The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America by
Giving voice to the voiceless, the Chicago Defender condemned Jim Crow, catalyzed the Great Migration, and focused the electoral power of black America. Robert S. Abbott founded The Defender in 1905, smuggled hundreds of thousands of copies into the most isolated communities in the segregated South, and was dubbed a "Modern Moses," becoming one of the first black millionaires in the process. His successor wielded the newspaper's clout to elect mayors and presidents, including Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy, who would have lost in 1960 if not for The Defender's support. Along the way, its pages were filled with columns by legends like Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes, and Martin Luther King.
Drawing on dozens of interviews and extensive archival research, Ethan Michaeli constructs a revelatory narrative of race in America and brings to life the reporters who braved lynch mobs and policemen's clubs to do their jobs, from the age of Teddy Roosevelt to the age of Barack Obama.
Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett’s Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox by
For more than fifty years, the Chicago-based Associated Negro Press (ANP) fought racism at home and grew into an international news organization abroad. At its head stood founder Claude Barnett, one of the most influential African Americans of his day and a gifted, if unofficial, diplomat who forged links with figures as diverse as Jawaharlal Nehru, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Nixon. Gerald Horne weaves Barnett's fascinating life story through a groundbreaking history of the ANP, including its deep dedication to Pan-Africanism. An activist force in journalism, Barnett also helped send doctors and teachers to Africa, advised African governments, gave priority to foreign newsgathering, and saw the African American struggle in global terms. Yet Horne also confronts Barnett's contradictions. A member of the African American elite, Barnett's sympathies with black aspirations often clashed with his ethics and a powerful desire to join the upper echelons of business and government. In the end, Barnett's activist success undid his work. Horne traces the dramatic story of the ANP's collapse as the mainstream press, retreating from Jim Crow, finally covered black issues and hired African American journalists.
Along the Streets of Bronzeville: Black Chicago’s Literary Landscape by
Along the Streets of Bronzeville examines the flowering of African American creativity, activism, and scholarship in the South Side Chicago district known as Bronzeville during the period between the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Poverty stricken, segregated, and bursting at the seams with migrants, Bronzeville was the community that provided inspiration, training, and work for an entire generation of diversely talented African American authors and artists who came of age during the years between the two world wars. In this significant recovery project, Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach investigates the institutions and streetscapes of Black Chicago that fueled an entire literary and artistic movement. She argues that African American authors and artists--such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, painter Archibald Motley, and many others--viewed and presented black reality from a specific geographic vantage point: the view along the streets of Bronzeville. Schlabach explores how the particular rhythms and scenes of daily life in Bronzeville locations, such as the State Street "Stroll" district or the bustling intersection of 47th Street and South Parkway, figured into the creative works and experiences of the artists and writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance.
A Raisin in the Sun by
When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and hailed as a watershed in American drama. Not only was it a pioneering work by an African-American playwright - Lorraine Hansberry's play was also a radically new representation of black life, one that was resolutely authentic, fiercely unsentimental, and unflinching in its vision of what happens to people whose dreams are constantly deferred. In her portrait of an embattled Chicago family, Hansberry anticipated issues that range from generational clashes to the civil rights and women's movements. She also posed the essential questions - about identity, justice and moral responsibility - at the heart of these great struggles. The result is a work that captivated audiences from every walk of life and has become a classic of American letters.
Native Son by
Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright’s powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.
Maud Martha by
LITS Tip: This is the only novel that Gwendolyn Brooks wrote.
Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance by
Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance comprehensively explores the contours and content of the Black Chicago Renaissance, a creative movement that emerged from the crucible of rigid segregation in Chicago's "Black Belt" from the 1930s through the 1960s. Heavily influenced by the Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago Renaissance of white writers, its participants were invested in political activism and social change as much as literature, art, and aesthetics. The revolutionary writing of this era produced some of the first great accolades for African American literature and set up much of the important writing that came to fruition in the Black Arts Movement.
The volume covers a vast collection of subjects, including many important writers such as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry as well as cultural products such as black newspapers, music, and theater. The book includes individual entries by experts on each subject; a discography and filmography that highlight important writers, musicians, films, and cultural presentations; and an introduction that relates the Harlem Renaissance, the white Chicago Renaissance, the black Chicago Renaissance, and the Black Arts Movement.
