SOURCE: Bone, Robert. “Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance.” Callaloo 9, no. 3 (summer 1986): 446-68.

[In the following essay, Bone provides an introduction to the Chicago School of writers, focusing on the connections between the literary doctrines followed by authors such as Richard Wright and Arna Bontemps on the one hand, and the theories developed by the University of Chicago School of Sociology on the other.]

One of the last visits I had with [Robert] Park was a few years ago when he had dinner in my apartment in Chicago. After dinner Richard Wright was to come by, as Park had expressed an interest in meeting him. … [Park] was old by that time, way up in the 70's, and it was difficult for him to get around. When Wright walked into the room Park began a painful struggle to get out of his chair. Wright impulsively asked him not to rise, and I, too, went over to protest. He muttered between pants, “I want to get up; help me Cayton.” After Park had struggled to his feet he extended his hand to Wright and said, “I want to shake hands with a great writer. I don't agree with much that you write but it's honest and great writing.”

—Horace Cayton

Arna Bontemps arrived in Chicago in the fall of 1935. After spending seven years in New York, during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, he had joined the ranks of the jobless, and like so many of his black contemporaries, scurried to the nearest brier patch for cover. His first refuge was a temporary teaching job in Alabama; then the parental roof in southern California. Now the worst was over, and graduate school seemed feasible. The University of Chicago was said to have a good program in library science. He decided to enroll. Working part-time to support a growing family, and writing fiction as opportunity allowed, he completed his master's degree in 1943.

The literary atmosphere of those Chicago days was highly charged. Not long after Bontemps's arrival he met Richard Wright, who was working on the Illinois Writers' Project, publishing his first poems, experimenting with the short story form, and organizing writers with left-wing leanings into what might broadly be described as the cultural anteroom of the Communist Party. Wright introduced him to a group of Negro writers who, if not Marxists, were at least proponents of the new realism, and champions of a socially committed art. Bontemps remembers with affection “… the heartiness of a writing clan that adopted me and boosted my courage. …”¹

The South Side Writers' Group consisted of some twenty aspiring authors, all black, and all in the initial stage of their careers. They met weekly at the Lincoln Center on Oakwood Boulevard to read aloud their work-in-progress, discuss each effort as a work of art, and explore its broader implications for a theory of Negro writing. Richard Wright was their guiding spirit, while among their members were the poet, Frank Marshall Davis, who worked for the Associated Negro Press; the playwright, Theodore Ward, employed on the Federal Theatre Project; and Margaret Walker, a recent graduate of Northwestern who had just become Wright's colleague on the Illinois Writers' Project. Through these associations Bontemps was introduced to the larger world of the WPA.

The Illinois Writers' Project was one of the most effective units in the nation. Under the directorship of John T. Frederick, an English professor at Northwestern, editorial standards were high, and much good writing was accomplished on and off the job. The local guidebooks, prepared for publication in the American Guide Series, were of superior quality, and Frederick, who was a strong proponent of regional writing, used these materials to encourage specificity of style. “Frederick had a sure instinct,” writes Jerre Mangione, “for spotting talented young writers who could benefit from working for the Project. Once they joined it, he did everything in his power to encourage their literary aspirations.”²

Bontemps had informal contacts with the Illinois Writers' Project as early as 1936; he was hired in a supervisory capacity in December 1939. During his tenure of about two years he was occupied primarily with the production of a local history called The Negro in Illinois. Gregarious by nature, he took full advantage of the new milieu to broaden his acquaintances. Among the black writers employed on the Project, in addition to Richard Wright and Margaret Walker, were Katherine Dunham, known chiefly as a dancer and choreographer, but also an aspiring writer; Willard Motley, a novelist who made his mark with Knock on Any Door; and Frank Yerby, who tried his hand at short fiction before turning to historical romance.

Among Bontemps' white colleagues on the Illinois Writers' Project were Nelson Algren, Jack Conroy, Studs Terkel, and a promising young novelist named Saul Bellow. Conroy, who hailed from Ozark country, became a close friend and professional associate. Author of The Disinherited, one of the few enduring proletarian novels of the 1930s, he was founder and editor of three left-wing literary journals: Rebel Poet, Anvil, and (with Nelson Algren) New Anvil. In the early 1940s he collaborated with Bontemps on three juveniles, and a popular history of Negro migration in the United States entitled They Seek a City.

Bontemps left Chicago in 1943 to become Head Librarian at Fisk. Having spent some seven years in Harlem and as many in Chicago, he was uniquely positioned to compare the two focal points of Negro self-expression. A participant in both movements, and a living link between two generations of black writers, how did he conceive of their relationship? In an important but neglected essay Bontemps writes: “Chicago was definitely the center of the second phase of Negro literary awakening. … Harlem got its renaissance in the middle 'twenties, centering around the Opportunity contests and the Fifth Avenue Awards Dinners. Ten years later Chicago reenacted it on WPA without finger bowls but with increased power.”³

Bontemps seems to place the two movements on an equal footing. If that should be the case, why does literary history record in great detail the story of the Harlem Renaissance while virtually ignoring its Chicago counterpart? The answer, I believe, lies in a false periodization. If we think like census-takers, dividing literary history into decades (twenties, thirties, forties, etc.), the very existence of a Chicago movement tends to be obscured. If we think in terms of literary generations, however, we may speak of the ascendancy of a “Harlem School” from 1920 to 1935, and a “Chicago School” from 1935 to 1950. Then something like Bontemps's concept of equal billing will emerge.

“Renaissance” is perhaps a pretentious word to describe the output of a literary generation. But if we wish to retain the usage “Harlem Renaissance,” then we must accept the notion of a “Chicago Renaissance” as well. For the flowering of Negro letters that took place in Chicago from approximately 1935 to 1950 was in all respects comparable to the more familiar Harlem Renaissance. Let us put this hypothesis to the test. If there was a Chicago School of Afro-American writing, what books and authors constituted it? If there was a Chicago Renaissance, what was its scope and quality?

The towering figure was of course Richard Wright. His apprentice novel, Lawd Today, written about 1935 but published in 1963, drew on his frustrations as a mail-sorter in the Chicago post office. His second novel, Native Son (1940), based on his experience in the South Side ghetto, changed the course of Negro writing in America. Eight more novels emanated from Chicago during this period, but only three are of enduring worth.⁴Black Thunder (1936), by Arna Bontemps, is a lively rendering of a slave revolt. Blood on the Forge (1941), by William Attaway, is an outstanding treatment of the Great Migration. And Willard Motley's Knock on Any Door (1947) is a naturalistic novel of considerable power.

Not the least accomplished writers of the Chicago School were its poets. Richard Wright made his literary début as a proletarian poet. Frank Marshall Davis, a neglected figure, was the author of four collections: Black Man's Verse (1935) I Am the American Negro (1937), Through Sepia Eyes (1938), and 47th Street Poems (1948). Margaret Walker launched her career in the august pages of Poetry magazine, where she appeared three times in the late 1930s. Her first collection, For My People, won the Yale Younger Poets' Award of 1942. Gwendolyn Brooks conferred a special distinction on Chicago. Her first book of verse, A Street in Bronzeville, appeared in 1945, followed by the Pulitzer Prize volume, Annie Allen, in 1949.

