Richard Wright and the Black Metropolis: From the Great Migration to the Urban Planning Novel

Early twentieth-century Black literature on the city from the likes of Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen pondered questions of what it meant to be Black and urbane and also how to reformulate Black identity from a new position removed from the violent history of the South. While hints of criticism toward northern segregation appeared in those early works, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) offered the first intensive prognostication and condemnation of the ad hoc, discriminatory, and de facto system of segregation appearing in cities like Chicago in response to the Great Migration and used Wright’s informal study of sociology with the Chicago school to animate its project. Native Son, for all of its flaws, first considered how narrative can help explain and unspool the “neutral and egalitarian” guise behind the truly discriminatory urban planning-related practices and policies—from real estate to neighborhood covenants to zoning—that grew up with the start of the twentieth century and that continue to impact American cities through today.

“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....

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....

Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance

This anthology engages questions about origins of the Black Chicago Renaissance (1930-1955) from wide-ranging disciplinary perspectives. It traces a foundational stage from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to onset of the Depression. Eleven essays contribute to recovering understudied black artists and intellectuals, remapping African American cultural geography beyond and before 1920s Harlem, and reconceptualizing the paradigm of urban black renaissance. Contributors probe the public lives and achievements, class and family backgrounds, education and training, areas of residency, and institutional affiliations of such African American cultural pioneers as writers Fannie Barrier Williams, James David Corrothers, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Fenton Johnson; visual artists William E. Scott, Charles C. Dawson, and King Daniel Ganaway; and dance teacher Hazel Thompson Davis. Organized chronologically and deploying rich archival explorations, these essays unearth local resonances of such world-changing events as the Columbian Exposition, First World War, Great Migration, 1919 Red Summer, and Jazz Age. They identify internally-generated, transformative forces that supported emergence of creative individuals and cultural circles committed to professional work in arts and letters. These individuals were often identified with the appellation “New Negro,” whose multiple (sequential, overlapping) meanings are explored in relation to the formation and growth of a geographically compact, racially homogenous, and increasingly autonomous Black Metropolis.