The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932-1950 by Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage (review)

The late Robert Bone’s work included The Negro Novel in America (1959), Richard Wright (1969), Down Home: Origins of the Afro-American Short Story (1975), a Callaloo article on a Chicago African American Renaissance of the 1930s (1986), and an unfinished book-length project on the same. In failing health, he handed the project to Richard A. Courage, a professor of English at Westchester Community College, SUNY; the result is The Muse in Bronzeville—the culmination of a life’s work, an encyclopedic study of renaissance activity, and a book that will forever alter the way scholars comprehend and historicize black cultural production.

As a conceptual category, the “Chicago Black Renaissance” first gained prominence in 1986, when it was articulated by Bone in his essay, “Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance.” This piece is the first articulation of a distinctly Chicago-based artistic flowering after the Harlem Renaissance. His main thesis was that there was in fact an identifiable generation of black writers holding ascendancy from 1935-1950, and this generation found its locus in the city of Chicago. Specifically, he proves that on a narrow tongue of land seven miles long and a mile and a half wide, in a rigidly segregated neighborhood called Bronzeville, home to over 300,000 African Americans, a generation of African American artists, authors, sociologists, and musicians rose to ascendency. Bone asked a series of vital questions: Why does literary history record in great detail the story of the Harlem Renaissance while virtually ignoring its Chicago counterpart? What were the causes of this flowering of African American creativity? Why did it take place in the midwestern, rather than the eastern metropolis? What historical and cultural forces converged in Chicago during the Depression years that were capable of sustaining what Arna Bontemps called “the second phase of Negro literary awakening”? Moreover, Bone stressed that the current version of African American literary history is in need of serious revision. The Muse in Bronzeville answers all of these questions, and rewrites African American literary history in the years following Harlem.

Bone and Courage show that from 1932 through 1950, Chicago’s black community witnessed, and participated in, startling developments in literature, art, music, social science and journalism. Their approach is broad, ambitious, and encyclopedic in nature. The Muse starts with a long section detailing how Chicago got its start. It takes a nontraditional first step with a chapter on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, then another on Charles S. Johnson and white University of Chicago sociologists, and finally ends the story of origin with a chapter on Robert Abbott’s Chicago Defender and Julius Rosenwald’s Fellowship Program—which served as the most prominent thread, more than any cultural institution, art center, library, or night club, tying together all of Bronzeville’s cultural producers. These first chapters prove that in Bronzeville, by way of Tuskegee and Harlem, conditions were ripe for a renaissance. Subsequent chapters get into the more exciting details—the actual meat of the renaissance—by tracking the poems and novels of Bronzeville’s authors, such as Richard Wright, who looms as the renaissance’s towering figure, poets Frank Marshall Davis, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and the many friendships between authors and artists at the South Side Community Arts Center; additionally, music is given a nod in an excellent chapter on Bronzeville’s Blues. Later chapters explore the literature of fact meeting the literature of fiction in the collaborative work between sociologists Horace Cayton and Richard Wright, the visual arts of Archibald Motley, Charles White, and the photography of Gordon Parks. These are merely a few of the authors and artists mentioned in the book.

A problematic element of the book is an uneasy use of the word renaissance and the chronology that grounds it. Courage admits to the volatility of the word in his introduction to the...