“The Special Beat of Chicago”: Desegregation, Antiblack Noise, and the Sound of Resistance in Frank London Brown’s Trumbull Park

In African American fiction, racial segregation is usually understood in terms of an exclusionary spatial dynamic. Rights to space are vehemently disputed, and setting assumes the power to regulate the movement of racialized bodies. This essay, by contrast, approaches mid-twentieth-century (de)segregation fiction through its sonic manifestations. Frank London Brown’s Trumbull Park (1959) has been hailed as the fullest literary account we possess of involvement in a desegregation campaign, yet the overwhelming aural patterns of (de)segregation in Brown’s novel have never been explored. As theorized in this essay, an aural pattern of (de)segregation involves a dynamic of sound impacted by racially restrictive spatial practices. The essay argues that the intertwining of these two strands—the aural and the spatial—is essential to a more expansive understanding of Brown’s literary work, African American (de)segregation fiction, and, more generally, the audible archive of segregation-era expressive culture.