The Black Chicago Renaissance by
"The "New Negro" consciousness with its roots in the generation born in the last and opening decades of the 19th and 20th centuries replenished and nurtured by migration, resulted in the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s then reemerged transformed in the 1930s as the Black Chicago Renaissance. The authors in this volume argue that beginning in the 1930s and lasting into the 1950s, Black Chicago experienced a cultural renaissance that rivaled the cultural outpouring in Harlem. The Black Chicago Renaissance, however, has not received its full due. This book addresses that neglect. Like Harlem, Chicago had become a major destination for black southern migrants. Unlike Harlem, it was also an urban industrial center that gave a unique working class and internationalist perspective to the cultural work that took place here. The contributors to Black Chicago Renaissance analyze a prolific period of African American creativity in music, performance art, social science scholarship, and visual and literary artistic expression. Each author discusses forces that distinguished and link the Black Chicago Renaissance to the Harlem Renaissance as well as placing the development of black culture in a national and international context by probing the histories of multiple (sequential and overlapping--Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis) black renaissances. Among the topics discussed in this volume are Chicago writers Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, The Chicago Defender and Tivoli Theater, African American music and visual arts, as well as the American Negro Exposition of 1940"--
Visionary Women Writers of Chicago's Black Arts Movement by
In Visionary Women Writers of Chicago's Black Arts Movement, Carmen L. Phelps examines the work of several women artists working in Chicago, a key focal point for the energy and production of the movement. Angela Jackson, Johari Amiri, and Carolyn Rodgers reflect in their writing specific cultural, local, and regional insights, and demonstrate the capaciousness of Black Art rather than its constraints. Expanding from these three writers, Phelps analyzes the breadth of women's writing in BAM. In doing so, Phelps argues that these and other women attained advantageous and unique positions to represent the potential of the BAM aesthetic, even if their experiences and artistic perspectives were informed by both social conventions and constraints. In this book, Phelps's examination brings forward a powerful and crucial contribution to the aesthetics and history of a movement that still inspires.
Black Moods Collected Poems by
Black Moods collects for the first time all of Frank Marshall Davis's extant published poems as well as his known previously unpublished work.
Cogently framed by John Edgar Tidwell's insightful introduction, this volume recovers the rich variety of Davis's poetic expression, much of it informed by his political convictions and by his multifaceted work as a journalist. His early work helped promote Chicago as a site of the New Negro Renaissance in the 1930s; late in his career the Black Arts Movement welcomed him as "the long lost father of modern Black poetry." Between these two signposts, Davis engaged in a tireless struggle for social, intellectual, political, and aesthetic freedom, lending his considerable energies and intelligence to the fight against racial segregation, anti-Semitism, labor exploitation, and other injustices.
Tidwell examines both Davis's poetry and his politics, presenting a subtle portrait of a complex writer devoted to exposing discriminatory practices and reaffirming the humanity of the common people. From sharp-edged sketches of Southside Chicago's urban landscape to the complicated bright prismatic world that lay beneath Hawaii's placid surface of beachfront hotels, bikinis, and beach bums, Davis's muscular poems blend social, cultural, and political concerns--always shaped by his promise to "try to be as direct as good blues." His jazz poetry and love poems offer a lyrical counterpoint to his realistic and satirical verse focusing on urban life, race pride, and fierce social consciousness.
A varied and valuable collection, Black Moods represents the recovery of a powerful and distinctive voice and a marvelous enrichment of African American poetry.
Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom by
Posthumously inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2007, Richard Durham creatively chronicled and brought to life the significant events of his times. Durham's trademark narrative style engaged listeners with fascinating characters, compelling details, and sharp images of pivotal moments in American and African American history and culture. In Word Warrior , award-winning radio producer Sonja D. Williams draws on archives and hard-to-access family records, as well as interviews with family and colleagues like Studs Terkel and Toni Morrison, to illuminate Durham's astounding career. Durham paved the way for black journalists as a dramatist and a star investigative reporter and editor for the pioneering black newspapers the Chicago Defender and Muhammed Speaks . Talented and versatile, he also created the acclaimed radio series Destination Freedom and Here Comes Tomorrow and wrote for popular radio fare like The Lone Ranger . Incredibly, his energies extended still further--to community and labor organizing, advising Chicago mayoral hopeful Harold Washington, and mentoring generations of activists. Incisive and in-depth, Word Warrior tells the story of a tireless champion of African American freedom, equality, and justice during an epoch that forever changed a nation.
