Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955, and: Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (review)

It is seldom that a historian has the opportunity to examine new works by two separate authors that complement each other to the extent that Davarian L. Baldwin's Chicago's New Negroes and Adam Green's Selling the Race do. Although the two authors do not mention each other in their otherwise copious acknowledgement sections, they share a common set of intellectual influences and academic friendships (James R. Grossman and Archibald Motley in Chicago as well as Robin Kelley and various scholars at New York University) and it is difficult not to think of them as collaborators of a sort. Their mutual project is to recenter Chicago as a dominant site of black American culture and intellectual life. By bringing together loosely connected stories of individual writers, creative artists, and entrepreneurs, each seeks to trace the efforts of the city's blacks to achieve autonomy and express dissent against white domination through creativity.

Baldwin situates his story within the Great Migration and the evolution of a consumer culture within Chicago's burgeoning Black belt—breaking with the traditional narrative of the Migration as catalyzed by Northern industrial expansion and the cutoff of European immigration during World War I, Baldwin audaciously reckons the period as beginning with the racial conflict that surrounded boxer Jack Johnson's victory over Jim Jeffries in 1910. Taking examples of entrepreneurs as diverse as beauty tycoon Madame C.J. Walker, gospel music pioneer Thomas A. Dorsey, and Rube Foster, founding father of Negro League baseball, Baldwin demonstrates that new arrivals to Chicago used engagement with the developing capitalist marketplace during the 1910s and 1920s to prevail over established social hierarchies within the Black community

Baldwin's work is an ideal text for undergraduates and for scholars in American Studies. His chief strength is his knowledgeable discussion of variety of a spheres, including beauty culture, independent black cinema, gospel music and sports, and the interaction of producers and consumers within them. Rather than a straightforward celebration of black entrepreneurship or innovation, he offers an incisive reading of the meanings of a market economy for Chicago black communities. For example, his analysis of the emancipatory impact of beauty product producers in providing their black women salesforces an alternative to domestic work is compelling. He is also generally subtle and intelligent in his description of the constraints and limitations within which these figures had to work. This restraint fades somewhat in Baldwin's treatment of filmmaker Oscar Micheaux—not only does he credit him, somewhat exaggeratedly, with developing the flashback as a cinematic device, but insists in the face of common sense that Micheaux's frequent reliance on a single take, even with mistakes included, was driven not by economic necessity but artistic choice. Baldwin is also tendentious in his argument that all championing of black art by white critics, however antiracist in intention, amounted to racial "slumming." He insists, rather curiously, that Czech composer Antonin Dvorak's famous assessment that Negro spirituals were the only true American folk music did nothing more than provide institutional confirmation for the work that W.E.B. DuBois had already performed to reclaim their importance—this despite the fact that Dvorak's comments came fully a decade before the publication of The Souls of Black Folk. Although Baldwin's work lies clearly in the—effectively unacknowledged—shadow of Lizabeth Cohen's Making a New Deal in its examination of the shift away from traditional ethnic community structures to a nationwide consumer culture and a shared identity, Baldwin's remains innovative in its description of consumerism as a self-affirming race strategy. He is likewise striking in his attempts to reshape outworn sociological categories associated with the Chicago school. Rather than speak of class conflict...