriage. In the context of that environment, however, theirs is a world of clean sheets, satisfying food, intimate conversation, and enduring passion. This image of an oasis of life and love in the midst of Bronzeville undercuts the notion that environment determines human behavior; after all, if that were the case, then how can the same street in Bronzeville house the couple from “when you have forgotten Sunday” and the subjects of the collection’s first poem, “the old-marrieds,” a pair so beaten by life that even under the most romantic circumstances they do not speak?
Such variation is only possible in a world where individuality and agency profoundly matter; and Bronzeville presents precisely this type of poetic universe. For Brooks, the street as environment proves secondary to the residents it comprises. By taking this approach, she emphasizes the humanity and dignity of all members of this community, from the sufferers to those who succeed. In doing so, she provides a strong counterpoint to the deterministic worldview that typifies sociologically inflected black Chicago literature.
These motifs from A Street in Bronzeville resonate through her Pulitzer Prize–winning collection of poems, Annie Allen (1948), and through her only novel, Maud Martha (1953). The great strength of the novel (which has been largely overlooked by critics) is its sustained examination of the impact of the Bronzeville environment on a single individual. Like chocolate Mabbie, Maud Martha knows the pain of color-based rejection; like the speaker of “kitchenette building,” she struggles to keep her aesthetic dreams alive in the oppressive environment of a South Side tenement. Her struggle is powerful, as her poverty, her color, and her increasingly sterile marriage to her inadequate husband, Paul, threaten to overcome her and force her down into resignation, perhaps even despair. And yet, for all of those forces, Maud Martha’s individuality and the strength of her character persistently rescue her from that fate. Her persistent resilience and hope, best embodied in her daughter, Paulette, and in the unborn child she carries at the novel’s end, move her past the limitations of her environment and inspire her to create a strong sense of self. She maintains that self against the relentless pressure of her environment, and by doing so she undermines the urbanist notions that largely drive novels like Wright’s Native Son.5
As a long-time resident of the South Side and a loving chronicler of her community, Brooks hews somewhat closely to the line of her earlier counterparts in the Black Chicago Renaissance tradition. One finds significantly different circumstances in the life histories of two other Black Chicago Renaissance writers, Willard Motley and Frank London Brown. As each man moved outside the conventional confines of Chicago’s Black Belt, he developed a relationship to and a reliance on Chicago sociology that varied in emphasis and orientation according to his place in the broader racial community of Chicago.
Of all the authors named in this study, none fall farther from the mainline of expectations about black writers and black writing in Chicago than Willard Motley. Hailing from an established middle-class family, Motley grew up on the South Side, but his family was the first black family to rent in their neighborhood around 60th Street. Motley was the only African American in his grammar school; when he got to Englewood High School, he found himself thrust together with other black students whose home environments and life experiences were radically different from his. Motley’s experiences in this range of diverse environments taught him early on to see people in terms of their common humanity, with little regard for their racial designation. This conviction that “people are just people” would inform most of his significant literary output, especially his first and best-known novel, Knock on Any Door (1947).
By the time he published that first novel, Motley was already a seasoned writer and traveler. Having begun his professional literary career at age thirteen writing a “Kid’s Column” for the Chicago Defender, Motley found upon graduation from high school that his range of experiences was too narrow to provide material for mature fiction. He responded to this recognition by taking a bicycle trip to New York City. Along the way, he encountered disadvantaged people of several racial and ethnic groups, and he gathered material that found its way first into travel articles that he published in his early twenties and, eventually, into his fiction. Of particular importance to his literary career were his encounters with Joe, a young Mexican American man in Colorado who was turning from innocence to a life of crime. As Motley later noted, it was meeting Joe that set him on the path toward writing Knock on Any Door.
The novel recounts the transformation of Italian American youth Nick Romano from an upstanding, devout, middle-class altar boy to a streetwise hoodlum whose increasing involvement in Chicago’s criminal world leads to his murdering a police officer and being sentenced to die in the electric chair for this crime. Nick’s increasing corruption and his concomitant rejection of all the good influences in his life proceeds directly as a result of his moving from a middle-class Denver neighborhood to a slum, and from there to a stint in the reformatory for possessing a stolen bicycle (though Nick himself did not steal it). Brutalized by his experiences in the reformatory, Nick emerges and joins his family, now in Chicago, a greatly changed young man. He drifts into a life of petty crime, passes in and out of incarceration, and eventually becomes a full-fledged hoodlum, rolling drunks and committing armed robberies. In the course of one robbery, Nick kills his old nemesis, a policeman named Riley. Sentenced to death, he goes to the electric chair reflecting on his earliest sufferings at the Denver reformatory. The novel ends “Nick? Knock on any door down this street,” an assertion that conveys Motley’s sense of the inevitability of environments working on individuals.