The Hottest Water in Chicago by
Gayle Pemberton shares the accumulated revelations of a lifetime of observation in sixteen provocative autobiographical essays, interweaving her own history and that of her family with reflections on American literature, art, music, and film. Building on the tradition of such writers as W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, but with a wisdom and sharp wit uniquely her own, Pemberton moves from the integration of a transient hotel in Chicago to a party on that city's Gold Coast; from journeys by train and the memories they provoke to reflections on race aboard ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean; from the Mickey Mouse Club to the ghost of Emmett Till; from Harvard to Hollywood.
Clybourne Park: A Play by
Clybourne Park spans two generations fifty years apart. In 1959, Russ and Bev are selling their desirable two-bedroom at a bargain price, unknowingly bringing the first black family into the neighborhood (borrowing a plot line from Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun) and creating ripples of discontent among the cozy white residents of Clybourne Park. In 2009, the same property is being bought by a young white couple, whose plan to raze the house and start again is met with equal disapproval by the black residents of the soon-to-be-gentrified area. Are the issues festering beneath the floorboards actually the same, fifty years on? Bruce Norris's excruciatingly funny and squirm-inducing satire explores the fault line between race and property.
Black Writing from Chicago: In the World, Not of It? by 
The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900-1967 by 
People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music by 
A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music by 
The Invention and Reinvention of Big Bill Broonzy by 
Willie Dixon: Preacher of the Blues by
One of the greats of blues music, Willie Dixon was a recording artist whose abilities extended beyond that of bass player. A singer, songwriter, arranger, and producer, Dixon's work influenced countless artists across the music spectrum. In Willie Dixon: Preacher of the Blues, Mitsutoshi Inaba examines Dixon's career, from his earliest recordings with the Five Breezes through his major work with Chess Records and Cobra Records. Focusing on Dixon's work on the Chicago blues from the 1940s to the early 1970s, this book details the development of Dixon's songwriting techniques from his early professional career to his mature period and compares the compositions he provided for different artists. This volume also explores Dixon's philosophy of songwriting and its social, historical, and cultural background. This is the first study to discuss his compositions in an African American cultural context, drawing upon interviews with his family and former band members. This volume also includes a detailed list of Dixon's session work, in which his compositions are chronologically organized.
Give 'Em Soul, Richard!: Race, Radio, and Rhythm and Blues in Chicago by 
l'll Take You There: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers, and the March Up Freedom’s Highway by
This is the untold story of living legend Mavis Staples—lead singer of the Staple Singers and a major figure in the music that shaped the civil rights era. Now in her seventies, Mavis has been a fixture in the music world for decades. One of the most enduring artists of popular music, she and her family fused gospel, soul, folk, and rock to transcend racism and oppression through song. Honing her prodigious talent on the Southern gospel circuit of the 1950s, Mavis and the Staple Singers went on to sell more than 30 million records, with message-oriented soul music that became a sound track to the civil rights movement—inspiring Martin Luther King Jr. himself.
Sun Ra's Chicago : Afrofuturism and the City
Sun Ra (1914–93) was one of the most wildly prolific and unfailingly eccentric figures in the history of music. Renowned for extravagant performances in which his Arkestra appeared in neo-Egyptian garb, the keyboardist and bandleader also espoused an interstellar cosmology that claimed the planet Saturn as his true home. In Sun Ra’s Chicago, William Sites brings this visionary musician back to earth—specifically to the city’s South Side, where from 1946 to 1961 he lived and relaunched his career. The postwar South Side was a hotbed of unorthodox religious and cultural activism: Afrocentric philosophies flourished, storefront prophets sold “dream-book bibles,” and Elijah Muhammad was building the Nation of Islam. It was also an unruly musical crossroads where the man then known as Sonny Blount drew from an array of intellectual and musical sources—from radical nationalism, revisionist Christianity, and science fiction to jazz, blues, Latin dance music, and pop exotica—to construct a philosophy and performance style that imagined a new identity and future for African Americans. Sun Ra’s Chicago shows that late twentieth-century Afrofuturism emerged from a deep, utopian engagement with the city—and that by excavating the postwar black experience of Sun Ra’s South Side milieu, we can come to see the possibilities of urban life in new ways.
