Chicago’s hidden Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, widely known at the time as the “flowering of Negro literature,” is the subject of countless books and films and plays.
But Harlem’s explosion of African-American culture often overshadows a vibrant and egalitarian movement that blossomed in Chicago. During the 1930s through the 1950s, Chicago’s South Side produced some of the country’s most iconic African-American literature. The city hosted a thriving African-American salon culture, where artists, writers, teachers, and even factory workers gathered to discuss the works of authors from Ralph Ellison to Voltaire and Gwendolyn Brooks to Plato.
Jacqueline Goldsby, Associate Professor in English Language and Literature, is set to provide a primer on this important moment in the city’s history and American literature. The keynote speaker at the University’s 30th annual Humanities Day, Goldsby will discuss the Chicago Renaissance, and one of its most important literary circles, in her lecture, “A Salon for the Masses: Black Chicago’s Book Review and Lecture Forum, 1933–53,” at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 25 in Mandel Hall.
Mapping the Masters
During the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, Chicago produced an unparalleled explosion of great African-American writing—Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry were just a handful of its stars. A specialist in 19th and early-20th century American and African-American literature, Goldsby had long wondered why scholars had left such a rich moment in American literature—a period that produced some of her favorite works—virtually unexplored.
Scholars had meticulously examined the Harlem Renaissance to the point, she says, “of over study. So it was a conundrum.” Why did we know so much about the Harlem Renaissance, yet so little about this later period, which had produced such important works?
Not long after beginning her research in 2005, Goldsby surmised why. Unlike in Harlem, much of Chicago’s African-American literary history was inaccessible—and not because it was lost. “The paper trail is there,” said Goldsby, “It just isn’t organized or indexed the way Harlem Renaissance archives are known.” Chicago lacked a literary-historical map that scholars could consult to track down, for example, the papers of writers like Margaret Walker or Richard Wright.
In 2005, Goldsby and a team of Chicago PhD students began a project, “Mapping the Stacks,” to locate, organize, and describe these hidden collections. Once Goldsby’s team began sifting through the archives at institutions across the South Side, such as the DuSable Museum of African American History, the Chicago Defender, and the Chicago Public Library’s Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History & Literature, they uncovered a wealth of materials—manuscripts, photographs, and films—that promises to recover this lost generation of writers for future study.
A Community Affair
Scouring the city for the Chicago Renaissance’s literary history has resulted in the topic of Goldsby’s Humanities Day lecture. It is an insight into what she believes differentiates the Chicago Renaissance from Harlem’s more famous movement.
“There was a degree of broad-based community involvement in the literary arts here,” says Goldsby. “Renowned writers such as Wright, Walker, and Brooks often apprenticed themselves in neighborhood-based collectives that nearly always included ‘amateur’ poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, and painters. There was a mixing of ‘highbrow’ literary figures with the working class and ‘middlebrow’ masses in Chicago that didn’t happen as fluidly in New York.”
Goldsby’s Humanities Day lecture will focus on one of the most important manifestations of Chicago’s egalitarian renaissance: The Book Review and Lecture Forum, anchored at the Chicago Public Library’s George Cleveland Hall Branch in the heart of the city’s Bronzeville neighborhood. The series started in 1933 and ran strong for two decades. The gatherings drew black authors—local and national, well-established and emerging—into face-to-face dialogue with Chicago’s black reading public.
“Hundreds turned out to hear Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston read from their latest works and works in progress,” says Goldsby. “Library patrons and local critics led discussions about the ‘great books’ and the ideas of those times.
“Where did this intellectual energy come from? How did the forums shape writers’ sensibilities about their craft, subjects, and relationship to their reading publics? Why did Chicago, as a place, stir these activities to such heights? These questions fascinate me.”
By Josh Schonwald