Drama and short fiction were slenderly but ably represented in the work of the Chicago School. In 1938, Theodore Ward's play, Big White Fog, was produced by the Chicago unit of the Federal Theatre Project, and Richard Wright's first collection of stories, Uncle Tom's Children, was published by Harper and Brothers. Both works were concerned with the evolution of blacks from a pre-revolutionary to a Marxist consciousness. The five novellas that comprise Wright's collection were written in Chicago. While their setting is rural Mississippi, these tales were inspired by the lives of Negro Communists whom Wright encountered in his South Side party cell.

No account of the Chicago School would be complete without taking note of its sociological and quasi-sociological writings. Here the key figure is Horace Cayton, co-author (with George S. Mitchell) of Black Workers and the New Unions (1935), and (with St. Clair Drake) of Black Metropolis (1945), with its brilliant introduction by Richard Wright. Under Cayton's tutelage, Wright produced Twelve Million Black Voices (1941), a documentary study of the Negro migration to Chicago, and a pivotal work in the Wright canon. Four years later, Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy published They Seek a City (1945), also dealing with the migratory theme, and based on documents assembled by the Illinois Writers' Project.

Like their predecessors of the Harlem Renaissance, authors of the Chicago School essayed the backward glance, attempting to define the meaning of their lives through memoirs and autobiographies. Available to date are Richard Wright's Black Boy (1945) and its sequel, American Hunger (1977),⁵ Katherine Dunham's A Touch of Innocence (1959), Horace Cayton's Long Old Road (1970), and Gwendolyn Brooks's Report from Part I (1972). Chicago plays a vital role in all these works, for it was there, in that “great iron city,” as Wright has called it, that the mature self was molded, as in a drop-forge, and the consciousness annealed, as perhaps only a Chicagoan can understand.

Thus far we have maintained a strict sense of place, in order to establish the existence of a “Chicago School.” Now we must accommodate a broader perspective. Not all of the important writing by black Americans from 1935 to 1950 emanated from Chicago, any more than all writing of the Harlem Renaissance had its origin in Harlem. Authors like Ralph Ellison, Robert Hayden, Chester Himes, and Ann Petry, while Wright's contemporaries, were not a part of the Chicago scene. But all-inclusiveness is not essential to the argument. It is only necessary to demonstrate that Chicago, for a certain literary generation, was the center, while other cities constituted the periphery.

A particular conundrum arises in the case of Richard Wright, who moved from center to periphery in mid-career. How can a writer who left Chicago for New York in 1937 be regarded as the central figure in a “Chicago School” whose dates are 1935-1950? A partial answer lies in the fact that Wright returned to Chicago for extended periods to visit family and friends, and to do research for books and articles.⁶ And again in the fact that his presence in New York represented an outpost of Chicago values. Ralph Ellison, for instance, never lived in Chicago, but Chicago lived in him, through the person and the work of Richard Wright. The complexities of Wright's career, however, cannot be gainsaid. The problem is to devise a conceptual model and a nomenclature adequate to these complexities.

The Chicago Renaissance, as we shall employ the term, has both regional and generational axes. If we wish to stress the former, we shall speak of a “Chicago School”; if the latter, of a “Wright generation.” The point in space/time where the axes intersect is the career of Richard Wright. Shaped in Chicago, where he spent his young manhood, Wright's artistic imagination clung to its shaping-place long after he moved to New York. Yet his vision of the world, radiating outward through his personal charisma, no less than the impact of his work, became a part of the Zeitgeist, and profoundly influenced a whole generation of black writers.

Conceptual difficulties aside, the main historical question remains. A remarkable efflorescence occurred in Chicago from 1935 to 1950. What were the causes of this flowering? Why did it take place in the midwestern, rather than the eastern metropolis? What historical and cultural forces converged in Chicago during the Depression years capable of sustaining what Arna Bontemps calls “the second phase of Negro literary awakening?”

THE MIGRANTS

Richard Wright arrived in the windy city on a chill December morning in 1927. To a youth of nineteen, born and bred in the Deep South, and raised in the Seventh Day Adventist faith, the city called up images of hell:

My first glimpse of the flat black stretches of Chicago depressed and dismayed me, mocked all my fantasies. Chicago seemed an unreal city whose mythical houses were built of slabs of black coal wreathed in palls of gray smoke, houses whose foundations were sinking slowly into the dank prairie. Flashes of steam showed intermittently on the wide horizon, gleaming translucently in the winter sun. The din of the city entered my consciousness, entered to remain for years to come.⁷

Anxiety was the young migrant's strongest emotion: “What would happen to me here? Would I survive? My expectations were modest. I wanted only a job.” He had fled from the oppressive weight of the white South, which was crushing his spirit and threatening his physical existence as well. Violence, intimidation, daily humiliation, and spiritual claustrophobia were momentarily behind him, while ahead lay hand-to-hand combat with the Unknown, whose outcome would remain in doubt for several years.

In the event, Wright's initial fears were fully justified. Employed at first as a delivery boy, then a dishwasher, he qualified (after some difficulty with being underweight) as a postal clerk, lost that job to the Depression, and found himself unemployed. A distant cousin offered him a chance to sell insurance policies for a Negro burial society. When the Depression deepened, and he could no longer sell insurance to hungry Negroes, he was forced to seek relief on the public dole: “As I walked toward the Cook County Bureau of Public Welfare to plead for bread, I knew that I had come to the end of something.”⁸

While on relief, Wright worked as the lowest of the low: street-cleaner, ditch-digger, hospital orderly. Meanwhile his living arrangements steadily deteriorated. His mother, brother, and aunt, for whose support he was partially responsible, shared with him a series of crowded kitchenette apartments, of the sort he would describe in Twelve Million Black Voices. The emotional atmosphere in these cramped quarters was filled with bickering and ugliness. But even this was better than the slum conditions to which they were soon reduced. When Communist soap-boxers in nearby Washington Park addressed their appeals to the wretched of the earth, they struck a responsive chord. Deliverance from the urban hell seemed at hand.

Wright survived the terrors of the city through a combination of revolutionary politics and an increasingly successful art. Recruited by a fellow postal clerk, he joined the John Reed Club in the autumn of 1933, and the Communist party not long after. He published proletarian verse in the Club's magazine, Left Front, and the Party's cultural journal, New Masses. Appointment to the Illinois Writers' Project in 1935 provided the security and leisure to develop his skill in short fiction. By the time he left Chicago for New York in 1937, he had written most of the novellas published in Uncle Tom's Children, and was well on his way to national recognition.

The working title of American Hunger, in which Wright recounts his early Chicago days, was “The Horror and the Glory.” Clearly he found a mythic quality in his personal experience. For after all, he was born of the peasant masses, the son of a Mississippi sharecropper. In his painful adjustment to the urban scene he differed from tens of thousands only in his mode of transcendence and his gift of eloquence. But the cycle of adjustment was the same: the uprooting from the rural South, the initial destabilization and culture shock, the defeats and casualties, and ultimate accommodation. This was the essential folk experience that Wright shared.

