In the early to mid-20th-century Chicago, Illinois loomed large in the collective imaginations of African Americans. Unlike the similarly romanticized, predominately black New York City neighborhood of Harlem, Chicago’s African American South Side retained a kind of folk/rural character and racial authenticity as compared to other northern U.S. destinations for southern black migrants. Even when one considers Harlem’s international notoriety – a residual effect of Harlem’s pivotal location in Manhattan – and its black cultural infusions from Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Caribbean, Chicago’s large black population and their familial ties to the deep South and that region’s treasured jazz and blues traditions ineradicably colored that community’s persona and, in conjunction with a marked commercial/industrial profile, an illustrious cohort of black entrepreneurs, and an indispensible working-class, reinforced Chicago’s reputation as the other early 20th-century, African American urban mecca.
Harlem’s cultural efflorescence in the 1920s and 1930s, which thrust into a national spotlight artistic luminaries like Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, and Paul Robeson, had an equivalent in the somewhat synchronic “Chicago Negro Renaissance,” as evidenced in the latter’s creative offerings from Earl Hines, Richard Wright, Archibald Motley, and Katherine Dunham. These two, competing black urban “rebirths” were more accurately examples of a global black modernist, or “New Negro,” movement that, in addition to New York City’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side, emerged in the interwar years in other metropolises (like Havana, Cuba; Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Kingston, Jamaica; and Paris, France) with sizeable black intelligentsias and creative cliques.
And, yet, in the years roughly between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II black Chicago experienced its own cultural flowering: a place and time in which the arts and letters, from Florence Price’s symphonic works to Big Bill Broonzy’s blues recordings, and from William Edouard Scott’s impressionistic canvases to Archibald Motley’s hothouse paintings, contributed to Chicago’s reputation as an African American focalized destination. Like Mount Parnassus in antiquity, Chicago’s South Side, in spite of the economic hardships of its inhabitants, was also the home of poetry, music, and art, expressed in plaintive or remonstrating testimonials, rousing church services, foot-tapping jazz, and images of beautiful and fashionable people. Painting a broad picture of interwar black Chicago, this essay explores how Chicago’s South Side became an African American cultural capital, with special attention to the role that the visual arts and culture more broadly played in this conferral.
“Black Parnassus: Chicago in the Interwar Years,” in Gordon Parks, The New Tide: Early Works 1940-1950, ed. Philip Brookman, Wash., DC: National Gallery of Art, 2018, 259-265.
