Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955 / Edition 2

by Adam Green

Overview

In Selling the Race, Adam Green tells the story of how black Chicagoans were at the center of a national movement in the 1940s and ’50s, a time when African Americans across the country first started to see themselves as part of a single culture. Along the way, he offers fascinating reinterpretations of such events as the 1940 American Negro Exposition, the rise of black music and the culture industry that emerged around it, the development of the Associated Negro Press and the founding of Johnson Publishing, and the outcry over the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till.

By presenting African Americans as agents, rather than casualties, of modernity, Green ultimately reenvisions urban existence in a way that will resonate with anyone interested in race, culture, or the life of cities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226306414
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	11/15/2006
Series:	Historical Studies of Urban America
Edition description:	1
Pages:	322
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Adam Green is associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

Read an Excerpt

SELLING THE RACE CULTURE, COMMUNITY, AND BLACK CHICAGO, 1940-1955
By ADAM GREEN
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS Copyright © 2007 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-30641-4



Chapter One IMAGINING THE FUTURE

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience. W. E. B. DUBOIS

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century-especially during the 1910s and 1920s-Chicago was the nation's focal point for African-American congregation. Lodges and fraternal groups such as the Elks and Odd Fellows, small but growing professional associations, expansive religious assemblies like the National Baptist Convention-all routinely came to Chicago for annual meetings and special events. Waves of itinerant artists and intellectuals, proselytizers of spirit and wallet, worldly train porters and mouth-agape masses broke upon the city's concrete shores, channeling an extraordinary human confluence. Terminus more than crossroads, Chicago's illustration of the modern saga of Black mass migration derives significantly from this precedent of destination. Personal journeys, along with the collective restlessness of a sojourning people, were promised an end in the Windy City, hopefully for better, though all too often for worse.

The first chapter of this book considers one noteworthy attempt to harness Black Chicago's role of convention: the American Negro Exposition in 1940, commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of the Civil War and Blacks' official emancipation from slavery. Held at the 18th Street Armory on the near South Side, the exposition sought to inventory the progress made by African Americans since slavery, and therefore buttress claims to full civil status and belonging. That this event-meant to constitute the first Black-organized World's Fair-has been essentially forgotten today indicates that it failed to realize these aims. Yet in its failure lies a revealing story of the logistics and politics of cultural programming in Black Chicago, on the eve of its emergence as a national center of cultural enterprise. In the end, the challenge embodied in the 1940 exposition was not only to represent Chicago as destination for the race, but also as a site of renovation for group imagination and discourse. Falling short of these goals, paradoxically, set the stage for later projects and institutions among African Americans in the Windy City that would better suggest how blacks' legion travels might culminate not only in a common experience of arrival, but also a new and modern sense of collective being, waiting to be broadcast across nation and even world.

With 1940 approaching, Claude Barnett, founder of the Associated Negro Press in Chicago, was not a happy man. "What on earth is the hold-up in the matter of the Afra-American Emancipation Exposition?" he demanded in a letter to James Washington, the local businessman who had first proposed commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of slavery's end in the United States. "We have gone along with your program supporting it and seeking to aid you, but I confess we are beginning to be a bit dubious," Barnett warned, noting that only months remained before the scheduled Fourth of July opening. Though an event commission had been organized, it was unclear to what extent-or whether-it had deliberated. A $75,000 grant from the Illinois legislature remained untouched, casting doubt upon claims of both progress and a plan. Barnett now grew anxious, fearing discredit to more than just Washington: "You are on trial in this matter and so is the whole race ... I suggest that you fight through whatever the barriers are and get some action. Get us some news so that we can keep praising instead of picking flaws." There was no response from Washington, but if there had been one, it failed to allay Barnett's concerns. By February 1940, Washington had been demoted to a figurehead role on the reconstituted board, with Barnett and his associates in Chicago now lining up contacts and funds for the gala, renamed the American Negro Exposition.