In his introduction to Black Metropolis, Wright attempts to link the personal and historical dimensions of his life:

I, in common with the authors, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, feel personally identified with the material in this book. … All three of us migrated to Chicago to seek freedom, life. … Drake came from the South; Cayton from the Northwest; and I went to Chicago as a migrant from Mississippi. And there in that great iron city, that impersonal, mechanical city, amid the steam, the smoke, the snowy winds, the blistering suns; there in that self-conscious city, that city so deadly dramatic and stimulating, we caught whispers of the meanings that life could have. …⁹

Chicago was a city of migrants from the outset. By 1850, over half of its inhabitants were foreign-born. By 1890, Chicago was a city of a million people, three-quarters of whom were either foreign-born or second-generation. Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians predominated, but Poles and Jews, Italians and Russians, Hungarians and Greeks were present in substantial numbers by 1910. With the outbreak of World War I, the stream of European immigration dried up. Yet the city's manpower needs were greater than ever, as industry expanded to meet the requirements of the war. To fill this gap, between 1916 and 1920 some 50,000 Negros poured into Chicago from the Deep South.

The mass migration of southern blacks up the Mississippi Valley to the city of Chicago took place in successive waves. The first, set in motion during World War I, expanded a small ethnic enclave to a substantial black belt. The second, flooding north between the wars, transformed this black belt into a black metropolis. Second only to Harlem in population, the South Side ghetto—or Bronzeville, as it came affectionately to be called—constituted by the year 1930 one of the world's largest concentrations of black people. As such, it formed the demographic base of the literary movement with which we are primarily concerned.

Successive generations of southern migrants passed through much the same ordeal: the transformation of a peasant folk into an industrial proletariat. Their emotional responses, however, differed according to their particular historical circumstances. The crucial event, for example, in the lives of the World War I generation was the bloody riot that began on a Chicago beach in the summer of 1919. Five days of violence left thirty-eight dead, five-hundred injured, a quarter of a million dollars in property damage, and a thousand people homeless. This trauma of rejection by their white neighbors fostered in the black community a separatist mood whose organizational expression was the Garvey movement.

The generation of which Richard Wright was a part suffered the trauma of the Great Depression. Economic catastrophe on such a scale promoted solidarity among its victims. Evictions were taking place across the city irrespective of race, creed, or national origin. If a black man joined a bread line or a picket line, whites were there as well. Black people came to see their plight less exclusively as racial; more and more as a dichotomy of rich and poor. As for whites, Wright sums up the leveling tendencies of the Depression years: “I now detected a change in the attitudes of the whites I met; their privations were making them regard Negroes with new eyes, and for the first time I was invited to their homes.”¹⁰

As conditions worsened, blacks and whites joined together in the quest for remedies. Drake and Cayton have described this political collaboration:

Organizations of the unemployed, under Socialist and Communist leadership, drew large masses of Negroes into various forms of disciplined petition and protest—against relief cuts, for social security; against discrimination, for housing projects. After 1935, those Negroes who remained in the mass production industries were caught up in the sweeping organizational campaigns of the CIO.¹¹

Politics, in short, became a mode of adjustment to the urban scene. Arriving in Chicago on the eve of the Depression, black migrants found themselves engulfed by economic chaos, social turbulence, and psychological demoralization. Literally on the verge of starvation, they were forced to resist the impulse toward ethnic isolation and to confront the larger issues of urban life. At this moment of crisis, an opening to the left unexpectedly appeared in the form of the New Deal and the CIO. What ensued was an act of transcendence at the folk level, not so different, as a means of coping with a strange environment, from the revolutionary politics of Richard Wright.

Such was the political climate in 1935, as the writers of the Chicago School launched their careers. The folk experience supplied them with a subject-matter and a point of view. They wrote repeatedly of the Great Migration, and of the transformation that it wrought in the black community. They wrote of the pathology that was too often the price of adjustment to the urban scene. And they celebrated the common folk of Bronzeville as they accommodated to the conditions of urban life. Their basic outlook, reflecting the recent history of the black community, was integrationist. This orientation was reinforced by their contacts with the Chicago School of Sociology, which offered them a sophisticated theory of urbanization.

THE SOCIOLOGISTS

Horace Cayton came to Chicago from Seattle in 1931. A member of the Negro elite, his maternal grandfather was Hiram Revels, United States Senator from Mississippi during Reconstruction. His father was the editor and a publisher of a modest weekly called the Seattle Republican. Reared in a tradition of success and achievement, Cayton rebelled during his high-school years, shipping out on the Alaska run. Eventually making his peace with respectability, he put himself through the University of Washington by working as a deputy sheriff. His mentor in the Department of Sociology, R. D. McKenzie, was a former student of Robert Park. On McKenzie's recommendation, Park arranged a fellowship for graduate study at Chicago.

The University to which Cayton came was founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1890. Initially conceived as a Baptist institution, Chicago took a special pride in its Divinity School, which soon became a center of liberal theology and the Social Gospel. The service ideal was stressed by Chicago's first president, William Rainey Harper, who was himself a Baptist minister. The University founded a settlement house near the stockyards in 1893, maintained close ties with Jane Addams's Hull House, and in the early days did not draw a sharp distinction between the discipline of sociology and the profession of social work. The ameliorative impulse, rooted in Christian conscience, remained strong, and in secularized form continued to suffuse the famous Division of the Social Sciences.

By the beginning of World War I, the Department of Sociology had established the national hegemony it would enjoy for several decades. The American Journal of Sociology was edited at Chicago, and a distinguished series of monographs published by the University Press. Research grants were available from such sources as the Laura Spelman Rockefeller and Julius Rosenwald Funds. The city of Chicago, moreover, was an ideal arena for field work. Among the departmental luminaries in Cayton's day were Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Louis Wirth. Its graduates included a distinguished roster of Negro sociologists, among them Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Allison Davis, and Bertram Doyle.

During his first year of graduate studies, Cayton served as research assistant to Dr. Harold Gosnell, then completing his book, Negro Politicians. Following a summer of teaching at Tuskegee, he returned as research assistant to Dr. Louis Wirth. One day a young black man, unemployed and on relief, appeared at Wirth's office. He had been sent for a job interview by Mrs. Mary Wirth, a social worker assigned to the youth's family. Cayton invited him in and showed him the research files on Chicago. The young man, whose name was Richard Wright, “… never forgot the enormous collection of facts and figures we had assembled or the methodical manner in which we had organized, classified, and catalogued them.”¹²

In the fall of 1932, Cayton had an unexpected visit from Charles S. Johnson. A former student of Robert Park, now chairman of Sociology at Fisk, and later to become Fisk's first Negro president, Johnson had good political connections. Over lunch, he offered Cayton a job as Special Assistant to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, to study the effects of New Deal legislation on Negro labor. Jumping at the chance, Cayton left for New York where he met his future collaborator, George S. Mitchell, a professor of economics at Columbia. Traveling around the country for a year, he observed the role of the Negro in the organizing drives of the CIO. In 1935 Cayton and Mitchell published their pioneering study, Black Workers and the New Unions.

After a year in Europe and another teaching at Fisk, Cayton returned to his graduate studies at Chicago. In conjunction with W. Lloyd Warner, who taught in both the sociology and anthropology departments, he formulated plans for a large-scale research project on the Negro community, to be underwritten by WPA funds. When it materialized, the project lasted four years, employing twenty research students and a supporting staff of 150 WPA workers. Shortly after its inception, St. Clair Drake came to the University from Natchez, Mississippi, where he had been working with Allison Davis on a study of the Deep South. A doctoral student in anthropology, Drake became Cayton's principal collaborator. The findings of their massive survey were published in 1945 under the title Black Metroplis.

