The Chicago Renaissance

Editors’ Note: This prose poem appears as part of the introductory material in the first (1927) volume of Frederick H. H. Robb’s remarkable compilation, The Intercollegian Wonder Book or the Negro in Chicago 1779–1927. “Entering Chicago” is attributed there to “J. M. Davis,” but internal and external evidence convince us that this was in fact contributed by journalist and poet Frank Marshall Davis shortly after his arrival in Chicago from his native Kansas. As such, the piece marks the ongoing “migration of the talented tenth” to the Black Metropolis, highlights the ubiquity of the railroad train as icon of Chicago’s modern moment, evidences Davis’s early efforts in free verse influenced by Carl Sandburg and Fenton Johnson, and prefigures the documentary spirit that would animate the most memorable works by writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance....

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Chicago’s Letters Group and the Emergence of the Black Chicago Renaissance

Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance ◽

10.5622/illinois/9780252043055.003.0012 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 222-244

Author(s):

Richard A. Courage

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

University Students ◽

Cultural History ◽

Richard Wright ◽

Literary Tradition ◽

Black Literature ◽

New Negro ◽

New Negro Movement ◽

Chicago Renaissance ◽

History Of

This chapter unearths the history of a literary circle formed in 1927 to publish a journal called Letters and foster appreciation of black literature. Its leader was Chicago Defender city editor Dewey Roscoe Jones, whose reviews in his weekly “Bookshelf” column established him as black Chicago’s premier literary critic and commentator on the Harlem Renaissance. Most participants in Letters were university students, but they were joined by several older writers, including poets Fenton Johnson and W. H. A. Moore. Future Black Chicago Renaissance luminaries Richard Wright and Frank Marshall Davis visited occasionally but felt unwelcome. Recovering this missing link in cultural history deepens scholarly understanding of the New Negro movement beyond 1920s Harlem and of early evolution of an African American literary tradition in Chicago.

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Literary Selections

Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance ◽

10.5622/illinois/9780252043055.003.0013 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 245-245

Keyword(s):

Chicago Renaissance

Editors’ Note: Our study concludes with a section comprising three literary selections that we intend to break new ground for a scholarly collection. None of the selections is a conventional academic essay, each belongs to a different genre of writing, and each amplifies the light already shone on the roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance....

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