In addition to this message, which ties Motley’s novel firmly to the concepts of urbanism that drive much Chicago sociology, Knock on Any Door also bears the marks of Motley’s extensive scientific research on his story. Critic Robert Fleming notes that Motley went to great lengths to try to get an accurate sense of the institutions of the criminal justice system that he treats in his novel. Furthermore, he drew on his personal history, particularly some time that he spent in jail in the course of his bicycle trip to New York. Motley’s purpose in drawing all of this material together is to make a statement about the harmful impact of environmental pressures on the lower classes and to illustrate the inevitability of Nick’s downfall from the moment that his family leaves the relative safety of the middle class. With this formulation, Motley builds on Wright’s example in Native Son; by paralleling Bigger’s experience with Nick’s, he also complicates the issue of the role of race in this sociological process, demonstrating the destructive nature of class-based environmental difficulties as the foundation of the trouble in the novel.
Knock on Any Door won Motley broad critical acclaim, the devotion of a public who consumed not only the novel but also comic strip and movie versions of the story; perhaps the most important accolades for our purposes come, though, from sociologist Cayton, the coauthor of Black Metropolis. In a series of reviews that he wrote for publications ranging from the Chicago Tribune to New Republic, Cayton praised Motley for the accuracy of his sociology and embraced the notion that submission to environmental pressures was not a racially based experience. Of all the other writers cited in this study, only Wright shares the distinction of having had his work publicly deemed sociologically significant by a member of Chicago’s Sociology Department.
One other author of this period who was locally significant, Frank London Brown, shares with Wright the distinction of having been directly exposed to and influenced by sociologists from the University of Chicago. Brown’s urban realist account of the violence accompanying integration of a housing project in the South Deering neighborhood, Trumbull Park (1959); the existentially inflected meditation on isolation and community in The Myth Maker (1969); and his body of short fiction indicate both the range of his literary abilities and the scope of his social vision.
Brown’s direct exposure to the ideas and methodologies of the Chicago School likely began during his undergraduate study at Roosevelt University, where St. Clair Drake, coauthor of Black Metropolis, was a faculty member for years. In his introduction to that volume, Wright notes that Cayton and Drake’s work “pictures the environment out of which the Bigger Thomases of our nation come.” One sees the impact of this seminal study on Brown throughout his body of work, as he repeatedly examines the impact of the urban environment on Chicago’s black population.
Trumbull Park, an account based on Brown’s own experiences as one of the early integrators of the Trumbull Park Homes in the South Deering neighborhood of Chicago, paints in relentless detail a picture of the protracted violence and outrage that greeted the new black residents of a housing project that was, according to deals supposedly made with the city on its construction in 1938, to have remained ethnically homogenous until the neighborhood agreed to integration (Chicago Human Relations, Document I). In Brown’s story, Louis “Buggy” Martin, his wife, Helen, and their daughters, Louella and Diane, brave the attack and work to make a home in the midst of the conflict engulfing the project. Though the ending implies they will ultimately succeed, the majority of the story concerns their entry into the struggle and the toll it takes on them individually and on their relationships with the other African American families engaged in the battle.
One might well wonder why these citizens would bear this onslaught; the answer has much to do with the conditions they were escaping on the South Side, where African American families were restricted to unspeakably crowded and inadequate housing and charged exorbitant rents. Arnold Hirsch reports that in the late 1940s, “375,000 blacks resided in an area equipped to house no more than 110,000”; furthermore, many lived in conditions as squalid as those in the basement of 3106 Wentworth, where “ten families occupied cardboard cubicles in 1947. The ‘apartments’ had no windows or toilets and shared a single broken stairway and stove.”6 Brown evokes this reality in Trumbull Park through repeated references to the Gardener Building, the South Side slum where Buggy and Helen Martin grow up, meet, marry, and raise their daughters until this new opportunity presents itself. “We called the building we lived in the Gardener Building, after Mr. Gardener, the owner…. the … building was real old, like Mr. Gardener, and rotten from the inside out…. The Gardener building had its own special smell: baby milk and whiskey, fried chicken and cigarette smoke, perfume—and the sick smell of rotten porches.” Having described the environment, Brown shows its impact on the black community as a child falls through one of these rotten porches to her death. Her mother, distraught by her daughter’s death, tries to kill herself in the same manner, figuring that self-destruction is a better option than a continued existence in the rat-infested hovel of her tenement apartment.