Cayton remained in Chicago from 1937 to 1946. After 1940 he was employed as Director of the Parkway Community House, a social and recreational center for Negroes located at 51st and South Parkway. During this time he wrote a weekly column for the Pittsburgh Courier and contributed articles and reviews to the Nation, New Republic, and Chicago Sun. His home became a haven for Chicago's younger intellectuals, and a way station for visitors from out of town. Arna Bontemps became his close friend; Langston Hughes stayed in the spacious guest rooms of the Parkway Community House for weeks at a time, on his frequent lecture tours through the middle-west; and Richard Wright spent a week or so with Cayton on more than one occasion.

One evening in April of 1941 Wright was visiting Chicago in search of documentary material for his folk history, Twelve Million Black Voices. The Caytons gave a buffet supper in his honor. Among those present were Arna Bontemps, Edwin Embree, director of the Rosenwald Fund, and two old friends, Louis and Mary Wirth. At Wright's request, Professor Wirth gave him a list of readings in the social sciences which Mrs. Wirth subsequently described as suitable for a second-year sociology major. Wright absorbed the list at a remarkable speed and visited his mentor several times to discuss what he was reading. He was particularly impressed by Wirth's own essay, “Urbanism as a Way of Life.”¹³

On this occasion Cayton made his own expertise available as well. According to Michel Fabre, he opened his research files, shared his notes for Black Metropolis, and provided Wright with a theoretical approach to the phenomenon of urbanization. Wright acknowledges his debt to Cayton in the foreword of Twelve Million Black Voices. It seems clear, in short, that Horace Cayton was the crucial link between the Chicago School of Sociology and the Chicago School of Afro-American writing. Since Cayton was in turn a disciple of Robert Park (to whose memory Black Metropolis is dedicated), we will need to take a closer look at one of America's most remarkable social thinkers.¹⁴

Robert Park was no ordinary academic sociologist. Trained at Michigan, Harvard, and Heidelberg, he was a student of John Dewey, William James, and Georg Simmel. For seven years (1906-1913), he was employed at Tuskegee Institute as publicity director, a post that involved considerable ghost-writing for Booker T. Washington.¹⁵ In 1910 they toured Europe together, collaborating subsequently on The Man Farthest Down. As Washington's emissary, Park traveled extensively throughout the black South. In consequence, he had a first-hand knowledge of Negro life that could be matched by few white men of his generation. When he came to Chicago in 1914, he brought with him the conviction that the southern Negro was the New World equivalent of the European peasant.

For a quarter of a century, Park played a leading role in his profession. He was president of the American Sociological Society, founder and president of the Chicago Urban League, and president of the National Community Center Association. A specialist in urban theory, as well as race relations, he made the scientific study of race a standard feature of the sociology curriculum. His most important publications were two standard texts: Park and Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921), and Park, Burgess, and McKenzie, The City (1925). Throughout his career he maintained an active interest in Negro education, teaching for ten years at Fisk after his retirement from Chicago.

In Parkian sociology, the radical metaphors are Darwinian. He was educated, after all, at a time when evolutionary thought dominated the universities. At Michigan, John Dewey introduced him to the harsh Darwinian world of Herbert Spencer. Conflict and competition, according to Spencer, and no amount of “crusading,” are the instruments of social change. Human history is an inexorable progression from simple to complex, homogeneous to heterogeneous, naive to sophisticated, rural to urban, agrarian to industrial, static to dynamic. These polarities, resting on the assumption of an evolutionary advance from lower to higher forms, are the building blocks of Robert Park's urban theory.

The crucial polarity, absorbed from the writings of Ferdinand Tönnies, is the contrast between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. While peasant societies are characterized by a preponderance of communal ties (Gemeinschaft), in urban-industrial societies human relations are chiefly voluntary or associational (Gesellschaft). This tends to emancipate the individual from his bondage to tradition, even as it induces a state of perpetual anxiety. On balance, however, the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft (or, as Park would put it, from the sacred to the secular) is beneficial. The loss of moral absolutes is more than compensated by the accompanying release of individual creative energies.

In this perspective, the city becomes a liberating force, and urban studies a chapter in the history of human freedom. Unconsciously, perhaps, a teleological bias permeates Parkian theory. The city is not merely a different sort of place from the village; it is higher in the evolutionary scale. It represents the wave of the future, as centers of dominance emerge, concentrating the energies of the hinterland. “The city is, finally, the habitat of civilized man. … It is a quite certain, but never fully recognized fact, says Spengler, that all great cultures are city born.”¹⁶

Evolutionary progress, to be sure, is not without a price. Those who cannot cope with the demands of a complex technological society soon become its casualties. Hence the Parkian concern with the pathology of urban life: with slums and ghettos, prostitutes and alcoholics, youth gangs and hoboes, suicide and crime rates. Yet despite the hardships and dangers of urbanization, Park views the process optimistically. A peasant people, undergoing this historic trauma, may encounter temporary setbacks, obstacles, and maladjustments, but in the end the survivors will achieve a higher level of social organization. A similar optimism, based on evolutionary premises, infuses Park's theory of race relations.

Park approached race relations in the generalizing spirit of a scientist seeking to codify universal laws. Thus he postulated a race relations cycle unfolding in four distinct stages: contact, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. Stanford Lyman offers a concise summary of Park's theory:

The first stage, contact, occurs when two races meet on a “racial frontier” and are obliged to interact. Conflict arises when the races compete for valuable resources. The conflict is resolved by accommodation, in which a stable but asymmetrical and unequal social order is established. Finally accommodation gives way to assimilation, when the two races merge culturally, and, ultimately, physically. In the end society becomes homogeneous.¹⁷

In this evolutionary progress toward a raceless world, the city plays a decisive role. For the city is the melting-pot of races and religions: it breaks down the old sacred cultures and replaces them with a multiplicity of subcultures. Urban diversity, in short, facilitates rapid assimilation. As in Park's urban theory, setbacks may occur. Obstacles may arise to postpone the evolutionary imperative, but in the end assimilation will prevail. The humanistic dream of a raceless society will be realized not so much in consequence of human will or moral commitment as by the impersonal operation of scientific law.

This is not the place to offer a critique of Park's race-relations cycle.¹⁸ Suffice it to observe that for black Americans the melting-pot has never worked, and least of all in the city of Chicago. In light of the American historical reality, Park's theories of race strike us as Utopian. Yet in their own time they enjoyed immense prestige. They played an influential role in Negro education; they inspired many of the classics of Negro sociology; and through the work of Wright and others they left their stamp on the literary scene.

As important for our purposes as Park's theoretical formulations are his research methods. For Parkian sociology was not as relentlessly quantified as would be the case today. On the contrary, its methods were quasi-literary, drawing heavily on the case study and the life history. These forms at bottom are versions of the narrative art; hence their affinity with fiction and autobiography. Many of the novels and short stories of the Wright generation are little more than fictionalized case studies, and much of their non-fiction achieves dramatic force by being presented in the guise of a life history.