Soul Train : The Music, Dance, and Style of a Generation by 
Herbie Hancock: Possibilities by
The warmly welcomed memoir by one of the most influential and beloved musicians of our time In Herbie Hancock- Possibilities the legendary jazz musician and composer reflects on an extraordinary life and a thriving career that has spanned seven decades. A true innovator who has spent a lifetime exploring a range of musical genres, and enriching each of them, Hancock has had an enormous influence on acoustic and electric jazz, R&B, funk, and hip-hop. From his beginnings as a child prodigy to his early classic Blue Note recordings; from his work in Miles Davis's second great quintet to his innovations as the leader of his own groundbreaking sextet; from era-defining classic albums like Head Hunters and River- The Joni Letters to his collaborations with artists like Wayne Shorter and Stevie Wonder, Hancock reveals the methods behind his ever-evolving musical genius. He discusses his influences, his happy marriage, and how his practice of Buddhism has inspired him both creatively and personally. Honest, enlightening, and as electrifyingly vital as its author, this is an invaluable contribution to jazz literature and an intimate, insightful portrait of a creative life. ' Possibilities is very effective at its paramount task- getting the reader to dig into the catalog of this restless jazz genius with newly edified ears.' The Boston Globe 'Revelations come thick and fast in this terrific page-turner. Honest, self-effacing, and packed with good stories, Possibilities presents an intimate self-portrait of one of popular music's most influential and affable keyboardists.' Mojo.
Do You Remember House? Chicago's Queer of Color Undergrounds by
This interdisciplinary study historicizes house music, the rhythmically focused electronic dance sound born in the post-industrial maroon spaces of Chicago’s queer, black, and Latino social dancers. Working from oral history interviews, archival research, and performance ethnography, it argues that the remediation and adaptation of house by multiple and overlapping crossover communities in its first decade shaped the ways that contemporary Chicago house music producers, DJs, dancers, and promoters re-remember and re-animate house as an archive indexing experiences of queer of color congregation. Engaging with and extending the fields of African American studies, urban studies, gender and sexuality studies, dance studies, performance studies, popular music studies, ethnomusicology, and media studies, Do You Remember House? considers house music culture’s liberatory potential in relation to its flexible repertoire in motion, an ever-expanding archive of danceable sounds.
Bomb the Suburbs: Graffiti, Race, Freight-Hopping and the Search for Hip-Hop's Moral Center by 
Chicago Hustle and Flow: Gangs, Gangsta Rap, and Social Class by 
The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago by
The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago is the first in-depth, illustrated history of a lost Chicago monument. The Wall of Respect was a revolutionary mural created by fourteen members of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) on the South Side of Chicago in 1967. This book includes photographs by Darryl Cowherd, Bob Crawford, Roy Lewis, and Robert A. Sengstacke, and gathers historic essays, poetry, and previously unpublished primary documents from the movement's founders that provide a guide to the work's creation and evolution.
The Wall of Respect received national critical acclaim when it was unveiled on the side of a building at Forty-Third and Langley in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. Painters and photographers worked side by side on the mural's seven themed sections, which featured portraits of Black heroes and sheroes, among them John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The Wall became a platform for music, poetry, and political rallies. Over time it changed, reflecting painful controversies among the artists as well as broader shifts in the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements.
At the intersection of African American culture, politics, and Chicago art history, The Wall of Respect offers, in one keepsake-quality work, an unsurpassed collection of images and essays that illuminate a powerful monument that continues to fascinate artists, scholars, and readers in Chicago and across the United States.
Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago by
This year marks the golden anniversary of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the flagship band of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Formed in 1966 and flourishing until 2010, the Art Ensemble distinguished itself by its unique performance practices—members played hundreds of instruments on stage, recited poetry, performed theatrical sketches, and wore face paint, masks, lab coats, and traditional African and Asian dress. The group, which built a global audience and toured across six continents, presented their work as experimental performance art, in opposition to the jazz industry’s traditionalist aesthetics.
In Message to Our Folks, Paul Steinbeck combines musical analysis and historical inquiry to give us the definitive study of the Art Ensemble. In the book, he proposes a new theory of group improvisation that explains how the band members were able to improvise together in so many different styles while also drawing on an extensive repertoire of notated compositions. Steinbeck examines the multimedia dimensions of the Art Ensemble’s performances and the ways in which their distinctive model of social relations kept the group performing together for four decades. Message to Our Folks is a striking and valuable contribution to our understanding of one of the world’s premier musical groups.
Art In Chicago : A History From The Fire To Now by
Now that art is getting its due. Art in Chicago is a magisterial account of the long history of Chicago art, from the rupture of the Great Fire in 1871 to the present, Manierre Dawson, László Moholy-Nagy, and Ivan Albright to Chris Ware, Anne Wilson, and Theaster Gates. The first single-volume history of art and artists in Chicago, the book--in recognition of the complexity of the story it tells--doesn't follow a single continuous trajectory. Rather, it presents an overlapping sequence of interrelated narratives that together tell a full and nuanced, yet wholly accessible history of visual art in the city. From the temptingly blank canvas left by the Fire, we loop back to the 1830s and on up through the 1860s, tracing the beginnings of the city's institutional and professional art world and community. From there, we travel in chronological order through the decades to the present. Familiar developments--such as the founding of the Art Institute, the Armory Show, and the arrival of the Bauhaus--are given a fresh look, while less well-known aspects of the story, like the contributions of African American artists dating back to the 1860s or the long history of activist art, finally get suitable recognition. The six chapters, each written by an expert in the period, brilliantly mix narrative and image, weaving in oral histories from artists and critics reflecting on their work in the city, and setting new movements and key works in historical context. The final chapter, comprised of interviews and conversations with contemporary artists, brings the story up to the present, offering a look at the vibrant art being created in the city now and addressing ongoing debates about what it means to identify as--or resist identifying as--a Chicago artist today. The result is an unprecedentedly inclusive and rich tapestry, one that reveals Chicago art in all its variety and vigor--and one that will surprise and enlighten even the most dedicated fan of the city's artistic heritage.
Painting the Gospel: Black Public Art and Religion in Chicago by
nnovative and lavishly illustrated, Painting the Gospel offers an indispensable contribution to conversations about African American art, theology, politics, and identity in Chicago. Kymberly N. Pinder escorts readers on an eye-opening odyssey to the murals, stained glass, and sculptures dotting the city's African American churches and neighborhoods. Moving from Chicago's oldest black Christ figure to contemporary religious street art, Pinder explores ideas like blackness in public, art for black communities, and the relationship of Afrocentric art to Black Liberation Theology. She also focuses attention on art excluded from scholarship due to racial or religious particularity. Throughout, she reflects on the myriad ways private black identities assert public and political goals through imagery.
Painting the Gospel includes maps and tour itineraries that allow readers to make conceptual, historical, and geographical connections among the works.
Archibald Motley Jr. and Racial Reinvention: the Old Negro in New Negro Art by
An essential African American artist of his era, Archibald Motley Jr. created paintings of black Chicago that aligned him with the revisionist aims of the New Negro Renaissance. Yet Motley's approach to constructing a New Negro--a dignified figure both accomplished and worthy of respect--reflected the challenges faced by African American artists working on the project of racial reinvention and uplift. Phoebe Wolfskill demonstrates how Motley's art embodied the tenuous nature of the Black Renaissance and the wide range of ideas that structured it. Focusing on key works in Motley's oeuvre, Wolfskill reveals the artist's complexity and the variety of influences that informed his work. Motley's paintings suggest that the racist, problematic image of the Old Negro was not a relic of the past but an influence that pervaded the Black Renaissance. Exploring Motley in relation to works by notable black and non-black contemporaries, Wolfskill reinterprets Motley's oeuvre as part of a broad effort to define American cultural identity through race, class, gender, religion, and regional affiliation.
