Old Settlers, New Negroes, and the Birth of Modernity in Black Chicago

For better or worse, there is a long scholarly tradition of studying black Chicago. Starting with University of Chicago sociologists' distorted early twentieth century investigations that cast the city's African American community as "naturally" vice ridden, it has since expanded to encompass an interdisciplinary array of themes and approaches, from St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton's pathbreaking 1948 study Black Metropolis to more recent works by political scientists, sociologists, journalists, literary scholars, and historians analyzing everything from black Chicago's vibrant 1930s-era literary "renaissance" to its changing place within the city's machine politics.¹

Now two historians have moved beyond the sociological angles more typical of black Chicago scholarship to look instead at the community's striking cultural innovations, which transformed not just Chicago's culture but that of the nation as a whole. Davarian Baldwin's Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life focuses on the 1910s through the 1930s, while Adam Green's Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago covers the years 1940 to 1955, but both challenge previous accounts of black creativity and, indeed, historians' understandings of cultural renaissances in general, by highlighting the ways that entrepreneurial and market forces fostered exciting new forms of black cultural expression. Both also contest the ideas of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, particularly his 1957 study Black Bourgeoisie, which attacked the black middle class for abandoning older virtues of thrift, hard work, and sacrifice in favor of an embrace of a "world of make-believe" based upon conspicuous consumption. Baldwin challenges Frazier's underlying assumptions about middle-class respectability, the black consumer culture marketplace, and racial advancement, while Green counters Frazier's dismissive attitude toward the black middle class through a reading of Ebony, the celebrity-besotted black magazine that Frazier saw as the epitome of black middle-class self-delusion.

Yet the two books could hardly be more different. Although both celebrate black creativity, they offer radically opposing visions of the relevance of class divisions, political debate, and racial conflict for understanding black (and by extension, U.S.) life. While Baldwin stresses that black cultural innovation was forged in a context of class conflict and often included expressions of resistance to white racism, Green explicitly brackets discussion of racism, intraracial class conflict, and intraracial political battles because, he insists, black life is about far more than these difficult subjects. But if we've learned anything from the past few decades of cultural studies, it is that culture does not exist in a vacuum and cannot be studied as if it floats untouched by the political battles around it. Green claims to be breaking new ground by telling a story of agency rather than declension, but his approach actually hearkens back to an older, inherently conservative tendency to marginalize politics from the reading of culture.

The stronger of the two books, Baldwin's Chicago's New Negroes uses innovative readings of black urban popular culture to uncover the values and intellectual vision of ordinary people. In some ways, Baldwin's entire study is an attack on two ideas that were implicit in Frazier's famous attack on the black bourgeoisie: first, that values of thrift, hard work, and sacrifice supposedly abandoned by the black middle class were in fact the most important values for black people to embrace; and second, that the places that fascinated many black Americans, middle class or otherwise—such as sports, movies, music, and self-adornment—could be dismissed as mindless escapism that lacked political content. Baldwin challenges these two assumptions in order to recast our understanding not of the black middle class, but rather of class, culture, and creativity within a black urban context and, more particularly, of...