Parkian research, like all social science, was documentary in spirit. The assumption was that men of good will, confronted with the facts, would alter their behavior. As Park put it, “The facts themselves would compel action because … there is something monumental in a fact. What is, is.”¹⁹ Once the fact is enshrined, certain procedures follow: direct observation, extensive gathering of data, exhaustive cataloguing and analysis, accurate reporting of results, a patient amassing of evidence. These will be recognized as the procedures of literary naturalism, as embodied in the fiction of Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell (himself a product of the University's Division of the Social Sciences), and Richard Wright.

As Wright and his generation were coming to maturity, sociology was in the air. It flourished not only as an academic discipline, but an instrument of social planning, under the aegis of the New Deal. Its documentary spirit invaded literature and the other arts. The artistic imagination of the 1930s was, in fact, characteristically sociological. Little wonder, then, that Wright and his colleagues should work in the documentary mode. The circumstances of their lives, as Wright would insist, had prepared them for a sociological vision of the world.

THE PATRONS

Edwin Embree arrived in Chicago on January 1, 1928, to take executive command of the newly professionalized Julius Rosenwald Fund. From its inception in 1917, the Fund had remained under the personal control of its founder. The Board of Trustees consisted exclusively of family members: Mr. Rosenwald, his wife, one son, and a son-in-law. Recently, however, as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, Mr. Rosenwald had been exposed to more sophisticated models. He had come to understand that philanthropy was big business, requiring more impersonal modes of operation. He expanded the Board of Trustees, created the office of president, and offered Edwin Embree, who had served as vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation, a free hand.

Edwin R. Embree (1883-1950) was born in Osceola, Nebraska. He was educated at Yale (class of 1906) in philosophy and cultural anthropology. After a year of newspaper work in New York, he returned to Yale to edit the alumni journal and solicit gifts for the endowment fund. Sixteen years of publicity and fund-raising for the University led to high office in the Rockefeller Foundation, where he attracted the attention of Julius Rosenwald. When he took command of the Rosenwald Fund, he was an energetic man of forty-five. Patrician in bearing but liberal in outlook, Episcopalian in religious but Democratic in party affiliation, he had the ideal background for a man who would mediate for twenty years between the Sears Roebuck millions and the black intelligentsia.

From 1928 to 1948 Embree administered the affairs of the Rosenwald Fund. Aided by Charles S. Johnson and Will Alexander, the Fund's most active trustees, he established close ties with the black intellectual community and with the highest circles of the New Deal. Armed with a war chest of twenty millions, he engaged the forces of American racism along a broad front. Meanwhile he managed to sustain a vigorous intellectual life. He was the author of eight books, of which the best known is Thirteen Against the Odds (1944), a series of sketches of famous black Americans, including Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. He died in 1950, having made a major impact on the cultural life of black America.

The founder of the Fund provides a striking contrast to its chief executive officer. Julius Rosenwald (1862-1932) was born in Springfield, Illinois. He was the son of a German Jew who had come to America with ＄20 in his pocket and a love of freedom in his heart. The father was a peddler, then a clothing merchant, who was living in comfortable circumstances by the time his son was born. Julius finished only two years of high school before beginning his own business career. He was a modest success by the mid-1890s, when Richard Sears let it be known that he was seeking capital to expand a small but thriving mail-order firm. Julius and his brother-in-law invested ＄75,000 in a partnership which eventually was worth many millions.

President of Sears from 1909 to 1924, Julius Rosenwald never ceased to wonder at his good fortune. “Who am I to live in a park?” he asked his daughter of their country home in Ravinia.²⁰ The idea of stewardship—of wealth temporarily entrusted to his care, but ultimately destined for the common good—took possession of his mind. He was fortified in his philanthropies by the ethical teachings of Dr. Emil Hirsch, spiritual leader of Chicago's Sinai congregation. Ultimately he committed some sixty or seventy million dollars to his charities, which included various Jewish causes and institutions, Negro education, war relief, hospitals, art museums, etc. Of this total some twenty million constituted the original endowment of the Julius Rosenwald Fund.

Mr. Rosenwald's interest in the plight of the Negro was first aroused by Paul J. Sachs, a partner of Goldman, Sachs, & Co., and a professor of Fine Arts at Harvard. It was furthered by his reading of two books: Up from Slavery, and the biography of William Baldwin, a northern white man active in promoting Negro education in the South. A personal encounter with Booker T. Washington, which took place in Chicago in 1911, inspired him to become actively involved. He visited Tuskegee Institute, was elected a trustee, and served until his death. Before establishing the Fund in 1917, he had already financed the construction of some eighty rural schoolhouses. The school construction program continued as the Fund's main thrust from 1917 to 1928.

Such was the state of affairs when Edwin Embree took the helm. Bringing professional standards and wide horizons to the task, he initiated some dramatic changes. Headquarters were moved from the main plant of Sears Roebuck to the former Rosenwald mansion at 4901 Ellis Avenue, adjoining the University of Chicago campus. Distinguished trustees were assembled, among them Will Alexander, head of the Farm Security Administration under FDR, Marshall Field III, of the Chicago department store dynasty, Robert Hutchins, President of the University, Charles S. Johnson, President of Fisk, Howard Odum of Chapel Hill, avatar of the enlightened South, and Anna Eleanor Roosevelt: address, the White House, Washington, D.C.

Ambitious programs were undertaken in the fields of Negro education, health services, leadership development, and race relations. Under the founder, the construction of elementary schools had been paramount. Within a year of Embree's appointment, the scope was enlarged to include aid to high schools, normal schools, and colleges, the development of county library service in the southern states, support of Negro hospitals and health agencies, and the establishment of a fellowship program to identify young talent and encourage excellence. In the last ten years of its existence (1938-48), the Fund shifted its emphasis to the field of race relations.

Two of the Fund's activities are germane to our purposes: the fellowship program, and the development of Negro university centers in the South. These were in fact complementary thrusts, having as their aim nothing less than the creation of a black intelligentsia. William Haygood, a reconstructed southerner from Mississippi, was Director of Fellowships. His mandate was to seek out gifted individuals and offer them support at an early stage of their careers. As talent scouts, Haygood and his wife Vandi were no slouches.²¹ Among the more famous fellowship recipients were Marian Anderson, Ralph Bunche, Charles Drew, Ralph Ellison, Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks, Pearl Primus, and William Grant Still.

A fellowship award, however, is a sometime thing. To make a more permanent impact, it was necessary to institutionalize the process, by providing jobs and careers for the fledgling intellectuals. This was accomplished by developing four university centers of demonstrated excellence, strategically placed throughout the southern region: Howard, Fisk, Atlanta, and Dillard. Approximately 1000 fellowship awards were made to Negroes from 1928 to 1948, and of the recipients a substantial majority spent some part, if not the whole of their careers, teaching at a southern Negro college.

Awards were made across the board, in medicine and law, journalism and education, the sciences and fine arts. Yet Embree was not without his biases. Trained in cultural anthropology, and convinced that social science had a special contribution to make in the field of race relations, he perhaps kept one thumb lightly on the scale. Among the sociologists and anthropologists who were Rosenwald Fellows were Horace Cayton (two awards), Allison Davis (three awards), St. Clair Drake (four awards), Katherine Dunham (two awards), E. Franklin Frazier, Charles S. Johnson, and Ira Reid (one award each). Without exception, these award recipients were trained at Chicago in the principles and practices of Parkian sociology.

