[A new collection explores the early twentieth-century artists and
institutions that made the Black Chicago Renaissance possible.]
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ROOTS OF THE BLACK CHICAGO RENAISSANCE  
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Malik Jackson
August 20, 2021
South Side Weekly
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_ A new collection explores the early twentieth-century artists and
institutions that made the Black Chicago Renaissance possible. _

, Maya Jain

 

Most cultural movements start small: in the bedrooms of budding
orators, around the table at a thrifty pub, or in the margins of an
artist’s sketchbook. But humble beginnings are foundations
nonetheless. Their  influence, as history tells us, can grow from
four people around a table to 4,000 people across a city—all
that’s necessary is for a seed to be planted, and for surrounding
conditions to foster its growth. Many people know about the richness
of the Black Chicago Renaissance, but the midcentury movement that
cemented Chicago as a center for Black literary excellence surely
required its own foundation, laid by lesser-known names,
relationships, and ideas. Pioneers by definition, their stories are
chronicled in _Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance_, a 2020
collection of essays edited by Richard A. Courage and Christopher
Robert Reed.

In the decades following the end of the Civil War, a fresh and
righteously freed Black population sought to make a new world for
themselves within a world that was still unsure about whether they had
the right to one. While most had yet to journey North, early arrivers
to Chicago were building the frameworks through which newcomers would
be able to flourish, imagine new ways of living, and claim new
opportunities. _Roots _serves as an anthology that honors their
contributions, from the writers, artists, and intellectuals who
reinvented what Black representation could look like, to the
entrepreneurs and financiers who created the spaces that would
insulate and incubate Black culture and thought, which continue to
influence the city and the world a century later. 

Roots of Black Chicago Renaissance. University of Illinois Press.

But first, every event needs a convener. 1893 was a critical year in
American history for both the ever-expanding white population and the
newly freed Black population. Chicago’s World’s Fair was an
opportunity for the American nation to represent itself in ways that
broke from classical European forms, and it was also an opportunity
for Black people to begin thinking about how they ought to represent
themselves on the world’s stage. Frederick Douglass, the curator of
Colored American Day at the World’s Fair, among other things, would
orchestrate one of the first opportunities for freed Black folks to
ask themselves this question. Influenced by recent trips to Ancient
Egypt and his role as a U.S. delegate to Haiti, his temperament
entering 1893 was one that pondered questions of Black pasts and
futures, dignity, and civility. The essay “Journey to Frederick
Douglass’s Chicago Jubilee,_” _by John McCluskey Jr., explores
how these preoccupations, however valid, would have deep implications
for the “tensions within and among urban Black Renaissances of the
early twentieth century.” After having to convince much of
Chicago’s Black culturati to attend the World’s Fair, the show
went on. Singers and musicians like Desiree Plato, Sydney Woodward,
and Maurice Arnold Strathotte performed their renditions of Romantic
classics.  Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poetry recitations would propel
him to national prominence, and a closing from Frederick Douglass
himself, in which he spoke to the commendable progress of Black people
since the Emancipation, minted the day of events as one that would be
formative for the future of Black culture. McCluskey cautions the
reader, though, that “in terms of original and vernacular
expression, Colored American Day may be important for what it
was _not_.” Douglass’s preoccupations with propriety curated a
day of events that didn’t do too much to push the boundaries of what
authentic Black expression could look like on the world’s stage. But
Colored American Day _did_ provide a stage, a gaping avenue for
self-definition and expression for one of the first times in American
history. 

Another presenter at the World’s Fair managed to set fire to
expectations, including those of Douglass, in a speech called “The
Intellectual Progress and Present Status of the Colored Women of the
United States since the Emancipation Proclamation.” Fannie Barrier
Williams was a nationally renowned writer, orator, leader, and
settlement house activist who took the world by storm in a speech that
reintroduced Black women to the world, and demanded the recognition of
their moral authority and democratic participation. Her efforts sought
to define “the New Colored Woman,” who she envisioned as community
leaders. Women who, contrary to gendered distinctions of the time,
balanced professional and service work, worked to create “new and
renewed communities,” and were concerned with social and political
matters both within the race and in broader contexts. 

Her dogma, Black feminist pragmatism, carved out a “third way” to
approach race relations, which incorporated both Booker T.
Washington’s and W.E.B. Du Bois’s philosophies on the advancement
of Black people. This non-confrontational, neighborly approach was
influenced by her abolitionist upbringing, as her father was a
longtime friend of Frederick Douglass, and she herself was a longtime
friend of suffragist Susan B. Anthony. The third way would find Fannie
in interracial circles, clubs, and social settlements, representing
Black women in spaces where they weren’t typically represented, and
working to advance the race by way of influencing and activating other
populations. 

Her success was apparently threatening. In a reception she organized
with the women of the social settlement called the Frederick Douglass
Club (FDC), she and a group of women of mixed race had a tea party in
protest of Jim Crow social lines in Chicago. This sparked negative
reactions from the press, obviously because of the issue at hand, but
certainly because of the fact that they were women. Fannie’s grace
and knack for leadership landed her in the seats of many institutions.
She held offices in the FDC’s Women’s Club and the Chicago
Woman’s Club, she was once the president of the Illinois Federation
of Colored Women’s Club, and was appointed to the board of the
Chicago Public Library by the mayor. Her presence within these spaces,
and her emphasis on creating space, made her a trailblazing example of
Black womens’ leadership in the early twentieth century, and her
friendships with the likes of Ida B. Wells, Irene McCoy Gaines, and
Mary F. Waring—to name a few—would create the networks and
reverberations necessary for the infrastructure of the coming
Renaissance.  

