“Entering Chicago”

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....

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

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.

Literary Selections

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....

From “These ‘Colored United States,’ VIII—Illinois: Mecca of the Migrant Mob,” The Messenger 5 (December 1923)

Editors’ Note: In our second literary selection—excerpts from Charles S. Johnson’s 1923 essay “Illinois: Mecca of the Migrant Mob”—the famed sociologist renders a broad-stroke account of consolidation and growth of the Black Metropolis. This essay, like many pieces of historical, sociological, and journalistic writing emanating from Chicago contributed to a literature of fact that was characteristic of early African American literary work in the city. While Johnson’s assertions about the paucity of black intellectual and cultural life are challenged throughout the current volume, equally important to note is the stylistic strategy with which he presents his analysis of “this Colored Chicago—the dream city—city of the dreadful night!” His elegant, high-keyed prose employs metaphor and other literary devices and arrays facts with novelistic selectivity and pacing. In this manner, Johnson’s essay looks ahead to a mutually beneficial interpenetration of fiction and sociological writing that would mark many of the most notable works of the Black Chicago Renaissance....

The Rise of Black Chicago’s Culturati

Chicago emerged two decades after its Great Fire of 1871 to host America's second world's fair, and with it witnessed the birth of a Black cultural movement along with the city's general rebirth. First in the performing arts, then progressing slower in the visual and literary arts, the next four decades beheld the rise of the foundational elements of a Black Chicago Renaissance somewhat paralleling that in Harlem but in an asymmetrical fashion. While the tempo of aesthetic evolution through two distinct periods was imbalanced, overall progress appeared: with a transformation in the class structure, bringing necessary Black patronage to the forefront; an intelligentsia to spur interest and appreciation in the fine arts; and impressive, awe-inspiring creative production in painting, sculpture, photography and music.