The change in leadership promised an event grander than what James Washington initially had in mind. As the Chicago Defender put it, the event would be "the first real Negro World's Fair." Named as executive director was attorney Truman Gibson Jr., who while at University of Chicago had helped research Professor Harold Gosnell's groundbreaking book Negro Politicians, introducing the young law student to the movers and shakers of Windy City politics. His father, Truman Gibson Sr., headed Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company along South Parkway, which meant the exposition was backed by the largest black-owned business in the country. Local notables joined the drive: among those named to governing boards were cosmetics magnate Anthony Overton, attorney and future municipal judge Wendell Green, labor leader Willard Townsend, community leader Irene McCoy Gaines, and city councilman Earl Dickerson. Earlier that year, Dickerson had helped argue the Lee v. Hansberry case before the Supreme Court, beginning the process of nullifying restrictive covenants, a first step in enlisting the federal courts against institutionalized bulwarks of segregation nationally.

Others went to work producing materials and promoting the event. Arna Bontemps, head of the Negro Division of the Illinois Writers Program (under the Works Project Administration) and Harlem Renaissance alumnus, was tapped to coordinate exhibit planning and construction. Together with Erik Lindgren, another WPA supervisor, Bontemps drew from a pool of IWP talent: Horace Cayton, Joseph Evans, Margaret Taylor Goss, Charles Dawson, and Katherine Dunham all worked researching themes and designing exhibits. As head of the Associated Negro Press, Barnett was well positioned to plan publicity, a task he delegated to his editor Frank Marshall Davis, known both for journalism and poetry in the urban realist style. Other local journalists, notably Lucius Harper, columnist and former editor for the Defender, joined the effort to excite popular interest in the exposition.

Given its scope, the drive shortly taxed the resources of local blacks: support was needed from beyond the boundaries of race community. Prominent Chicago whites, for whom politics of color had been a point of tension since the horrific Race Riot of 1919, assisted at several junctures. The $75,000 legislative grant signaled the state government's interest: seeking to insure proper use of the appropriation, Governor Henry Horner tapped Robert Bishop to represent the state on the exposition board. Aware that sponsorship might translate into votes, city politicians from alderman and school board members up to Mayor Edward Kelly lined up behind the project. Financial help came from the Rosenwald Fund, the local philanthropic organization administered by well-known negrophile Edwin Embree. Known for its stake in school construction throughout the black South, spread of the YMCA system in black urban enclaves, and increasing fellowship support of black artists and scholars during the Depression, the Rosenwald Fund underwrote education and health exhibits at the exposition, to a total of $15,000.

Help from more distant sources proved decisive in putting the exposition on track. Though blacks were emerging as a political constituency of note-especially in urban centers like Chicago-federal leaders remained averse to acknowledging blacks' special needs. Inattention to racial equity had proven an Achilles' heel for the early New Deal, due to the distorted leverage white southern congressmen and appointees enjoyed during the Roosevelt era, as well as doctrinaire administration liberals who perversely frowned upon race conscious policy as smacking of favoritism. Thus, Claude Barnett could have been forgiven dim hopes while traveling in late February to Washington, D.C., in search of support. A meeting with agriculture secretary Henry Wallace-personally progressive, yet to date grievously neglectful of black sharecroppers and farmers-surprisingly saw Barnett's expectations not only met but exceeded. Wallace committed all branches of agriculture to exhibit in Chicago at a cost of $40,000; suggested contacts in other departments and agencies, including Labor, Commerce, Social Security, and the alphabet agencies of the New Deal; and laid the groundwork for a matching federal grant of $75,000 to exposition organizers.

