The Chicago Renaissance turn of 20th c.-1960s(ish)a ga.docx

The Chicago Renaissance: turn of 20th c.-1960s(ish)
“a gathering of writers, a flowering of institutions that
supported and guided them, and the outpouring of writing they
produced”
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/257.html
*
Chicago in the 1890s—Setting the Stage for the Renaissance
*
Historical significance of the World's Columbian Exposition
The second half of the 19th century was an age of fairs and
expositions held in London, Paris, and other great cities
throughout the world. The World's Columbian Exposition, held
in Chicago in 1893, was the first critically and economically
successful U.S. world's fair. Conceived as a celebration of the
400th anniversary of Columbus' landing in the new world, the
Exposition held a near-mythological appeal for people of the
time.

The Columbian Exposition showcased a city just 60 years old, a
city magnificently reborn just 22 years after the Chicago Fire. It
also placed before the world the genius of Chicago architects
Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Louis Sullivan.
In effect, the Columbian Exposition was Chicago's debut on a
world stage as a locus of great architecture and burgeoning
economic power.
http://columbus.gl.iit.edu/index.html
*
"The exterior of the gigantic bubble of glass and iron that rises
over the central pavilion of Horticultural Hall has already been
shown in these plates, and here we are admitted into the
luxurious tropical garden that flourishes in the interior. Here in
a great space of light and air may be seen a miniature mountain
covered with strange foliage and with a little stream dashing
down its sides, great tubs of palms and tree ferns, bamboos,
century plants, "elk horns," a miniature Japanese garden,
bridges and all, and shady, inviting nooks, in which the tourisht
may find picturesque rest - much as the painter has here
shown." Art & Architecture (the White City Edition)
*
The Chicago Defender, 1905
The Chicago Defender, which was founded by Robert S.

Abbott on May 5, 1905, once heralded itself as "The World's
Greatest Weekly." The newspaper was the nation's most
influential black weekly newspaper by the advent of World War
I, with more than two thirds of its readership base located
outside of Chicago.
As a northern paper, The Defender had more freedom
to denounce issues outright, and its editorial position was very
militant, attacking racial inequities head-on. The Defender did
not use the words "Negro" or "black" in its pages. Instead,
African Americans were referred to as "the Race" and black
men and women as "Race men and Race women.“
During World War I The Chicago Defender waged its
most aggressive (and successful) campaign in support of "The
Great Migration" movement. This movement resulted in over
one and a half million southern blacks migrating to the North
between 1915-1925.
*
,
Richard Wright, born 1908
Native Son, 1940
Black Boy, 1945
*
Harriet Monroe and Poetry, 1912

The word "Imagiste" appeared for the first time in the U.S.
in January 1913 with the publication of poems by H.D. in
Harriet Monroe's Poetry. "Most important of all," claimed
Monroe, as she sought in 1917 to define the single component
that encapsulated the newness of this modernist verse,"these
poets have bowed to winds from the East."
Ezra Pound
Amy Lowell
Katherine Ann Porter
Wallace Stevens
Eugene O’Neill
William Carlos Williams
e.e. cummings
Gertrude Stein
*
Gwendolyn Brooks , born 1917
First work of poetry published in the Defender, 1934
A Street in Bronzeville, 1945; Annie Allen, 1949—Pulitzer
Prize for Poetry; Maud Martha, 1953; The Bean Eaters, 1960
*
The Savoy Ballroom, 4733 South Parkway (now Martin Luther
King Drive), opened in November 1927. Throughout its
existence, the ballroom served the predominately African-

