As a phenomenon of American literary history, the Chicago Renaissance that began in the second half of the 1930s is most significant for its articulation of an almost complete break with the “Harlem” or “New Negro” Renaissance of the 1920s. The radical tenor of the artists associated with the Chicago movement developed in two distinct forms: the social realism and literary protest of the 1930s and early 1940s, and the high modernism of the second half of the 1940s. The early work of Richard Wright, the early short stories of Frank Yerby, Frank Marshall Davis’s poetry, the novels of William Attaway, and the plays of Theodore Ward represent well the efforts of protest realism; the later work of Richard Wright, beginning with “The Man Who Lived Underground” of 1944, the poetry of Robert Hayden, and the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks best characterize the second movement. These achievements culminated with the efforts of the best-known high modernist novelist, Ralph Ellison. This momentous break from the literary strains of the 1920s and 1930s required a series of radical judgments to refine and transform the literary aesthetics of African American writers.
The first black writer who developed a body of criticism that made a departure from a straightforward doctrinaire Marxist analysis, but who captured the dissident spirit of the new generation, was Edward Bland, brother to novelist Alden Bland. Black critics had been conscious of the tension to assimilate into the white American mainstream, but rarely had they looked analytically at the structure of Western literary evolutions and their place as a formerly enslaved racial minority within that structure. In 1935 and 1937, the black Marxist critics Eugene Gordon, Eugene Holmes, and Richard Wright presented a broad refutation of what they saw as a tendency towards romanticism and assimilation in African American writing. Of these, Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937) is the best known and recognized as the most definitive. And yet, the essays do not strike a completely compelling note; there is a dogmatic formulism in them that lacks complete freshness and originality. Bland’s major works, “Social Forces Shaping the Negro Novel,” and “Racial Bias in Negro Poetry,” introduced key literary terms that produced new revelations about the value of African American literature and culture and its relation to the American mainstream.
Edward Bland was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on February 2, 1908. His father, Edward Bland III, had moved to Chicago seeking work and sent for his wife Philomene and his two sons Edward and Alden from Louisiana in 1919. Edward and his brother grew up on the South Side, and Edward attended Wendell Phillips High School. After high school Bland married Althea McCoy, and began a career at the U.S. Post Office in Chicago. Bland had four children, two of whom survived: Geraldine, and Edward O. Bland, the noted composer, director of films, and maker of the tour de force documentary “The Cry of Jazz.”
During the Depression Bland lived at 5951 Indiana Avenue, where he collected thousands of books, from John Dewey and Bertrand Russell to Karl Marx. The neighborhood was culturally and intellectually alive and included institutions such as the Carter School, Englewood High School, and Wilson Junior College. Self-taught and active in politics, Bland pursued a career as a disciplined adherent to the philosophy of dialectical materialism. He believed in developing his own talents but he also engaged in local cultural associations. Bland was an original member of the South Side Writers Club, formed immediately following the National Negro Congress of February 1936. The club was created by Richard Wright and held its first meeting at the home of Robert Davis, Bland’s best friend, and then the group maintained regular weekly meetings at the Abraham Lincoln Center on Oakwood Blvd. While Davis went on to become a Hollywood actor under the name Davis Roberts, Bland turned himself into a literary critic. At the meetings, Bland developed his ideas, criticism, and fiction alongside Wright, Margaret Walker, Frank Marshall Davis, Theodore Ward, Russell Marshall, Fern Gayden, Robert Davis, and Arna Bontemps. Among such distinguished peers, Bland was considered a leader in matters of literary criticism, and he was especially close to Fern Gayden. On occasions when the group met at his home, Bland required his adolescent son to listen to Richard Wright read his short stories.
After Wright departed in the late spring of 1937, according to Margaret Walker, the original club fell apart. Bland continued to remain active on the Chicago art and writing scene, which held unique opportunities for vibrant intellectual exchange and artistic exploration. He was a close friend of the composer Ulysses Kay, and at that time, several blacks were studying for degrees at the University of Chicago—Marian Minus, Arna Bontemps, Frank Yerby, Lawrence D. Reddick, St. Clair Drake, Horace Cayton, and Ulysses Lee among them. Both the Abraham Lincoln Center and the Good Shepherd Community Church Center on 57th Street (which became the South Parkway Community Center) served as forums for original dramatic and artistic expression alongside regular community-based classroom instruction. Bland also took an occasional class at the University of Chicago.