A flurry of contacts built on this beachhead, including several directed toward black advisors embedded within various government departments in Washington: Mary McLeod Bethune and Robert Weaver at the most visible levels of the Black Cabinet, as well as lesser figures like William Trent and Emmer Lancaster, advisors on Negro Affairs at the Federal Works Agency and the Department of Commerce respectively. Through their efforts, multiple branches of the government signed onto the exposition, helping insure that as a program, it would be national in scope. It now constituted the most ambitious cultural partnership between blacks and the federal government to date: an experiment with relations of race and state that in the best moments since emancipation had been characterized by patronizing clientage and in the worst by withering contempt.

Thus, the exposition effort gained momentum through the spring of 1940, offering promise not only of an intriguing curiosity, but a watershed in public perception of blacks as a group. Communication with Jackson Davis of the Southern Education Board, Gunnar Myrdal's guide across the South during his early research on U.S. race relations, resulted in a $25,000 grant to the American Film Center for a film on southern black education-the most elaborate documentary on black life to date. Letters to Grove Edwards at the Civil Aeronautics Authority and Willa Brown, the well-known pilot whose Coffey School in Chicago was an epicenter for the flight training craze captivating black America at the time, led to plans for a black aviation exhibit. E. Simms Campbell, alumnus of Englewood High School and now a featured artist at Esquire magazine, agreed to show a selection of his acclaimed cartoons. Albion Holsey of Tuskegee Institute and the National Negro Business League solicited black businesses across the country to rent booths, while Dorothy Porter, supervisor of the Moorland Collection at Howard University, proposed an exhibit of books by prominent black authors.

Anchoring the developing effort was Barnett. Nominally coordinator of government and arts exhibits, Barnett was the driving force in most aspects of the exposition project. His own start had come during the Golden Freedom Jubilee held in Chicago twenty-five years earlier, when as a young Tuskegee graduate he established a mail-order portrait service of "prominent Negroes through history and in contemporary life." Now, having parlayed his experiment into a global wire service counting nearly one hundred black newspapers as subscribers, Barnett was among the best connected African Americans in the country, making him the logical point person to oversee programming. Woodbridge E. Morris, director of the Birth Control Federation of America, enthusiastically replied to Barnett's invitation, promising cooperation "to the fullest extent possible." If Barnett held doubts concerning endorsement of contraception in the heavily Catholic city of Chicago, his subsequent letter reiterating interest gave no indication. Barnett showed nimble feet again in the matter of the federal appropriations bill, whose main sponsor was Arthur Mitchell, the vainglorious black congressman from Chicago. Reassuring the prickly Mitchell that plans were proceeding smoothly, he kept the bill on a slow but steady path to passage in mid-May. Barnett wrote officials in the Virgin Islands, Liberia, and Haiti inviting exhibits representing their countries and territories, and sent letters to African missions in nine different colonies, asking for documentation of "life and progress in Africa," with emphasis on indigenous newspapers and magazines. Closer to home, Barnett pressed William Nickerson Jr., founder of Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, to continue efforts to revive the exhibit from Los Angeles, despite Nickerson's fears that the project might prove "a complete flop."

Securing another community's involvement posed a thornier challenge. All efforts at depicting black life in 1940, of course, had eventually to reckon with the outsized place of New York City and, in particular, Harlem. Barnett acknowledged as much in his deferential letter of invitation to Mayor La Guardia requesting a representative exhibit ("Harlem ranks as the greatest Negro city in the world," he wrote). Most leading lights of African-American culture and intellect viewed Harlem as their spiritual home, and though the reputation of the Renaissance nearly a decade after its puzzling end was not what it would become, there was still a catchy ring to the notion that black life in Gotham sounded the key for race existence throughout the country, if not the world. Chicago blacks, by contrast, rarely found their own lives spoken of in such terms, despite the political clout, extensive business enterprise, and advanced social organization of Bronzeville. In late spring organizers took stock of their more promising attractions: Augusta Savage's sculptures, previewed to an enthusiastic audience in early May; Aaron Douglas's panels inspired by James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones, set to show in the Temple of Religion; Langston Hughes's and Richard Wright's appearances, scheduled for key dates during the exposition. It would have been hard to resist the conclusion that, whatever its location, the exposition would further burnish New York and Harlem's claim as race capital.

