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The Black Press and the Black Chicago Renaissance
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
the Black Press and the Black chicago renaissance Zoe trodd In February 1927, Matilda McEwan of Hubbard Woods, Illinois, read an issue of the Chicago Defender, America’s leading black newspaper of the day. She took particular notice of an item in The Bookshelf, theDefender’s book review column and self-styled “literary club.”1 The item was a request from a reader in Dallas, Texas, for information on a half-remembered poem.2 Matilda’s response ran in The Bookshelf on February 19, 1927: “I saw in ‘The Bookshelf’ where someone is asking for the complete poem ‘The Face on the Barroom Floor.’ Having memorized it years ago, I shall be glad to send it to the person as I remember it.” She included her address.3 A month later the column ran another letter from Matilda: “Dear Readers of ‘The Bookshelf,’ I only meant to send the poem to the person who asked for it in the column. But to date I have received over 50 letters asking that a copy be sent to them. Since I am only a working girl and haven’t much leisure time, it would be impossible for me to answer them all.” She added: “If there are those who are very anxious for a copy and will send a small contribution with their letters, I shall be glad to make a special effort to send it to them.”4 A literary club was in full swing. On May 14, 1928, the anonymous editor of The Bookshelf announced in the column that “the West” was finally speaking “in the realm of letters.”5 The Bookshelf ’s contribution to this realm in fact dated back to November 14, 1925, when the column, then three years old, began to offer a question-and-answer forum for readers alongside its existing selection of book reviews and literary gossip. The new forum included sections called “Defender Forum” and “Who Can Answer This?” And, after its introduction, readers immediately used the new question-and-answer feature to support their own book clubs, perhaps inspiring the official metamorphosis of the column into a “literary club” in January 1926. On December 26, 1925, a reader wrote to The Bookshelf about “a speaker at our forum” and in the following issue a reading group began to use the column as a source for its selections, writing: “Our literary club is planning a birthday the Black Press and the Black chicago renaissance • 449 program the last Sunday in this month. Can you tell us which poets were born in January?”6 Two weeks after publishing this request, The Bookshelf’s editor removed the part of the column’s banner that had proclaimed: “In the small space allotted we will try to touch upon subjects generally of interest to readers .”7 Instead appeared a new line: “If you are a book lover and like the idea of a literary club that meets through ‘The Bookshelf’ column, you are welcome.”8 The column’s new status as a literary club was official. The imaginative space of a “literary club” then expanded the “small space allotted ,” as the earlier banner put it, to make room for Matilda, the fifty readers who wanted her poem, and potentially hundreds of thousands of others. By 1920 the Defender was the most widely read black newspaper in America, with a circulation of 283,571, according to a circulation pamphlet distributed by the newspaper. No other black newspaper of the time claimed a circulation of more than half this number. The issue of March 14, 1925, apparently ran to 247,867 copies (though the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which guarantees newspaper circulation, did not then include the Black Press, so the accuracy of this figure is impossible to verify) and each copy of the newspaper sold was likely read by four to five African Americans, putting its actual readership at close to a million people each week. In 1931 black newspaper circulation reached 1,600,000 and by 1950 it was at 2,440,000, with the Defender still prominent. Robert Sengstacke Abbott, who had produced the first issue of the Chicago Defender on May 5, 1905, became the first black publishing millionaire.9 In 1922 Frederick Detweiler compared the Black Press to a public work of art and a church or lodge, a symbol of aspiration and an embodiment of group life.10 Black newspapers did not just reflect life but helped to create it. This was still the...