The Rise of Chicago's Black Metropolis, 1920-1929

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Joseph Bibb, “Achievements of Ten Years,” cited in Frederick H. H. Robb, The Negro in Chicago (hereinafter referred to as NIC) (Chicago: Washington Intercollegiate Club, 1929), 2:96. 2. “Booker T. Washington Takes Chicago by Storm,” Chicago Defender (hereinafter referred to as CD), December 10, 1910, 1. 3. Crisis, September 1915: 236. 4. St. Clair Drake, Churches and Voluntary Associations in the Chicago Negro Community (hereinafter referred to as CVA), (Chicago: Work Projects Administration, 1940), 136–37. 5. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (hereinafter referred to as BM), (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1945), 75. 6. Drake and Cayton, BM, 81–82. 7. Harold M. Kingsley, “The Negro Goes to Church,” Opportunity 7 (March 1929): 90; E. Franklin Frazier, “Chicago: A Cross-Section of Negro Life,” Opportunity 7 (March 1929): 71; “Unique Assemblage Meets at Home of Misses Shaw,” CD, December 29, 1928, A4. Rather than living in social isolation from cultural and intellectual personages with whom one would have expected them to bond, the Fraziers-Marie and E. Franklin-interacted with the residents of the Black Metropolis. On one occasion they attended an interracial gathering on the fringes of the enclave that was devoted partially to a discussion of the Baha’i movement and poetry readings, with Mrs. Frazier rendering an original piece of her creation. Interestingly, Charles S. Johnson pointed to religious expression as an indicator of different levels of cultural progression. He observed “200 churches ranging from the air-tight store fronts of illiterate cults, dissenters and transplanted southern churches to the imposing structure of the Olivet Baptist Church with a membership of ten thousand. The different stages of culture of the Negro population are accentuated in the religious life of the Negro community in Chicago.”(“These ‘Colored United States,’ VIII: Illinois: Mecca of the Migrant Mob,” Messenger 5 (December 1923): 928.) 8. Dennis C. Dickerson, “African American Preachers and Politics,” The Careys of Chicago (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010). 9. Richard Courage, The Muse of Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1942–1950 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011). Chapter 1. Demography and Ethos 1. Arvath E. Strickland, History of the Chicago Urban League (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 72. 2. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1990), 34. Overall nationally, 749,000 persons migrated from the South between 1920 and 1930 at an average annual rate of 74,900, U.S. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 240. 3. Harold M. Kingsley, “The Negro Goes to Church,” Opportunity (March 1929): 90. 4. For the Davises’ experience, see Sarah Davis Elias, Recalling Longview: An Account of the Longview Riot (Baltimore: C. H. Fairfax, 2004) and interview with Mrs. Libby Davis Topps on July 13, 2007, in Chicago. For the Arthurs’ experience, see Dahleen Glanton, “Running North: A Family History,” Chicago Tribune, February 12, 1998, Sect. 5 [Tempo], 1, 4. For the Walkers’ experience, interview with Patricia Walker Bearden on November 2 and 9, 2007, in Chicago, and an unpublished manuscript on the life of Alex W. and Julia Walker. For Alex W. Walker’s involvement in the 1906 event, see Mark Bauerlein, Negrophobia : A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001), 246–49, and Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 315–19, which covers the episode in its broader context. See also interview at http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/PrintFriendly?oid=oid%#A125219. For the Brown family, see Oscar C. Brown Sr., By a Thread (New York: Vantage Press, 1983), 49. 5. See Richard R. Wright Jr., 87 Years behind the Black Curtain: An Autobiography (Philadelphia : Rare Book Co., 1965). 6. Anthony M. Platt, E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 85–94. 7. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932). 8. Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago, 117. Today’s mislabeled “ghetto” with its many deficiencies and imperfections has dominated purported scholarship in later years in complete blindness to whatever existed as the features of a community with diverse lifestyles . 9. Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), xviii, xix, 433–34. 10. Frazier, The Negro Family in Chicago, 126...