Yet that the exposition was set for Chicago and not New York marked a crucial, if not immediately apparent, shift in the balance of cultural power in black America. Assessment of the Harlem Renaissance-in its own time and since-has noted its inability to generate native structures of production, distribution, and support to sustain its artistic progeny. When white patrons, wavering by the late 1920s, took flight with the Depression, ingénues like Bontemps, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston soon found themselves cast to the winds. Chicago, to be sure, had its own conventions of white philanthropy and cross-racial validation. But these arrangements were not as self-important as they had been in Jazz Age New York, nor did they supersede the dense web of black commercial, civic, and media institutions offering a nascent base for creative work and group imagination locally. Indeed, an alternate reading of the relationship between New York and Chicago, in light of the exposition effort, might emphasize the gravitational pull of Chicago on blacks across the country, including Harlem, as the 1940s began. Figures like Bontemps and Hughes were in many ways Renaissance refugees, drawn by chance or design to Chicago to connect with a broad black public audience that, despite all efforts, had thus far eluded them.

Nowhere was this new calculus more evident than in plans for the arts exhibit, rapidly becoming the centerpiece for the exposition. Visual arts was a latecomer among the imaginative genres for blacks: despite talents like Douglas, Savage, and Richmond Barthe, painters, printmakers, and sculptors rarely received the acclaim-or funding-that drama, music, and literature had in the high days of the Harlem Renaissance. Ironically, the Depression had seen improved prospects for black visual artists-due, to be sure, not to improved market conditions, but rather the emergence of new lines of support, none more important than the Harmon Foundation in New York. Since 1928, Harmon had subsidized black achievement in the arts: by the Depression years, their traveling show (reaching fifty cities and 150,000 people in 1931) signaled that black artists were being sponsored and promoted to an unprecedented degree.

Once Claude Barnett opened communication with Mary Beattie Brady, the prim, efficient director at Harmon, through an exchange of letters exploring an art show for the exposition, he accessed the foundation's weighty reputation, further validating the event's credentials. Yet this undertaking would test Harmon's capabilities, along with those of Barnett and other organizers. The proposed exhibit would be twice the size of any prior showing of African-American art. Certainly there were risks, as Brady reminded Barnett in discussing the intricacies of selecting, transporting and storing works. But there were as well the benefits of staging a blockbuster show to authorize black painters and sculptors, as race writers had been a decade earlier. Too, there were the possibilities of strengthening links between black artists based in the East, the South, and the remaining parts of the country-including Chicago, where established figures like Archibald Motley Jr., William Edouard Scott, and Charles Dawson anchored a cohort of rising talents. As planning progressed through the spring, both Barnett and Brady realized that Chicago's freedom fete offered a unique opportunity to place black visual arts on the nation's cultural map.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from SELLING THE RACE by ADAM GREEN Copyright © 2007 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: In Search of African-American Modernity

1 Imagining the Future

2 Making the Music

3 The Ends of Clientage

4 Selling the Race

5 A Moment of Simultaneity

Conclusion: An African-American Dilemma      

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

"From slavery's origins in 1619 Virginia to the current crises of family disorganization, poverty, and violence, African Americans all too often appear as victims of U.S. society. Taking a different approach, Green (NYU) emphasizes the vibrant, positive cultural life of black Chicago in the years immediately preceding the rise of Martin Luther King Jr. and the nationally recognized Civil Rights Movement. . . . Recommended."

Choice

"Selling the Race is a terrific book, one that should have a long historiographical influence. . . . All social scientists and humanists will find Green's book worthy of a serious and close reading."—Andrew E. Kersten, H-Net Review

— Andrew E. Kersten

H-Net Review

"Much like the race sellers and buyers in his book, Green imagines a much wider horizon of innovative ideas that shaped a national race culture."—Erik S. Gellman, Journal of Illinois History

— Erik S. Gellman

Journal of Illinois History

"An important additon to African American urban and business history."