Once ensconced at Trumbull Park, the Martins face a wave of violent protest, physical and psychological assault, and egregious mob activity by white residents, suffering broken windows, death threats, stonings, and a consistent nightly barrage of fireworks directed at their homes. The novel’s account of day-to-day conflict in the development clearly resonates with the actual historical record. When the Donald Howard family leased a Trumbull Park Homes apartment in July 1953, a feat accomplished because of Mrs. Howard’s light skin and the absence of her dark-skinned husband from the leasing office, those segregationist agreements were broken. Rather than evict the Howards, which they had no legal grounds for, the Chicago Housing Authority opened Trumbull Park Homes to other African American families. One result was a slow influx of blacks into the project, including the Frank London Brown family, who moved into Trumbull Park Homes in April 1954. Another consequence was a wave of violent protest, physical and psychological assault, and egregious mob activity perpetrated unrelentingly against the new black residents from August 1953 through December 1955. The Howard and Brown families, as well as the other twenty-five African American families who moved into the project, suffered broken windows, death threats, stonings, and a consistent nightly barrage of fireworks directed at their homes.
In the novel, one result of this onslaught is conflict among the integrators of Trumbull Park. As each of the black families in the development descends into its separate struggle to survive, Brown alludes to another important premise of the Chicago School of Sociology. This infighting reflects the theories of W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, who argue that individual development comes only through inevitable struggle with the community. For each of these families to advance, according to this argument, they must break with one another as they have broken with their home communities in moving to Trumbull Park. Wright adopts a similar pattern in both Native Son and Black Boy/An American Hunger. Brown brings this struggle to a different resolution, however, as he posits a means of survival for the struggling individuals through community building: the collective celebration of African American cultural markers, one of which is music.
Music is, as many scholars have noted, a critically important element of Brown’s life and work. One of his most recognized publications is his 1958 Down Beat interview with Thelonious Monk, and Brown’s professional highlights include his reading short fiction to the live accompaniment of Monk’s music in a New York jazz club. As Sterling Stuckey notes, Brown’s interest in jazz dates to his childhood when, after migrating with his family from Kansas to Chicago, he “battered his way into manhood…. on the 58th Street ‘Stroll’” and spent countless hours listening to music at Morrie’s Record Shop, where he was exposed to the blues and jazz evolving in Chicago at the time.7
In Trumbull Park, music restores Buggy’s sense of himself and establishes the community foundation he seeks. Whenever Buggy feels fragmented, he sustains himself with music; when he wants to connect with another black resident of Trumbull Park, he does so by playing records. His first real bonding with Arthur Davis, the first of the black migrants, comes when he plays Billie Holiday records while the two men talk; a shared appreciation for her voice enables them to set aside their present stress and explore their common experiences on “the 58th street ‘Stroll.’” Also, as Maryemma Graham notes, when Buggy and a new black resident of Trumbull Park assert their humanity at the end of the novel by walking to the bus stop rather than riding in a squad car and sustain themselves by singing Joe Williams’s blues, the music becomes a “new form of collective resistance to oppression.”8
This scene also illustrates Brown’s ultimate response to the primary impulses of the Chicago School. Although he employs sociological methodologies in his chronicling of black life in the city, he resists the deterministic conclusions that the social scientists drew about the impact of environment on individuals and on the community. For him, the structures and traditions of African American culture provide an effective counter to the oppressive urban environment his characters inhabit, a cause for hope rather than despair.
One sees a similar pattern at work in The Myth Maker. Ernest Day, the protagonist, is a solitary African American student with no home and no identity. When the novel opens we see him having abandoned his wife and daughters to take up the quest for an intellectual ideal he cannot achieve. In a moment of despair he kills a man who treats him kindly and spends the rest of the novel fleeing the consequences of his actions. Near the end of the story, however, he finds some hope and immediately transforms it into a celebration of his heritage. In this moment, Day heads for 58th Street and Morrie’s Record Mart, which “seemed to be the place to go now that Ernest wanted to live.” His desire for the place extends into a desire for the music of a litany of performers Brown names, including “Bird, Diz, Prez, Ella, Sarah, Dakota, Horace Silver, Count Basie, Joe Williams, Jackie McLean, Thelonious, Ornette Coleman … Muddy Waters, Blind Lemon, and Harry Belafonte.”9 A cavalcade of jazz and blues greats, the names represent both the rich cultural heritage of the African American community and a means of further healing for Day. As he listens eagerly and carefully to a Thelonious Monk recording, Day gains a new perspective on his life and his role in the community, a level of insight enabling him to step away from his intellectual despair and toward a place of human connection.
