The Chicago Black Renaissance (also known as the Black Chicago Renaissance) was a creative movement that blossomed out of the Chicago Black Belt on the city’s South Side and spanned the 1930s and 1940s before a transformation in art and culture took place in the mid-1950s through the turn of the century.
The movement included such famous African-American writers as Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Arna Bontemps, and Lorraine Hansberry, as well as musicians Thomas A. Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines and Mahalia Jackson and artists William Edouard Scott, Elizabeth Catlett, Katherine Dunham, Charles Wilbert White, Margaret Burroughs, Charles C. Dawson, Archibald John Motley, Jr., Walter Sanford, and Eldzier Cortor.
Richard Wright
During the Great Migration, which brought tens of thousands of African-Americans to Chicago’s South Side, African-American writers, artists, and community leaders began promoting racial pride and a new black consciousness, similar to that of the Harlem Renaissance. Unlike the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago Black Renaissance did not receive the same amount of publicity on a national scale. Among the reasons for this are that the Chicago group participants presented no singularly prominent “face”, wealthy patrons were less involved, and New York City—home of Harlem—was the higher profile national publishing center.
The awakening in Chicago was borne out of Bronzeville, a historically Black neighborhood known as the Black Metropolis, where many artists, musicians and writers resided. Similarly, Harlem was home to Black residents with limited housing options who had come from the South during the Great Migration. And there was of course some overlap between both movements, with Harlem-era artists such as Arna Bontemps relocating to Chicago, and acclaimed poet Langston Hughes becoming a columnist at the Chicago Defender after the Harlem Renaissance.
But despite introducing the world to acclaimed artists such as author Richard Wright (best known for his novel Native Son and memoir Black Boy) and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks (the first Black writer to win the Pulitzer), the Chicago Black Renaissance still seems to lag behind the Harlem movement in terms of clout and recognition — even as scholars say the Chicago revival’s impact is undeniable.
Gwendolyn Brooks
“It was impactful in terms of art production,” Erik Gellman, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told The Triibe. “But it was also impactful in terms of creating art for political purposes that connected strongly with social protest movements of the 1930s and 1940s. So it sort of helped create a kind of working-class militant Black counterculture that mattered beyond the art world itself.”
“The Harlem Renaissance is often taught as a group of artists who removed themselves from the larger urban scene to collectively produce all of this work, and their work [was] often the product of collaboration with white entrepreneurs or benefactors,” Gellman said. As a result, they “weren’t that invested in the politics and the currents of what was happening in the larger community.”
The Harlem Renaissance happened in an era “wrapped up in the politics of respectability, sort of striving for the ‘Talented Tenth’ kind of idea,” Gellman said. Chicago was different.
“It was public. It was working class. Anyone could participate,” he said of Chicago’s renaissance. “And it was a very public-facing endeavor that was oriented towards working class people, ordinary people. Rather than saying, ‘we are artists, we need to detach ourselves from the society we’re in,’ [Chicago’s artists] actually engaged with the society they were in and engaged in the kind of radical politics of their day. And that informed their artwork.”
This included artists such as Charles Wright, a Chicago painter whose work featured Black men doing manual labor during a time when Black Chicagoans worked strenuous jobs for low wages in factories and railyards, experiencing economic disparities steeped in racism.
Paintings by Charles Wright
Artists such as poet and painter Margaret Burroughs were exceptional creators and intellectuals, “but they were also very working class people,” Gellman said. “They made art, not to be hung in a gallery or bought by a white patron, but to be shown or [displayed] in the South Side Community Art Center, or to be exhibited at the YMCA. It was art for a different purpose and a different audience.”
The working-class ethos of Chicago’s movement may play a role in how it’s perceived decades later and whether it has a place in today’s classrooms. Back in July 2012, dozens of high school teachers from across the country came to Chicago to participate in a program on the Black Chicago Renaissance, with the intention of learning about the renaissance and incorporating that knowledge into their curriculum, according to Gellman and NPR station WBEZ.
Gellman believes that a high school teacher is likely to find the Harlem Renaissance a “less controversial” topic than the uncompromising, complicated art from Chicago’s era.
“You can teach a Langston Hughes poem about Africa or some of the other great works of the Harlem Renaissance,” he said. “But it won’t raise the same kind of troubling questions that would have come out of the Black Chicago Renaissance, where you’ve got Arna Bontemps writing about slave revolts.”
He added, “Look at the work of Charles White: what’s being depicted there is a revisionist, resistant activist form of African-American history that doesn’t make African Americans passive or victims. It makes them a people in struggle and essential to American history. It’s a very radical idea, even today.”