— Robert E. Weems Jr.

Business History Review

"Green communicates forcefully the problems and possibilities posed by an era of tremendous social and political change and potent forces of resistance to those changes. This technique reflects Green's broader effort to situate African Americans at the centre rather than at the margins of modernity, and, likewise, as agents in its manifestation rather than victims."—Rachel Roseman, Economic History Review

— Rachel Roseman

Economic History Review

"The writing is crisp, the topics were chosen with great thought, the research is thorough, and the arguments are logical. This is a marvelous book, a must-read for everyone interested in the history of Chicago, as well as mid-century African American history."

— Perry R. Duis

Michigan Historical Review

"An intellectually rigorous, original work of scholarship that produces two important advances in African American studies. First, the book offers a thick description of mid-century Chicago-based African American cultural produciton. . . . Second, the book posits African American modernity as an emergent process of equivalence between city, or community, and nation."

Bill V. Mullenn Historical Review

"Much like the race sellers and buyers in his book, Green imagines a much wider horizon of innovative ideas that shaped a national race culture."

Journal of Illinois History - Erik S. Gellman

"Green communicates forcefully the problems and possibilities posed by an era of tremendous social and poliitical change and potent forces of resistance to those changes. This technique reflects Green's broader effort to situate African Americans at the centre rather than at the margins of modernity, and, likewise, as agents in its manifestation rather than victims."

Economic History Review - Rachel Roseman

"An important additon to African American urban and business history."

Business History Review - Robert E. Weems Jr.

"Selling the Race is a terrific book, one that should have a long historiographical influence. . . . All social scientists and humanists will find Green's book worthy of a serious and close reading."

H-Net Review - Andrew E. Kersten

"The writing is crisp, the topics were chosen with great thought, the research is thorough, and the arguments are logical. This is a marvelous book, a must-read for everyone interested in the history of Chicago, as well as mid-century African American history."

Michigan Historical Review - Perry R. Duis

Selling the Race is the most important study of 1940s black Chicago to appear in sixty years. It will change ways of thinking and writing about black urban history.”James Gregory, author of The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America

James Gregory

Brilliant. By looking at cultural work and the reconstitution of community in wartime and postwar black Chicago, Adam Green provides a window into the emergence of modern black urban life. Whether he’s exploring the fusion of sacred and secular blues or the writings of Chicago-school sociologists, Green beautifully demonstrates how the ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ of the period offered lessons for living, utopian dreams, a route to self-transformation, a means of survival, momentary challenges to white supremacy even as they sometimes reinforced black subordination, and the basis for a black economy.”Robin Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Robin Kelley

As an alternative to what he sees as the ‘hard empiricism’ in humanistic and social science research, Green emphasizes ‘the city as a site of creativity, rather than constraint.’ In doing so, he makes a series of significant contributions to knowledge that will influence broad interdisciplinary audiences in African American studies, urban and labor studies, public history, and museum studies. Rich and convincing, Selling the Race will also appeal to a wide range of scholars interested  in cultural policy and decision making.”Joe William Trotter, Jr., Mellon Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University and author of The African American Experience

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Joe William Trotter Jr.

"An intellectually rigorous, original work of scholarship that produces two important advances in African American studies. First, the book offers a thick description of mid-century Chicago-based African American cultural produciton. . . . Second, the book posits African American modernity as an emergent process of equivalence between city, or community, and nation."

American Historical Review - Bill V. Mullen

An intellectually rigorous, original work of scholarship that produces two important advances in African American studies. First, the book offers a thick description of mid-century Chicago-based African American cultural produciton. . . . Second, the book posits African American modernity as an emergent process of equivalence between city, or community, and nation.

— Bill V. Mullen

American Historical Review