As Day hears Monk move “history forward,” he recognizes “the cyclic circularity of history, and of the future of man, and the end of the bad things, and the beginning of the good things” and feels “free, loose, weightless, yet not in need of wings! In need of nothing but his will to be free.”10 This ability to “move history,” and the concomitant hopefulness associated with it, further reinforces Brown’s assertion of African American cultural forms as a counter to the determinism of Chicago sociology. Although he vividly chronicles ghetto life in The Myth Maker, addressing the social and economic forces that conspire to perpetuate this oppressive existence, he once again suggests that environment alone does not entirely determine the future of the African American urban community. So long as individuals within that group embrace traditional cultural forms, there is a chance to build something better for the group.
In addition to his novels, Brown wrote a number of significant stories that also illustrate his views about heritage as a means of countering isolation, alienation, and oppression. Two bear special mention in this context—“Singing Dinah’s Song” and “McDougal.” In many ways, “Dinah’s Song” picks up directly on themes appearing in Trumbull Park. By contrast, “McDougal” makes a bold new statement about the possibilities for harmony between the races.
“Singing Dinah’s Song” is the story of a drill press operator whose coworker and friend, Daddy-O, sustains his work at the plant by singing Dinah Washington’s songs as he works. The music gives him a sense of self and makes the work bearable, at least in the moment. The larger issues behind the work surface when Daddy-O comes to work beautifully dressed and insisting he has bought his machine with his ten years of work. Refusing to either operate it or allow anyone else to touch it, Daddy-O asserts his rights and holds the plant manager at bay until the police come and force him to surrender. With that he breaks down and is led away, leaving the narrator to reflect on his actions. He understands that the blues has been a shield for Daddy-O, but he also sees that the blues alone are not enough. As he recognizes that “being in the plant made [Daddy-O] sing those songs and like finally the good buddy couldn’t sing hard enough to keep up the dues on his machine,” he knows that the blues are only part of the solution.11 In addition to the music, Daddy-O needs the community that sustains it; he needs the friendship of the narrator, who stands up for him and tries to help him deal with this crisis. Furthermore, he also needs the narrator to remember him and his trials, something the narrator does by singing one of Dinah Washington’s songs himself as he works after Daddy-O’s removal. Though it comes perhaps too late for Daddy-O himself, the community he needs grows in the wake of his blues lesson to sustain the narrator.
Community and music are even more intertwined in “McDougal,” one of Brown’s most respected stories. A brief impressionistic account of a jazz performance, the story raises the issue of whether or not the white trumpeter, McDougal, has any legitimate right to be on the bandstand with the black members of the jazz combo they all play in. One might well expect this to be simply a statement of the racial exclusivity of legitimate jazz or some sort of condemnation of the presumptuousness of white culture. That McDougal has a black wife apparently suggests a complicated and problematic fusion of cultures. Certainly the fact that McDougal and his wife suffer racial slights, that they cannot find a place to live, and that he cannot support her and their three children point to the difficulties of interracial marriage. More importantly than that, however, these experiences become for McDougal the raw material of the superb jazz that he plays. As the bassist, Little Jug, explains, “he knows the happenings … I mean about where we get it, you dig? I mean like with Leola and those kids and Forty Seventh Street and those jive landlords, you dig? The man’s been burnt, Percy. Listen to that somitch—listen to him!”12 His bandmates respect him and distinguish him from a cadre of white imitators who seek to soullessly copy the accomplishments of black musicians. McDougal is acceptable to them because he is living their life, and the music that he plays is born from a version of the suffering that they have known.