American neighborhoods between 23rd and 63rd Streets and
helped anchor the 47th and South Parkway bright-light district,
or what was sometimes referred to as the "Harlem of Chicago."
The Savoy secured its reputation as one of the city's top night
spots by showcasing the nation's hottest jazz bands in a refined
setting that appealed to upwardly mobile black Chicagoans.
http://chicago.urban-history.org/sites/ballroom/savoy.htm
*
The Great Depression: October 29th, 1929—Black Tuesday
Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” depicts destitute pea
pickers in California. The picture features 32 year-old Florence
Owen Thompson and three of her seven children.
--Nipomo, CA: March 1936.
This picture is also called “Dustbowl Madonna”
*
Lorraine Hansberry Lorraine Hansberry born, 1930
A Raisin in the Sun first produced on Broadway, 1959
Film adaptations—1961/Sidney Poitier; 1989/Danny Glover;
2008/Sean Combs
Musical adaptation—1973; Tony Award for Best Musical in
1974

*
Assassination of John F. Kennedy: November 22th, 1963
*
“The cruel disease of discrimination knows no sectional or state
boundaries. The continuing attack on this problem must be
equally broad. It must be both private and public -- it must be
conducted at national, state and local levels -- and it must
include both legislative and executive action.
[…] In addition, it is my hope that this message will lend
encouragement to those state and local governments -- and to
private organizations, corporations and individuals -- who share
my concern over the gap between our precepts and our
practices. This is an effort in which every individual who asks
what he can do for his country should be able and willing to
take part. It is important, for example, for private citizens and
local governments to support the State Department's effort to
end the discriminatory treatment suffered by too many foreign
diplomats, students and visitors to this country. But it is not
enough to treat those from other lands with equality and dignity
-- the same treatment must be afforded to every American
citizen.”
-JFK, Feb. 28, 1963: Letter to Congress

*
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs Voting Rights Act of 1965
*
Chicago Black Renaissance
Although the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s has gained
greater prominence, the
black aesthetic movement in mid-twentieth-century Chicago
also produced an
influential flowering in the arts. The “Great Migration” brought
tens of thousands of
southern African Americans to the city, where they contributed
to the development
of an urban culture reflected in the visual and performing arts,
literature, and music.
Chicago became a pioneering center for recording and
performing music. The
Chicago Defender promoted black fine arts and publicized the
works of artists and
the institutions that supported and nurtured their creativity. The
South
Side Community Art Center and the New Deal's Works Progress
Administration
nourished artistic creativity and organized art workshops for
black citizens.
Literature

The spirit of the city, conflict between the races, questions of
identity, and the quest for
meaning and dignity anchor the novels, poems, and short stories
of Langston Hughes,
Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker, and
Gwendolyn Brooks. In 1936,
Wright founded the South Side Writers Group, whose
membership included Bontemps and
Walker, in order to provide inspiration and encouragement to
budding writers and space to
experiment with new themes and subjects. The publication in
1940 of Native
Son catapulted Wright into national prominence. Its evocative
exploration of slum and
ghetto, class and race, complements its social-science
counterpart, the classic Black
Metropolis of St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton.
In 1941 Gwendolyn Brooks attended a class on modern poetry
that Inez Cunningham Stark
conducted at the South Side Community Art Center. Her award
a few years later at the
Midwestern Writer's Conference led to the publication of her
first book of poetry, A Street
in Bronzeville. Her next book, Annie Allen, won the Pulitzer
Prize in 1950, and in 1968 Brooks was named Poet
Laureate of Illinois. In 1969, with the publication of Riot,
Brooks began a long association with Haki Madhubuti's
Third World Press.
Visual Art
Four early black visual artists, all of whom received training at
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, captured the
dynamic spirit of black Chicago: William Edouard Scott,

Charles White, Archibald John Motley, Jr., and Eldzier
Cortor. Scott painted impressionist landscapes, portraits, and
murals, including the murals depicting black
achievement on the walls of the Tanner Art Gallery in the
Chicago Coliseum when it was the site of the American
Negro Exposition in 1940. White worked with the mural
division of the Illinois Federal Art Project and became a
prominent graphic artist. Motley's early works provoked
controversy with his depictions of jazz culture and
celebration of black sensuality. His paintings, joyous
celebrations of the vitality of urban black life, provide vivid
images of black social activities in the 1920s and 1930s. Cortor
was among the first African American artists to take
the beauty of black women as his major theme. In 1946, Life
Magazine published one of his full-length seminude
female figures.
SUBSCRIBERS TO THE DEFENDER,
1919 (MAP)
CAVALCADE OF THE
AMERICAN NEGRO, 1940

