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"African Americans Illinois Chicago Social conditions."
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The Depression Comes to the South Side
In the 1920s, the South Side was looked on as the new Black Metropolis, but by the turn of the decade that vision was already in decline-a victim of the Depression. In this timely book, Christopher Robert Reed explores early Depression-era politics on Chicago's South Side. The economic crisis caused diverse responses from groups in the black community, distinguished by their political ideologies and stated goals. Some favored government intervention, others reform of social services. Some found expression in mass street demonstrations, militant advocacy of expanded civil rights, or revolutionary calls for a complete overhaul of the capitalist economic system. Reed examines the complex interactions among these various groups as they played out within the community as it sought to find common ground to address the economic stresses that threatened to tear the Black Metropolis apart.
eBook
Chicago's New Negroes
As early-twentieth-century Chicago swelled with an influx of at least 250,000 new black urban migrants, the city became a center of consumer capitalism, flourishing with professional sports, beauty shops, film production companies, recording studios, and other black cultural and communal institutions. Davarian Baldwin argues that this mass consumer marketplace generated a vibrant intellectual life and planted seeds of political dissent against the dehumanizing effects of white capitalism. Pushing the traditional boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance to new frontiers, Baldwin identifies a fresh model of urban culture rich with politics, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship.Baldwin explores an abundant archive of cultural formations where an array of white observers, black cultural producers, critics, activists, reformers, and black migrant consumers converged in what he terms a \"marketplace intellectual life.\" Here the thoughts and lives of Madam C. J. Walker, Oscar Micheaux, Andrew \"Rube\" Foster, Elder Lucy Smith, Jack Johnson, and Thomas Dorsey emerge as individual expressions of a much wider spectrum of black political and intellectual possibilities. By placing consumer-based amusements alongside the more formal arenas of church and academe, Baldwin suggests important new directions for both the historical study and the constructive future of ideas and politics in American life.
eBook
Popular fronts : Chicago and African-American cultural politics, 1935-46
The Communist International's Popular Front campaign of the 1930s brought to the fore ideas that resonated in Chicago's African American community. Indeed, the Popular Front not only connected to the black experience of the era, but outlasted its Communist Party affiliation to serve as both model and inspiration for a postwar cultural insurrection led by African Americans.
With a new preface Bill V. Mullen updates his dynamic reappraisal of a critical moment in American cultural history. Mullen's study includes reassessments of the politics of Richard Wright's critical reputation and a provocative reading of class struggle in Gwendolyn Brooks' A Street in Bronzeville . He also takes an in-depth look at the institutions that comprised Chicago's black popular front: the Chicago Defender , the period's leading black newspaper; Negro Story , the first magazine devoted to publishing short stories by and about African Americans; and the WPA-sponsored South Side Community Art Center.
eBook
Not Alms but Opportunity
Illuminating the class issues that shaped the racial uplift movement, Toure Reed explores the ideology and policies of the national, New York, and Chicago Urban Leagues during the first half of the twentieth century. Reed argues that racial uplift in the Urban League reflected many of the class biases pervading contemporaneous social reform movements, resulting in an emphasis on behavioral, rather than structural, remedies to the disadvantages faced by Afro-Americans.Reed traces the Urban League's ideology to the famed Chicago School of Sociology. The Chicago School offered Leaguers powerful scientific tools with which to foil the thrust of eugenics. However, Reed argues, concepts such as ethnic cycle and social disorganization and reorganization led the League to embrace behavioral models of uplift that reflected a deep circumspection about poor Afro-Americans and fostered a preoccupation with the needs of middle-class blacks. According to Reed, the League's reform endeavors from the migration era through World War II oscillated between projects to \"adjust\" or even \"contain\" unacculturated Afro-Americans and projects intended to enhance the status of the Afro-American middle class. Reed's analysis complicates the mainstream account of how particular class concerns and ideological influences shaped the League's vision of group advancement as well as the consequences of its endeavors.
eBook
The criminalization of black children : race, gender, and delinquency in Chicago's juvenile justice system, 1899-1945
\"In this book, Tera Agyepong explores the vital role children played in the construction of ideas of criminality in early twentieth century Chicago. For African American children, youthfulness--far from being a marker of purity or innocence--was a factor in subjecting them to particular institutional, social, and economic vulnerabilities at the hands of the juvenile justice system. At a moment when blackness was becoming a marker of criminality, their race overrode the potential protections their status as children could have provided them\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Negro in Illinois
A major document of African American participation in the struggles of the Depression, The Negro in Illinois was produced by a special division of the Illinois Writers' Project, one of President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration programs. Headed by Harlem Renaissance poet Arna Bontemps and white proletarian writer Jack Conroy, The Negro in Illinois employed major black writers living in Chicago during the 1930s, including Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Katherine Dunham, Fenton Johnson, Frank Yerby, and Richard Durham. The authors chronicled the African American experience in Illinois from the beginnings of slavery to Lincoln's emancipation and the Great Migration, with individual chapters discussing various aspects of public and domestic life, recreation, politics, religion, literature, and performing arts. After the project was canceled in 1942, most of the writings went unpublished for more than half a century--until now. Editor Brian Dolinar provides an informative introduction and epilogue which explain the origins of the project and place it in the context of the Black Chicago Renaissance.
eBook