Passionately Human, No Less Divine -Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 by
The Great Migration was the most significant event in black life since emancipation and Reconstruction. Passionately Human, No Less Divine analyzes the various ways black southerners transformed African American religion in Chicago during their Great Migration northward. A work of religious, urban, and social history, it is the first book-length analysis of the new religious practices and traditions in Chicago that were stimulated by migration and urbanization.
The book illustrates how the migration launched a new sacred order among blacks in the city that reflected aspects of both Southern black religion and modern city life. This new sacred order was also largely female as African American women constituted more than 70 percent of the membership in most black Protestant churches.
Ultimately, Wallace Best demonstrates how black southerners imparted a folk religious sensibility to Chicago's black churches. In doing so, they ironically recast conceptions of modern, urban African American religion in terms that signified the rural past. In the same way that working class cultural idioms such as jazz and the blues emerged in the secular arena as a means to represent black modernity, he says, African American religion in Chicago, with its negotiation between the past, the present, rural and urban, revealed African American religion in modern form.
Feeling the Spirit: Faith and Hope in an Evangelical Black Storefront Church by
Amidst a game room, transient hotel, car wash, tire repair shop, and unpaved parking lot, members of First Corinthians Missionary Baptist Church worship in a rickety structure abandoned during Chicago's race riots of the 1960s. Frances Kostarelos, an anthropologist granted unique access to the life and organization of this congregation, ushers readers into its services, seminars, committee meetings, and prayer meetings and into the homes of the individuals who worship there. Her vivid participant-observer portrait sheds light on a remarkably little understood social formation that shapes the lives of millions of inner-city African Americans - the evangelical storefront church. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, Kostarelos illumines the nature, role, and function of religion in this congregation and in the African-American community at large. She analyzes the precepts that unite the church, the life histories of its leading members, and the organizational structure of the ministry. Her study reveals a staggering range of official roles filled by parishioners, enormous blocks of time devoted to church activities, and a set of narratives and practices that effectively challenge degrading stereotypical images of working-class and poor African Americans. Kostarelos squarely contradicts social critics who characterize the storefront church as a capitulation to white economic power structures or as an otherworldly escape from the ghetto. Rather, she portrays the institution as the legacy of a 300-year struggle against oppression and as the embodiment of solidarity among working-class and poverty-stricken African Americans.
African American Preachers and Politics: The Careys of Chicago by
During most of the twentieth century, Archibald J. Carey, Sr. (1868-1931) and Archibald J. Carey, Jr. (1908-1981), father and son, exemplified a blend of ministry and politics that many African American religious leaders pursued. Their sacred and secular concerns merged in efforts to improve the spiritual and material well-being of their congregations. But as political alliances became necessary, both wrestled with moral consequences and varied outcomes. Both were ministers to Chicago's largest African Methodist Episcopal Church congregations- the senior Carey as a bishop, and the junior Carey as a pastor and an attorney.
Bishop Carey associated himself mainly with Chicago mayor William Hale Thompson, a Republican, whom he presented to black voters as an ally. When the mayor appointed Carey to the city's civil service commission, Carey helped in the hiring and promotion of local blacks. But alleged impropriety for selling jobs marred the bishop's tenure. The junior Carey, also a Republican and an alderman, became head of the panel on anti-discrimination in employment for the Eisenhower administration. He aided innumerable black federal employees. Although an influential benefactor of CORE and SCLC, Carey associated with notorious FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and compromised support for Martin Luther King, Jr. Both Careys believed politics offered clergy the best opportunities to empower the black population. Their imperfect alliances and mixed results, however, proved the complexity of combining the realms of spirituality and politics.
Public Religion and Urban Transformation: Faith in the City by
American cities are in the midst of fundamental changes. De-industrialization of large, aging cities has been enormously disruptive for urban communities, which are being increasingly fragmented. Though often overlooked, religious organizations are important actors, both culturally and politically in the restructuring metropolis.
Public Religion and Urban Transformation provides a sweeping view of urban religion in response to these transformations. Drawing on a massive study of over seventy-five congregations in urban neighborhoods, this volume provides the most comprehensive picture available of urban places of worship-from mosques and gurdwaras to churches and synagogues-within one city.