The awards in creative writing are particularly interesting. They commenced in the early 1930s with writers who had made their mark in the first decade of the century: William Stanley Braithwaite (one award), W. E. B. DuBois (three awards), and James Weldon Johnson (three awards). They then moved on to encompass the generation of the Harlem Renaissance: Claude McKay (two awards), Langston Hughes (two awards), Sterling Brown, and Zora Neale Hurston (one award each). But the bulk of the awards in creative writing went to members of the Wright generation. A list of grant recipients, together with their work-in-progress at the time, highlights the contribution of the Rosenwald Fund to contemporary Negro writing.

Among the Chicago-based authors who received Rosenwald fellowships were William Attaway (Blood on the Forge), Arna Bontemps (Drums at Dusk), Frank Marshall Davis (Through Sepia Eyes), Willard Motley (We Fished All Night), and Margaret Walker (Jubilee). Those not based in Chicago include Owen Dodson (Powerful Long Ladder), Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), Robert Hayden (The Lion and the Archer), and Chester Himes (Lonely Crusade). One author of the oncoming generation should be mentioned to underscore Edwin Embree's commitment to the fresh and new: James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain).

Arna Bontemps was deeply involved with the Rosenwald Fund during his Chicago years. In 1936 he wrote a juvenile, Sad-Faced Boy, expressly for the Fund. In 1938 he received a grant for study and travel in the Caribbean which provided background for his third novel, Drums at Dusk. In 1942 he received a second grant for studies in library science, leading ultimately to his appointment as Head Librarian at Fisk. For several years he served as a member of the Committee on Fellowships, helping with the difficult task of screening candidates and making the final selections.

While employed on the Illinois Writers' Project, Bontemps made arrangements for a private office in the spacious headquarters of the Rosenwald Fund, where he could pursue his creative work undisturbed. From this vantage point, he observed what might be called the Fund's ambiance. Everything, as he reported regularly in letters to Langston Hughes, was top drawer. Bontemps was clearly fascinated by the glamour of his surroundings and by the personality of the president. Here are two glimpses of Edwin Embree at work and play:²²

“Just came from an afternoon party at the Fund for Katherine Dunham, her husband, and others. Earlier today the presidents of Dillard, Spelman, Tuskegee, Fisk, etc., had a session with Mr. Embree. After the conference Dr. Jones (Fisk—my new boss) asked me to make suggestions for two posts which are open at Fisk.”

“Yesterday it was a cocktail on the northside for Alberta and me … followed by an auto trip to Ravinia with Mr. Embree and the Gruensfeld family to hear the final concert of the season (the Budapest string quartet) in that leafy outdoor chamber, followed by a trip to Great Lakes (having picked up another car load of friends and trustees of the Fund) to hear Owen Dodson and Charles Sebree's production of Owen's Dorie Miller. …”²³

Wherever there are artists, there are patrons. Just as the Harlem Renaissance had its Carl Van Vechten, Blanche Knopf, Mrs. A'Lelia Walker, and Mrs. R. Osgood Mason, so the Wright generation enjoyed the patronage of the Julius Rosenwald Fund. And as always, patronage was a mixed blessing. There was something Jesuitical, without a doubt, in Edwin Embree's empire-building, which those inclined toward cynicism will see as an attempt to co-opt the black intelligentsia. Yet Embree brought a certain panache to the art of giving away other people's money. In his hands, the Rosenwald Fund became less of a money-tree and more of a milieu. It is not too much to think of him as the Carl Van Vechten of the Chicago Renaissance.

THE JOURNALS

Next to a means of livelihood, young writers need an outlet for their work. This need was met for the generation of the Harlem Renaissance by Crisis and Opportunity, the house organs of the NAACP and Urban League respectively, and by such “little magazines” as the Messenger, Fire, and Harlem. During the 1930s and 1940s, Crisis and Opportunity continued to fulfill their traditional roles. In addition, the Wright generation had access to a variety of publications either Chicago-based, or, in the case of New Challenge, Chicago-inspired. The earliest of these was Abbott's Monthly (1929-33), offspring of the Chicago Defender.

Robert Abbott (1868-1940) was born on St. Simon's Island and reared on the outskirts of Savannah. Educated at Hampton Institute, he visited Chicago with a student quartet that sang at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Returning after graduation, he found employment as a printer, mastered the newspaper trade, and founded the Chicago Defender in 1905. During World War I he launched a crusade to bring the rural masses north. By 1920 the Defender was a triumphant success, with a peak circulation of 230,000. Pullman porters distributed out-of-town editions to black communities across the nation. Abbott became one of America's first Negro millionaires, and the greatest single force in Negro journalism.²⁴

In the 1920s the Defender expanded its horizons to encompass sports, fashion, Negro society, and the arts. As part of this expansion policy, a cultural magazine was proposed to supplement the newspaper's more topical concerns. In September, 1929, the first number of Abbott's Monthly appeared, with a press run of 50,000 copies. This was the nation's first mass-circulation periodical for Negroes; a fore-runner of Ebony and the other Johnson publications. Its features included articles on politics and history, short stories and poems, book reviews, “true confessions,” sketches of successful Negroes, and the like.

The magazine was supervised by Lucius Harper, city editor of the Defender, and Abbott's second-in-command. Born in Augusta, Georgia, he was educated at Haines Institute in Atlanta, Fisk, and Oberlin. A voracious reader and an avid student of Negro history, his column in the Defender, called “Dustin' Off the News,” was one of the most widely read features of the Negro press. Under his editorship Abbott's Monthly achieved a peak circulation of 100,000, but it was devastated by the Depression. Abbott allowed the magazine to fold in 1933, but not before it had published an apprentice story by Richard Wright, five prison tales by Chester Himes, and a poem by Robert Hayden.

After Abbott's death in 1940, Lucius Harper continued his policy of nurturing the arts. During the war years, for example, the Defender published the early poems of Gwendolyn Brooks, which formed the core of her collection, A Street in Bronzeville. For several months of 1942, Langston Hughes was in and out of Chicago, giving poetry readings, and organizing a theatre group called the Skyloft Players. Harper took advantage of his presence to negotiate a contract for a weekly column. The result was the famous series of “Simple” sketches, which appeared in the Defender for several years, beginning in November, 1942.

.....

On a Saturday evening in the fall of 1933, Richard Wright rode to the Loop, tracked down an obscure address, and climbed the dingy stairs. He was in search of the Chicago John Reed Club. Opening the door, he was welcomed cordially, and introduced “to a Jewish boy who was to become one of the nation's leading painters, to a chap who was to become one of the eminent composers of his day, to a writer who was to create some of the best novels of his generation. …”²⁵ When he spoke of his own ambition to become a writer, he was invited to join an editorial meeting of the magazine, Left Front.

This was heady stuff for a young writer of twenty-five who was virtually unpublished. The left-wing press looked especially attractive at a time when publishers and periodicals were folding, and unknown authors having trouble breaking into print. Before long, Wright returned with a sheaf of poems. The editor of Left Front accepted two on the spot, sent two more to Jack Conroy's Anvil, and another to the New Masses. Within a year, International Literature and Partisan Review were added to the list. Left Front, however, which catered to beginners like himself, was Wright's first love. He became a staunch supporter of the magazine, serving on the editorial board during the last phase of its existence.

