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the chicago school of sociology and the Black chicago renaissance William r. nash The Chicago School of Sociology and the Black Chicago Renaissance represent two defining elements of the African American experience in early twentiethcentury Chicago. On an empirical level, methods and attitudes developed in the sociology department of the University of Chicago during the first decades of the twentieth century helped shape local and federal policy on racial matters , and thereby affected black-white race relations in the city. On an artistic level, black authors writing in and/or about the city of Chicago in the period between 1935 and 1959 (a slight modification of Robert Bone’s definition of the era) brought the landscape of the South Side to life with a richness and intensity matched only in descriptions of Harlem in classic texts of the Harlem Renaissance . While equal in power to the best Harlem works of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, and Rudolph Fisher, Chicago texts by authors like Richard Wright, William Attaway, Willard Motley, and Gwendolyn Brooks also convey a quality of grittiness largely absent from the best-known works of the Harlem Renaissance. For critics like Bone and Carla Cappetti, the grittiness of the writing provides evidence of the influence that Chicago sociology, which focused on how environmental factors in the city determined human behavior, had over the writers of the Chicago Black Renaissance. Certainly one can learn much from pairing this sociological methodology with literary works from the Black Chicago Renaissance era. As Bone and Cappetti have argued, Wright’s fiction and his fictionalized autobiography, Black Boy/American Hunger, lend themselves well to Chicago sociological readings. As Wright himself notes in the introduction to Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake’s landmark sociological study of Chicago, Black Metropolis (1945), he saw the principles of Chicago sociology as defining his experience and giving it meaning. He further suggests that one can best understand his writing by first understanding basic principles of the Chicago School. This approach works well 466 • WilliaM r. nash for reading Wright, who aligns himself with the Chicago sociologists and seeks to give their ideas about environment and behavior life in his literary renderings of the city. For all of that, however, the Wright model becomes a Procrustean bed if one attempts to read other Chicago authors of the era through the same lens. Close consideration of work by Brooks, Motley, Frank Marshall Davis, Theodore Ward, and Frank London Brown complicates the notion that black Chicago writers working between 1935 and 1959 felt the influence of the sociology department at the University of Chicago on their work in any unified sense. Ultimately, then, one best understands the sociologists and writers as making common cause around understanding Chicago life but taking a variety of approaches to achieve that shared end. In order to best understand this relationship, one must grasp some of the basic principles traditionally grouped under the heading of the Chicago School. Arguably, at least, the term is itself problematic, according to University of Chicago alumnus Howard S. Becker’s history of the sociology department. He suggests that one can use the term “Chicago School of Sociology” in its narrowest sense to refer to the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago; more often, though, students and scholars use the term to reference a coherent body of ideas about urban life generated by faculty and graduate students of the Sociology Department and a concomitant pattern of research practices developed to implement those ideas. In fact, the diverse body of scholars who made up the department pursued their various interests, sometimes in direct conflict with the work of their peers. This detail demonstrates the simplification and mythologizing of the Department of Sociology’s scholars and their work— which in turn reinforces the notion of how difficult it is to assess the influence of the sociological school on the literary work. In all fairness, however, one can point to certain methodological innovations that arose at Chicago as hallmarks of the department’s work. One can also identify prominent individuals whose ideas and undertakings advanced the department’s status. In the case of Louis Wirth (1897–1952), Cayton, and Wright, one can even draw specific connections between particular individuals whose relationships provide the foundation for Bone’s and Capetti’s arguments. To be sure, Wirth is an important figure in the development of the Chicago School; his contributions build, however, on the foundations established by Ernest Burgess (1886–1966), W. I...

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