Revisiting the primary site of research for the early members of the Chicago School of urban sociology, the volume focuses on Chicago, which provides an exceptionally clear lens on the ways in which religious organizations both reflect and contribute to changes in American pluralism.
From the churches of a Mexican American neighborhood and of the Black middle class to communities shared by Jews, Christians, Hindus, and Muslims and the rise of "megachurches," Public Religion and Urban Transformation illuminates the complex interactions among religion, urban structure, and social change at this extraordinary episode in the history of urban America.
Black Public History in Chicago: Civil Rights Activism From World War II Into the Cold War by
In civil-rights-era Chicago, a dedicated group of black activists, educators, and organizations employed black public history as more than cultural activism. Their work and vision energized a black public history movement that promoted political progress in the crucial time between World War II and the onset of the Cold War. Ian Rocksborough-Smith's meticulous research and adept storytelling provide the first in-depth look at how these committed individuals leveraged Chicago's black public history. Their goal: to engage with the struggle for racial equality. Rocksborough-Smith shows teachers working to advance curriculum reform in public schools, while well-known activists Margaret and Charles Burroughs pushed for greater recognition of black history by founding the DuSable Museum of African American History. Organizations like the Afro-American Heritage Association, meanwhile, used black public history work to connect radical politics and nationalism. Together, these people and their projects advanced important ideas about race, citizenship, education, and intellectual labor that paralleled the shifting terrain of mid-twentieth century civil rights.
The Pekin The Rise and Fall of Chicago’s First Black-Owned Theater by
In 1904, political operator and gambling boss Robert T. Motts opened the Pekin Theater in Chicago. Dubbed the "Temple of Music," the Pekin became one of the country's most prestigious African American cultural institutions, renowned for its all-black stock company and school for actors, an orchestra able to play ragtime and opera with equal brilliance, and a repertoire of original musical comedies.
A missing chapter in African American theatrical history, Bauman's saga presents how Motts used his entrepreneurial acumen to create a successful black-owned enterprise. Concentrating on institutional history, Bauman explores the Pekin's philosophy of hiring only African American staff, its embrace of multi-racial upper class audiences, and its ready assumption of roles as diverse as community center, social club, and fundraising instrument.
The Pekin's prestige and profitability faltered after Motts' death in 1911 as his heirs lacked his savvy, and African American elites turned away from pure entertainment in favor of spiritual uplift. But, as Bauman shows, the theater had already opened the door to a new dynamic of both intra- and inter-racial theater-going and showed the ways a success, like the Pekin, had a positive economic and social impact on the surrounding community.
Black Theater Is Black Life: An Oral History of Chicago Theater and Dance, 1970-2010 by 
Chicago's South Side, 1946-1948 by The Way of Life of the Northern Negro, Chicago: Wayne Miller photographs of the Black Metropolis during the 1940s at the Mount Holyoke Art Museum.
Chicago's South Side: The everyday lives of the African-American community in Chicago’s South Side captured by Wayne Miller in a historic photoessay.
DOCUMERICA: John H White was hired for DOCUMERICA to capture the spirit and struggle of the African-American community in Chicago, Illinois in the early 1970s.
Black Archives: Renata Cherlise and Danielle A. Scruggs worked as curator and editor to create multimedia narratives centering Black life in Chicago, sourcing from the Chicago Sun-Times archive from 2017-2018.
Ebony Archives: digital archive of Ebony Magazine (1950-2000).
JET Magazine Archives: digital archive of JET Magazines(1950-2005).
Black World/Negro Digest: digital archive of Negro Digest (1960-1970).
Queer Bronzeville: history of African American gays and lesbians on Chicago's South Side.
Center for Black Music Research: independent research unit of Columbia College Chicago devoted to documentation, research, preservation, and dissemination of information about the history and current expressions of Black music on a global scale.
South Side Home Movies Project: five-part initiative to collect, preserve, digitize, exhibit, and research home movies made by residents of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods that builds an alternative, accessible visual record in existing written and visual histories ensuring that the diverse experiences and perspectives of South Siders will be available to larger audiences and future generations.