The pivotal moment for Bland’s development and influence, however, was probably the 1941 opening of the South Side Chicago Community Art Center, located in the Old Comiskey Mansion on South Michigan and 39th Street. Fern Gayden sat on the board of trustees and was planning a regular journal that would appear in early 1944 called Negro Story, a journal that carried the work of world-famous Richard Wright and the earliest work of a completely unknown Chicago poet and Wilson Junior College graduate named Gwendolyn Brooks. In this milieu, Bland, by now quite confident in literary matters, took a personal interest in instructing Brooks, nearly ten years his junior. She was talented, shy, and curious, but her work showed vivacity, technical astuteness, and powerful insight. Bland expressed particular concerns about the weaknesses of the black middle class’ point of view in literature, which he thought too narrow and a weak formula for public relations. On the other hand, he resisted the efforts of his cadre’s writers to write exclusively in the vein of social protest without revealing the richness of African American heritage. According to his brother Alden, Edward was socratic in his critical method during group sessions, enabling others to embark upon a “voyage of self discovery.”
The movement of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes between New York and Chicago increased the contacts between radical black writers of both cities. In Manhattan in 1941, a new journal, Negro Quarterly, appeared, put out by the Negro Publication Society of America. Similar to Carter G. Woodson’s Associated Publishers in Washington, D.C., the New York–based Negro Publication Society promoted historic works by black writers and about African American history, but with a left-wing political edge. According to Saunders Redding, the society did not survive because it was targeted by a “red-smear” campaign, but the editors of the Negro Quarterly were two of the most important figures for black political organization and literary criticism: Angelo Herndon and Ralph Ellison.
Ellison served as the managing editor of Negro Quarterly for nearly two years, and in that capacity he introduced the work of Edward Bland to American audiences. In the third issue of the journal Bland published his most important work, “Social Forces Shaping the Negro Novel,” one of Negro Quarterly’s most distinguished essays. The essay was outstanding for two reasons. It was one of the earliest examples of thoroughgoing, modern criticism of black literature in ideological terms, and it sharply and openly criticized black American literary craftsmanship from a nonaligned point of view, outside of the central orbit of both the Communist Party and black American racial-uplift magazines, newspapers, and journals.
Bland’s crusading spirit sprang from the opening line: “One of the outstanding features of the Negro novels that appeared during the twenties was their literary incompetence.” Paying close attention to the “new criticism,” unleashed in 1938 with Brooks’ and Warren’s Understanding Poetry, Bland focused on the technical poverty of the novelist, who had shown poor competence in literary technique and “in integrating these devices to meet the fullest demands of theme.” “Artistically they were more absorbed in what they were doing than in how,” said Bland. Black writers during the 1920s and later had privileged content over form, a disastrous mistake.
A dismissal of the writers as individuals did not concern Bland; he wanted to analyze their defects as a strata. Black isolation from American institutions had not produced “conscious craftsmen,” but rather a group of middle-class scribblers frustrated by their status.
Briefly, it might be said that the Negro writer of the twenties was pre-disposed to an inferiority in literary artisanship because of his utilitarian conception of the purpose of literature; because he neglected the mechanics of writing out of his confidence in the expressional skill of Negro folk culture (which fixed at a lower level of display talents which might have been more fruitfully trained), and because those social forces which might have activated a lively interest in writing strategy were absent from the Negro situation.
The “social forces” Bland drew his reader’s attention to were grounded in the historic cleavage that had produced the engine of modernity in the modern Western world—the overthrow of the feudalistic regime of the landed gentry by the bourgeoisie mercantile class. For Bland, the resulting material dominance by the middle class had caused their artistic consciousness to sunder the world into a dualism between Man and Nature, according the latter adversarial power. Granting almost no agency to blacks during the Civil War, Bland faulted the urban and minute African American middle class that had “emerged within this world as its creation rather than its creator” as coming into existence too late to respond to this dynamic. By the time black business emerged in any numbers, Bland thought the middle class had become dependent upon the “social environment” for its consciousness, rather than the awe-inspiring power of Nature.
For Bland, this ecological condition of the inchoate black intellectual class produced novelists “reticent about the patterns and meaning of existence,” and bereft of consciousness of “the wider dimensions of life.” The implications for the novel were great: “The creation of a sensibility whose contact with Man created only occasional and temporary feelings of inadequacy, this novel spurned the larger interests of the mind as seen through the major traditions of the West.” Black writers from the middle class had produced Victorian-era–style romantic dramas, but they were unconcerned with the “overtones of significance” that had spurred the romantic tradition’s revolt of individualism, and instead wrote with an emphasis on “conformity to civilized practices.” The result of the imitation was an empty novelistic form.
