Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance

Fenton Johnson

fenton Johnson (May 7, 1888–september 16, 1958) James c. hall By some measures, Fenton Johnson is a marginal figure to the Black Chicago Renaissance. He published nothing during its most vibrant period and after the late 1920s seemed to willfully slide into complete and total obscurity; his loyalty to a sardonic, imagist poetic technique, similar to that of fellow Chicago poet Carl Sandburg, would, on the surface, make him out of step with either the general critical social realism or modified high modernism that generally held the day in black Chicago through the 1930s and 1940s. African American poet Arna Bontemps worked diligently to ensure that later work by Johnson had a presence in a late 1940s anthology of African American poetry that he edited, but that brief and tantalizing selection of four poems had to stand for what remained of a once real and vibrant ambition. Indeed, from another angle, that very ambition may make Johnson indispensable to the emergence of a substantive cohort of black artists, writers, critics, and entrepreneurs in Chicago that could command national and international attention. By a similarly reasonable measure, then, Fenton Johnson could be remembered as black Chicago ’s pioneering literary entrepreneur such that without his modest successes and significant failures, the energy behind the South Side Writers Group, the South Side Community Arts Center, and Negro Story are simply unimaginable. Much recent attention to the Black Chicago Renaissance has focused upon its foregrounding of a critical realism within the Popular Front, an intimate relationship between literary and civil rights activity, and the integration of urban and literary concerns that lead to the emergence of a vital “black arts” scene. If the black Chicago Renaissance had a future, it most certainly had a past, and Fenton Johnson is a crucial part of that history.1 Fenton Johnson was born in 1888 to Elijah and Jessie Johnson and into a comfortable, if complex, middle-class existence on Chicago’s South Side. Elijah was a Railway Porter, a distinctly respectable and secure position for African American men of the time, and had had some success purchasing real estate. The late 1880s and 1890s were transitional times for black Chicago. Patterns of fenton Johnson • 219 permanent residential segregation had not wholly settled in and it would not be unusual for someone like Johnson to have had an upbringing that included contact with the great diversity of Chicago’s immigrant communities, and, moreover, it most certainly would have been an upbringing that included class ambition and expectation. By the time of Johnson’s high-school years at Englewood and Wendell Phillips High Schools, however, Chicago would be gradually formulating its own version of Jim Crow, and thus laying the groundwork for a nascent and necessary cultural nationalism by its black inhabitants. Johnson’s maturity would coincide with the establishment of an important network of schools, hospitals, clubs, banks, businesses, theaters, and newspapers, a virtual black metropolis, eager to serve a thriving and growing community uneasily surrounded by nonblacks often equally eager to scapegoat Blacks as they were faced with the hardships of industrialization and modernization. Regardless of whether or not Johnson was shaped most completely by either the assimilationist hopes of one portion of the black middle class, or the nascent nationalist dreams of another, he had no difficulty imagining for himself a thoroughly literary existence. By twelve years of age, he had published his first poem, and by nineteen by some accounts (no record has yet been found) had plays produced at black Chicago’s important playhouse, the Pekin Theatre. Arna Bontemps recalls Johnson telling of his family’s electric car and the scene he made driving the vehicle around the city; he was a literary man, most certainly, if not a self-conscious dandy and dreamily (if not realistically) upwardly mobile. The fluidity of Johnson’s (if not the whole community’s) class experience can be marked by the rumors that some of his earliest literary and theatrical ventures were funded by his uncle John “Mushmouth” Johnson, black Chicago’s most accomplished cabaret operator and suspected gambling kingpin. As in troubled decades to come, the line between underground and traditional economies was not impervious. If racism sought to circumscribe black opportunity, talented entrepreneurs would simply sidestep respectability altogether to gather wealth and other trappings of success. Not unlike his contemporary, African American poet and fiction writer Jean Toomer, and perhaps because of the complexity of his family support and network, Johnson seemed permanently restless...