This story marks an important step for Brown with regard to his thought about race and the possibility for community. In his novels, the hope of community rests primarily within racial groups, and racial antagonism exists simply as a matter of course. In “McDougal,” the white character’s ability to share a sense of black experiences and to make authentic art from them, art that is acceptable to black people, offers hope for meaningful connections that transcend racial boundaries. McDougal simultaneously maintains his white identity and experiences black life. His openness to connection across societal boundaries suggests that the difficulties Brown’s other characters suffer under need not be permanent. True McDougal is only one man, but he represents a great potential, the hope that fulfills the positive undertones recurring throughout Brown’s body of work.
McDougal gains acceptance among his fellow jazz musicians because they can grasp the veracity of his experience and understand that he does indeed know the troubles they see. Furthermore, he sees the value of their heritage and the cultural forms it generates as a means of expressing that experience. In the process of sharing his art, he helps forge a community among the initiated. The racial mixture of this new community suggests that the small steps of this beginning will eventually be expanded to encompass the broader human community. This is the message of hope that Brown builds toward throughout his body of work. Always well aware of the difficulties and injustice that African Americans face at the hands of power-maddened whites with no regard for their humanity, Brown also knows that blacks can and must resist that power and create collective, coherent responses to the injustice and oppression visited on them. As the bonds of that resistance are forged, the growing community can supplement its strength and reach out farther, eventually embracing all people in an acknowledgment of a collective human heritage.
Brown’s emphasis on community building reflects his complete commitment to social reform. In addition to his literary career, Brown also worked to effect social change in Chicago through his roles of social activist and union organizer. In his life, as in his art, Brown resisted the notion that the sociological conditions documented by the Chicago School defined African American experiences in the city. As his fiction demonstrates, he believed instead that a positive awareness of heritage and a strong sense of group identity were the tools that African Americans could use to build themselves a new life in Chicago. Widely known in his home city during his life, Brown was in a sense a prophet who was honored in his own country. His modification of the sociological vision associated makes his a significant voice in the city’s African American literary tradition and a figure worthy of further scholarly attention.
As the various authors cited in this study demonstrate, the job of determining the influence of Chicago Sociology on writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance is both vast and complex. On the continuum of author’s responses from Wright’s almost total fealty to Wirth’s and Park’s ideas to Brooks’s almost complete rejection of the basic principles of urbanism, one finds many shades of gray, many writers who see some use in sociological observation but variously resist or reject the conclusions that the social scientists drew about black Chicago using those principles. Perhaps the simplest thing to say is that the work of sociologists at the University of Chicago and the work of black authors writing in and/or about the city during the Renaissance era shared the goal of illuminating black life in the city; the varieties of use that these authors make of sociological methodology in their work, then, represents the richness and complexity of their personal responses to their intellectual and cultural environment.
1. Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940, 243, 256.
2. Ibid., “Introduction,” xvii.
3. Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States. New York: Viking Press, 1941, 111.
4. Ibid., 147.
5. In drawing this distinction between Brooks and Wright, I must acknowledge the critical view that Wright tempers his deterministic view in Native Son by having Bigger insist that his actions are more than a product of his environment. I do not believe that Bigger’s resistance of this characterization conveys Wright’s message about the deterministic power of race and class to define Bigger’s existence.
6. Hirsch, Arnold. Making the Second Ghetto: Race & Housing in Chicago 1940–1960. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983, 19, 23.
7. Stuckey, Sterling. “Frank London Brown—A Remembrance.” In Black Voices, edited by Abraham Chapman. New York: New American Library, 1968, 670.
8. Graham, Maryemma. “Bearing Witness in Black Chicago: A View of Selected Fiction by Richard Wright, Frank London Brown, and Ronald Fair.” CLA Journal 33 (March 1990), 292.
9. Brown, Frank London. The Myth Maker. Chicago: Path Press, 1969, 97.
10. Ibid., 100.
11. Brown, Frank London. “Singing Dinah’s Song.” In The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, edited by Langston Hughes. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967, 300.
12. Brown, Frank London. “McDougal.” In Black Voices, edited by Abraham Chapman. New York: New American Library, 1968, 204.
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Brooks, Gwendolyn. A Street in Bronzeville. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945.
———. Maud Martha. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953.
Brown, Frank London. “McDougal.” In Black Voices, edited by Abraham Chapman. New York: New American Library, 1968, 202–4.
———. “Singing Dinah’s Song.” In The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, edited by Langston Hughes. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967, 295–300.
———. The Myth Maker. Chicago: Path Press, 1969.
———. Trumbull Park: A Novel. Chicago: Regnery, 1959.
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———. 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States. New York: Viking Press, 1941.