Bland turned his attention to the history of black efforts in poetry in March of 1944, when Harriet Monroe’s Chicago-based magazine Poetry published his essay “Racial Bias and Negro Poetry.” In the essay, Bland again offered what was becoming his trademark bracing analysis, as evidenced by the essay’s very beginning: “A provincial view of life and a tremendously slanted approach mark almost all poetry by Negroes, and these factors operate as serious limitations.” In this work also, Bland explored the yawning gap of social difference between the way blacks viewed themselves and the way that they were understood by white Americans. Instead of an orientation in commonly available social values, such as “the humanistic notion of the natural dignity of man and the Christian stress on human brotherhood,” Negro poetry was characterized by “the defensive maneuverings of a minority against a hostile group.” Black poets sought to shape the understandings of whites but were ineffectual, in some regard, because they lacked a community of shared assumptions. When the poet Countee Cullen’s poem “Incident” reaches its climactic moment and the narrator recoils at being called “nigger,” could whites who saw nothing offensive in the term understand the meaning of the poem? For Bland, “Lack of rapport leaves inaccessible to whites the Negro’s attitudes toward life.” Bland never doubted the importance of the interracial audience, but, because of difficulties of reception across racial lines, he thought the most effective verse crossing the racial divide were works that focused on desperation and revolt, enabling even a remote reader to participate in an emotional catharsis. Frank Horne, who had written “Nigger,” and Claude McKay, who had produced “If We Must Die,” “Tired,” and “Is It Because I Am Black,” had offered poems that were completely direct and “announce[d] [their] orientation before racial prejudice interposes itself.” Unfortunately for the poets, “It is this bigoted white world that Negro poetry seeks to come to grips with, a world that would limit the breadth of its meaning.”
But Bland’s most stimulating and influential insight lay in his surmise of the “internal” condition of black poetry. He found black poets, and black writers more generally, holders of “pre-individualistic values,” a belief system nearly opposed to the Western tradition of distinctive, individual humanistic examination: “Instead of seeing in terms of the individual, the Negro sees in terms of ‘races,’ masses of peoples separated from other masses according to color.” Bland decided that the “limitation” caused by this situation, “detracts from whatever poetic skill may be otherwise present.” Bland hoped that, in keeping with the American propaganda, the Second World War’s successful conclusion would advance the humanistic elimination of white prejudice. And he also hoped that the “self-conscious ‘race values’” that “impair and delimit the vision of the artist” would also find their end.
Bland did not live to see the results of his critical efforts. Anxious to leave Chicago, he volunteered for the Army around 1943 and worked in a segregated special services unit in the European theater of operations. In early 1945 he sacrificed his rank and seniority to volunteer for the racially integrated 394th combat infantry regiment of the 99th division, an outfit created as the U.S. Army pushed its way into Germany anticipating heavy losses. A bazookaman, Bland led an attack and was killed on March 20, 1945, six weeks before the end of hostilities in Europe.
His reputation however, should not be underestimated. With his razor-sharp judgments against mediocrity and his wide-ranging intellectual project that unceasingly demanded that African American letters be understood in relation, albeit often antagonistic, to a larger Western humanistic tradition, Bland spearheaded the transformation from literary works of social protest and sentimental romantic fiction to high modernism. In his own groundbreaking essay of 1945, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” a review of Black Boy, Ralph Ellison borrowed heavily from Bland’s “Racial Bias and Negro Poetry” work and its exploration of preindividualistic values, even as Ellison acknowledged the work of Booker T. Washington in the essay as well. The work enabled Ellison to frame properly Richard Wright’s Black Boy for a multiracial and politically diverse audience. Ellison of course went on in his own work to take with religious seriousness Bland’s dictum that Negro literature must formidably take on the intellectual challenges of Western writers and reject the narrow identity of minority literature with an accompanying narrow bed of concerns. After his death, the South Side Community Center began to give an annual Edward Bland Prize for Literature. Even more deeply influenced than Ellison was the high modernist poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who freely admitted that at the South Side Community Center and the soirees and artistic parties at Margaret Burroughs’s loft, Edward and Alden Bland “patiently taught me and Henry [Henry Blakely, Brooks’s husband] to think.” Brooks published an elegy memorializing Bland in 1945, a poem that she used to open her famous 1949 collection Annie Allen. The book was also dedicated to Bland. The ode to Bland and his “cool twirling awe” in the first book written by a black American to win the Pulitzer Prize served as a fitting tribute to one of Chicago’s most exciting and influential critics.
Bland III, Edward O. Telephone interview, April 26, 2005.
Brooks, Gwendolyn. Annie Allen. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1949.
———. Report from Part One. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972.
Ellison, Ralph. “Richard Wright’s Blues.” Shadow and Act. (1964) New York: Quality Paperback Club, 1994, 77–94.
Gordon, Eugene. “Social and Political Problems of the Negro Writer.” American Writers Congress, edited by Henry Hart. New York: International Publishers, 1935, 141–45.
[Holmes], Eugene Clay. “The Negro in Recent American Literature.” American Writers Congress, ed. Henry Hart. New York: International Publishers, 1935, 145–53.
Kent, George. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.
Mullen, Bill. Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–1946. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1993. Wright, Richard. “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” New Challenge 2.1 (Fall 1937): 53–65.
———. Essays: “Social Forces Shaping the Negro Novel.” Negro Quarterly 1.3 (Fall 1942): 241–48.
———. “Racial Bias and Negro Poetry.” Poetry 53.6 (March 1944): 328–33.
———. “Southside Art Center Gives 7 Poetry Awards,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 19, 1942: sw5.