Meanwhile, Wright was caught up in a change of Party line that culminated in the demise of Left Front and the liquidation of the John Reed Clubs. In 1934-35, the Comintern was emerging from its Third (or revolutionary) Period, when ultra-leftist policies prevailed, and entering its Popular Front phase, when revolutionary aims were muted in order to build a broad coalition against fascism. This “right turn” entailed the dissolution of the John Reed Clubs, whose very name was redolent of Bolshevism, and their replacement by the less sectarian League of American Writers. Deeply committed to the John Reed Clubs, which he describes as “my first contact with the modern world,” Wright opposed these changes bitterly, but to no avail.

In the spring of 1935, Wright attended the first American Writer's Congress in New York, at which the League of American Writers was born. Addressing the Congress at its final session, he spoke eloquently of the isolation of the Negro writer, and of his personal salvation through the Chicago John Reed Club.²⁶ Returning to Chicago in a half defiant mood, he sought a means of recapturing the essence of the John Reed Clubs without directly challenging the Party leadership. Suppose he were to organize a writers' group on the South Side, composed entirely of Negroes, and beyond the reach of Party discipline? The launching of the National Negro Congress provided the organizational opportunity that he desired.

The National Negro Congress was a broad coalition of religious, fraternal, educational, labor, and civil rights organizations, dominated more or less by the Communist minority. Its founding convention was held in Chicago during February of 1936. Wright presided over the Writers' Section and joined a panel discussion, along with Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes, on “The Role of the Negro Writer and Artist on the Social Stage.”²⁷ According to Margaret Walker's account of the affair, Hughes turned to Wright toward the end of the proceedings and remarked, “If you people really get a group together, don't forget to include this girl.”²⁸

The first meeting of the South Side Writers' Group was held in May of 1936. Thereafter the group met regularly for about two years, at first under the leadership of Richard Wright, and then of Margaret Walker. Among the participants were Frank Marshall Davis, Theodore Ward, Fern Gayden, and Edward Bland. Arna Bontemps, as we have seen, was a frequent visitor. The focal point of their discussions was a topic known in Marxist circles as “the national question.” In practice it involved the relation of the Negro writer to his folk tradition. On these thorny issues they strove for a consensus which was ultimately embodied in Wright's famous essay, “Blueprint for Negro Writing.”²⁹

In March of 1934 Dorothy West, a young Bostonian studying at the Columbia School of Journalism, had launched a little magazine called Challenge. Appearing sporadically for three years, it tried avowedly to recapture “the spirit of '26,” or in other words, to revive the Harlem Renaissance. The attempt did not succeed, despite a poem or two from Countee Cullen and Claude McKay, and some stories from such transitional figures as Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes. The myth of primitivism was dead, and not to be revived. The voices of a new generation, however, were heard for the first time in the pages of Challenge, among them William Attaway, Owen Dodson, and Frank Yerby.

Most of the new voices seemed to emanate from the city of Chicago. At first Miss West was inclined to defend her own high standards from the barbaric yawp of the Chicago proletarians, but as the Depression persisted, she gradually assumed a friendlier tone. In the spring issue of 1937 she remarks:

… We have become greatly interested in a young Chicago group. … These young Chicagoans hold meetings regularly, where their work is read for open discussion. The meetings, we are told, are lively and well attended. Challenge has come in for considerable dispraise. … And we have retaliated by offering them a special section in a forthcoming issue.³⁰

The gage was down. Chicago had been challenged to prove itself. Marian Minus, a graduate of Fisk, a student of anthropology at Chicago, and a member of the South Side Writers' Group moved to New York and became Dorothy West's co-editor. Wright himself, who had recently been transferred to the New York Writers' Project, served as Associate Editor. New Challenge, which appeared in the fall of 1937, marked a turning point in the history of Afro-American letters. The Chicago School had seized the initiative and was manifestly in the ascendancy.

.....

On a June evening in 1941, a slender woman in a fashionable gown, her red hair pulled back in an elegant roll, crossed the lobby of her Gold Coast apartment and asked the doorman to hail a taxi. When she gave the driver a South Side address, he looked back in dismay. His unspoken censure echoed the response of her friends, when she announced her intention of teaching a class of would-be poets at the South Side Community Art Center. “You can't mean this.” “Society will drop you.” “You'll be raped.” “Poetry? Rhymes, perhaps.” She smiled at the recollection and repeated the address.³¹

Inez Cunningham Stark was a familiar figure in Chicago art circles. A critic, lecturer, and connoisseur, she was president of the University's Renaissance Society from 1936 to 1940. During those years she brought Le Corbusier, Léger, and Prokofiev on tour to the United States, and was active in helping Nazi refugees to settle in this country. Like many of her social set, she was a patron of Poetry magazine, founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, and long a treasured feature of the city's cultural life. She contributed poems and reviews on occasion, and served as a reader for several years. When she agreed to teach a class for aspiring poets on the South Side, she had at her disposal a considerable expertise.

The class met weekly from the summer of 1941 to the following spring. Mrs. Stark would arrive with an armful of books, announce a topic, and begin to read, either from various poets or from a text such as Robert Hillyer's First Principles of Verse. Heated discussions would ensue. Students would read their own work, only to have it torn apart by their peers. The teacher was a gentler, but no less demanding critic. On occasion the class would meet at Mrs. Stark's apartment on the near North Side. Toward the end she sponsored a poetry contest, to be judged by S. I. Hayakawa. First prize went to a young poet of twenty-three named Gwendolyn Brooks.³²

The Chicago Poets' Class fostered some impressive talent. Gwendolyn Brooks first appeared in Poetry in October, 1944, and went on to a distinguished career. John Carlis became a well-known California painter; William Couch, a college teacher and editor of New Black Playwrights (1968). Margaret Danner, something of a late bloomer, became an associate editor of Poetry, and published several volumes of verse in the 1960s. Margaret Taylor Goss (Burroughs), an accomplished painter, became director of Chicago's Du Sable Black History Museum. Several former members of the South Side Writers' Group were involved, including Edward Bland, who was killed in the Battle of the Bulge, and Fern Gayden, who became co-editor of Negro Story.

Late in March of 1944, Richard and Ellen Wright, and their two-year-old daughter, Julia, arrived at the Parkway Community House to spend a week with Horace Cayton. Wright was in Chicago at the invitation of Edwin Embree, to attend the founding conference of the American Council on Race Relations. When he had a free moment, he visited his mother and his brother Leon, for whom he had bought a modest home on Vincennes Avenue. Two doors down, so Cayton informed him, was the home of a young school-teacher, who was planning to launch a periodical called Negro Story. Would Wright care to meet her?

Alice Browning was a native of Chicago and a daughter of the black bourgeoisie. She came from a family of teachers and ministers, and grew up in affluent circumstances. She took her B.A. from Chicago Normal School, B. Phil. from the University of Chicago, and M.A. from Columbia University, where she studied with Vernon Loggins, a white scholar and authority on early Negro literature.³³ A teacher in the Chicago public schools, active in social and cultural affairs, and not without her own literary ambitions, she was delighted to receive an invitation from Horace Cayton to spend an evening with the Wrights. She called her friend, Fern Gayden, made arrangements to come by in her car, and together they drove over to Cayton's apartment.³⁴

In contrast to her rather conventional companion, Fern Gayden was a rebel, nineteen-thirties style. Born in Dunlap, Kansas, and the first of her family to obtain a college education, she attended Kansas State Teachers College at Emporia and graduated from Northwestern University. Thwarted in her hopes of going on to law school, she turned to a career in social work. Becoming interested in left-wing politics, she joined the South Side Writers' Group where, according to Constance Webb, she became a source of friendly rivalry between Dick Wright and Ted Ward.³⁵ By now, of course, Wright was a national celebrity. She looked forward to renewing their friendship.