Music
The Chicago Black Renaissance witnessed the emergence of
jazz, the evolution
of gospel music, and the rise of urban blues. In 1922 King
Oliver invited trumpeter Louis
Armstrong to join his Creole Jazz Band in Chicago. Armstrong
quickly eclipsed Oliver,
demonstrating an impressive skill as an improvising soloist. He
remained mostly in Chicago
for the next three decades, where his recordings and radio
broadcasts defined and
dominated Chicago jazz.
Thomas Dorsey, known as the “Father of Gospel Music,” wrote
over four hundred songs
that revitalized black religious music. A distinctly urban music,
gospel featured pianos,
tambourines, drums, cymbals, and steel tambourines. Contralto
Mahalia Jackson was most
responsible for the acceptance and widespread popularity of
gospel music. She arrived in
Chicago in 1927 and by 1945 was selling millions of records
featuring Dorsey's
compositions, including “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.”
Dance
Dance halls and social clubs became important venues for black
Chicagoans who sought release and pleasure after

working in stockyards, factories, and steel mills. At the other
end of the spectrum, Katherine Dunham
organized Ballets Negres and in 1931 presented one of her
compositions, “Negro Rhapsody,” at the Beaux Arts Ball in
Chicago. In 1945, she founded the Katherine Dunham School of
Arts and Research. Dunham's race consciousness
and appreciation of black aesthetics emerged in her
choreography and her ethnographic studies of West Indian
dance.
Darlene Clark
Hine, Northwestern University
SPELLS BROTHERS GOSPEL
SINGERS, N.D.
The Works Progress Administration (WPA)
Of all of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the Works Progress
Administration (WPA) is the most

famous, because it affected so many people’s lives. Roosevelt’s
vision of a work-relief program
employed more than 8.5 million people. For an average salary
of $41.57 a
month, WPA employees built bridges, roads, public buildings,
public parks and airports.
Under the direction of Harry Hopkins, an enthusiastic ex-social
worker who had come from
modest means, the WPA would spend more than $11 million in
employment relief before it was
canceled in 1943. The work relief program was more expensive
than direct relief payments, but
worth the added cost, Hopkins believed. “Give a man a dole,”
he observed, “and you save his
body and destroy his spirit. Give him a job and you save both
body and spirit”.
The WPA employed far many more men than women, with only
13.5 percent of WPA employees
being women in the peak year of 1938. Although the decision
had been made early on to pay
women the same wages as men, in practice they were consigned
to the lower-paying activities of
sewing, bookbinding, caring for the elderly, school lunch
programs, nursery school, and

recreational work. Ellen Woodward, director of the women’s
programs at the WPA, successfully
pushed for women’s inclusion in the Professional Projects
Division. In this division, professional
women were treated more equally to men, especially in the
federal art, music, theater, and writers’
projects.
When federal support of artists was questioned, Hopkins
answered, “Hell! They’ve got to eat just
like other people.” The WPA supported tens of thousands of
artists, by funding creation of 2,566
murals and 17,744 pieces of sculpture that decorate public
buildings nationwide. The federal art,
theater, music, and writing programs, while not changing
American culture as much as their
adherents had hoped, did bring more art to more Americans than
ever before or since.
The WPA program in the arts led to the creation of the National
Foundation for the Arts and the
National Endowment for the Humanities.
The WPA paid low wages and it was not able to employ
everyone — some five million were left to
seek assistance from state relief programs, which provided

families with $10 per week. However, it
went a long way toward bolstering the self-esteem of workers.
A poem sent to Roosevelt in
February 1936, in block print, read, in part,
“I THINK THAT WE SHALL NEVER SEE
A PRESIDENT LIKE UNTO THEE . . .
POEMS ARE MADE BY FOOLS LIKE ME,
BUT GOD, I THINK, MADE FRANKLIN D.”
American Experience, PBS

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