The Rise of Chicago's Black Metropolis
2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 99; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jas360
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)French Historical and Cultural Studies
ResumoRichard Wright wrote in his introduction to St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton's seminal sociological study Black Metropolis (1945): “Chicago is the known city; more is known about it, how it is run, how it kills, how it loves, steals, helps, gives, cheats, and crushes than any other city in the world” (p. xviii). In the historian Christopher Robert Reed's mind however, Wright's description was not completely accurate. Reed asks what the black communities of Chicago looked like before the Great Depression and World War II. His intent in The Rise of Chicago's Black Metropolis is to ground historically Drake and Cayton's 1940s snapshot into a much longer historical pattern. The 1920s provides another viewpoint on the formation and history of black Americans in Chicago. Reed documents multilayered communities of black Chicagoans. During the 1920s they, alongside white communities, were consolidating political power and business interests, labor organizing, and servicing the spiritual needs of their communities. In Reed's estimation, black Chicago was neither the “black belt” ghetto of the protagonist Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) nor the ghetto of 1960s urban historiography. Throughout the 1920s black Chicagoans were intent on building a life for themselves from a variety of social class positions via civil society and capitalist invention. That envisioned world was more hopeful than the one sketched in the haunting refrain of Gwendolyn Brooks's 1963 poem “of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery”:
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