Representation at the table, whether it be in boardrooms or
classrooms, was important for changing broader perceptions of Black
identity. But those spaces, despite having significant influence, were
hardly proximate to the majority of working-class Black people. In
order for the Renaissance–which originated in exclusive spaces–to
begin influencing the broader Black community, it required forms of
self-representation and “cultural capital” that would help the
masses reimagine what their roles in society could be. The Black
Chicago Renaissance and all its colors were contingent upon the
formation of black modern subjectivity. People needed to be able to
see their likeness in different forms in order to recreate or emulate
those forms for themselves. This is where art and Black media played a
formative role in building a collective racial identity. 

In “Strategies for Visualizing Cultural Capital_,” _Amy M. Mooney
dives into the power of the Black portrait. She specifically focuses
on the art of William Edouard Scott and Charles C. Dawson, and the
ways they’d deploy the Five Cs—class, character, costume,
countenance, and composition—to both capture and manufacture the
essence of their subjects. Also instrumental were the ways in which
portraiture and other art forms were disseminated. Publications
like _The Chicago Defender,_ _The Champion_, _Half-Century
Magazine_, and _Reflexus_, were just some of the Black-owned outlets
that’d display portraiture and art, let alone writings of and about
Black culture. These publications circulated throughout Black
communities and would shape and encourage dynamic Black identities. 

 

Scott and Dawson received numerous commissions from Chicago’s Black
political leaders, entrepreneurs, and social activists. The essay
focuses on how business leaders utilized the arts to influence
perceptions. The arts, for this purpose, were deliberate,
collaborative, and intentional. For Dawson, through portraiture,
drawings, and advertisements, his goal was to portray Black agency;
and so themes of Black “history, mythology, and fable” were aided
by tropes of “beauty and nobility.” This sentiment shone through
in Dawson’s illustrated advertisements, which he did for both banker
Jesse Binga and cosmetic mogul Anthony Overton’s respective
enterprises. 

Scott, most known for his paintings depicting Black life, was
attentive to details when it came to composition. In a portrait he
painted of Frederick Douglass, he made sure to position him against a
background of a wall of books to indicate Douglass’s scholarly
nature. He captured the subject’s contemplative gaze, a reflection
of the way he was understood, an example for those who would look upon
the painting. These goals and intentions around visualizing the
culture would do many things for the Black populus. On one hand,
commissions from notables like Overton and Robert S. Abbott, the
publisher of the _Chicago Defender _would brand them to the public,
setting examples but also facilitating further social and economic
progress for themselves and their publications. Mooney speaks to the
newspapers and magazines that were backed by the dollars of Binga,
Overton, and others, and of the events that would spring about to
further promote the work, like the _Defender’_s annual Bud
Billiken parade. 

Visualizing the culture would also become the basis through which the
culture could critique itself. Mooney uses a quote from Frederick
Douglass to contextualize the chapter: “It is only by making
ourselves and others objects of contemplation that we can begin to
imagine better selves and better futures.” This self-representation,
much like the events of the Colored American Day, sparked imaginations
and debates about where the race was headed and how it should appear.
In a later example, she references the work of Jay Jackson, a
satirical artist, which took aim at Overton’s line of
skin-lightening creams by using an illustration to critique those with
biases toward Black people of lighter skin. These critiques, and the
culture of critique writ large, added a nuance to intraracial
discourse that made room for more subjectivity and dynamism.

These are just a few examples of the essays that reveal the early
workings of what would become a monumental literary and artistic
Renaissance in Chicago. Others within the collection dive deeper into
the literary groups that would recruit and inspire many, like the
Chicago Letters Group, and pioneers like Hazel Thompson Davis, who
built a castle out of the Unity Club in Bronzeville to nurture
performance artists. The time period of 1893-1930 was a time where Old
Settlers (Black people who were already in Chicago) and new Southern
migrants would carve out their plots and plant seeds for future
generations to observe and build upon. Those seeds would bloom into
names that would shape race consciousness until today, with classic
works like Richard Wright’s _Native Son_, Lorraine
Hansberry’s _Raisin in the Sun_, and Gwendolyn Brooks’ Pulitzer
Prize-winning poetry. What _Roots of the Black Chicago
Renaissance _captures are the ideas, institutions, and individuals
that had to come together in a post-Emancipation America and ask,
“Where is the race headed?” Regardless of their individual
answers, they laid the foundation for Black people in Chicago and
abroad to ask the same question of themselves. 

Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance: New Negro Writers, Artists,
and Intellectuals, 1893-1930_, edited by Richard A. Courage and
Christopher Robert Reed, University of Illinois Press, 296 pages,
$28._

_MALIK JACKSON [[link removed]] is the Housing
Editor for the Weekly. He last wrote a review
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Home by Dr. Reuben Miller._

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