The two women arrived at Cayton's apartment and spent a pleasant evening with the Wrights. Once the amenities were over, Alice described their new venture. She spoke enthusiastically of her friend, Roi Ottley, and his recent book, New World A-Coming (1943). Inspired by his vision of a brave new postwar world, and piqued by a rejection-slip from Esquire,³⁶ she had conceived the idea of Negro Story, modeled after Whit Burnett's Story mazagine. She had approached Fern, with whom she shared an interest in the arts, and a desire to write short fiction, and asked her to be co-editor. Together they had laid the groundwork for the first issue.

Alice recounted their progress to date. They had lined up substantial community support. “Friends of Negro Story” already included an attorney, a congressman, an alderman, a minister, two service stations, two labor unions, the YM and YWCAs, and several local celebrities. The wives of two executives at the Defender would lend a hand. Langston Hughes would serve as an advisor. Arrangements for campus sales were being made at Atlanta, Hampton, and Wilberforce. They were in touch with several writers from the Chicago Poets' Class. What they needed now was national prestige. Would Wright contribute a story for the first issue?

Why not? He offered them the publication rights to “Almos' a Man,” which had appeared in Harper's Bazaar of January, 1940. He promised to spread the word to his friends in New York, and to round up potential contributors. And he put them in touch with Jack Conroy, who had considerable experience with the editing of little magazines. Alice was elated. She borrowed ＄200 from her husband, bought some paper stock, hard to come by during wartime, from the Chicago Defender, made arrangements with a printer, and brought out her first issue in May.

Negro Story was published bi-monthly for two years, from May 1944 to May 1946. Toward the end the schedule was erratic, but in all, nine issues appeared. The journal was edited from Mrs. Browning's home at 4019 Vincennes Avenue. It featured not only stories, but poems; not only black, but white contributors; not only young and unknown talent, but seasoned authors as well. At first the staff consisted of Alice Browning and Fern Gayden, co-editors; Langston Hughes and Nick Aaron Ford (then teaching at Langston University, Oklahoma), advisers. With the fourth number (Dec./Jan. 1944-45), Fern Gayden stepped down as co-editor while Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes were added to the advisory board.

In retrospect, we can see that Negro Story suffered from a split personality. Apprentice fiction appears by Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Davis, and Margaret Taylor Goss: all former members of Mrs. Stark's workshop. But professional short-story writers appear as well. Chester Himes contributes seven stories; Ralph Ellison four (all reprints); Langston Hughes four; and Richard Wright one (also a reprint). On the white side, a similar division occurs. Local talent is represented by several members of a class in creative writing taught by Jack Conroy. Among the more prominent white contributors are Earl Conrad, Vernon Loggins, and Bucklin Moon.

The poetry is principally by blacks. Langston Hughes offers nine of his “Madam” poems, later to be serialized in One Way Ticket (1949). Frank Marshall Davis is represented by one poem, Owen Dodson by two; Margaret Walker by two. Of the younger poets trained by Mrs. Stark, William Couch contributes half-a-dozen poems, while Gwendolyn Brooks wins two war bonds in a contest sponsored by the United Electrical Workers, CIO. Her prize poem is an Eliotic piece entitled “Revision of the Invocation.” In a subsequent issue she expresses her gratitude to the magazine: “Negro Story should go down in history for its inspiration to young writers.”

The second year of publication finds the editor in an expansive mood. Plans are made for a Drama Section and a Music Section. A Negro Story Press is founded, with its first two projects being a magazine for children and a book on jazz entitled The Lionel Hampton Swing Book. Negro Story Clubs are organized in Chicago and New York. A ＄300 short story prize is established, and contributions solicited toward a ＄2000 fellowship fund for aspiring novelists. The editor, in short, over-extends herself, and a little magazine turns grandiose. Yet for a brief moment Negro Story was the focal point of black writing in America.

Marking more an end than a beginning, Negro Story furnishes our account of the Chicago movement with a fitting coda. For Arna Bontemps moved to Fisk in 1943. Robert Park died at Fisk in 1944. Horace Cayton's marriage was dissolved in 1945, and he suffered a severe emotional crisis, moving to New York and ultimately San Francisco. Richard Wright sailed for Paris in the spring of 1946, thus severing his remaining ties with the Chicago scene. The Rosenwald Fund was dismantled in 1948, and by 1950 Edwin Embree was dead. The matrix that gave birth to the Chicago Renaissance had disintegrated.

NEW PERSPECTIVES

If the main thesis of this essay is valid—if there was in fact an identifiable generation of black writers holding the ascendancy from 1935 to 1950, and if this generation found its locus in the city of Chicago—then the current version of Afro-American literary history is in need of serious revision. The prevailing wisdom postulates a Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, and a second literary flowering, associated with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. But our sense of the intervening years is at best vague and indistinct.

The acknowledgement of a Chicago School will force us to reconsider the current fragmentary view, and replace it with a perspective stressing continuities. The Harlem Renaissance will then seem less an isolated episode, and more a part of a larger movement unfolding in two phases, one based in Harlem and the other in Chicago. What these two literary outpourings have in common is that both are at bottom responses to the Great Migration. What differentiates them is the nature of the two responses to the basic phenomenon of urbanization.

Confronted with the trauma of the Great Migration, the Harlem School adopted a retrospective view. They looked back with nostalgia on the rural past, celebrated the values of the Southern folk culture, and attempted to reassure the embattled black migrants by evoking familiar images of rural life. In the face of white resistance they exhorted the black community to close ranks, and thereby to recapture the feeling of Gemeinschaft that had formerly prevailed in the rural South.

The Chicago School, under the leadership of Richard Wright, repudiated the retrospective view. They looked ahead toward the future, toward the necessary adaptations and adjustments, toward the risks and adventures and existential dilemmas of modern life. They were spiritual migrants, on a journey toward what William James has called “the unguaranteed existence.” In the face of white resistance they looked outward from the group, seeking allies on the left, in the New Deal, and the labor movement, exploring the possibilities of Gesellschaft, or free association.

Why were these two generations of black writers so dissimilar in their interpretations of the Great Migration? The answer lies, I think, in the cultural climate of their respective times. The Harlem School was diverted from its historic task by the myth of primitivism, which dominated the literary scene in the 1920s. Working in this mode, writers like Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes tended to romanticize the past and idealize the Noble Savage. But the myth of primitivism proved unable to survive the harshness of the Great Depression.

The Wright generation came of age during a revival of literary naturalism. Under the impact of joblessness and hunger, the myth of primitivism was replaced by a bleak Darwinian myth. This in turn was reinforced by the evolutionary doctrines of the Chicago School of Sociology. The work of Park and his associates gave the Wright generation a sophisticated theory for understanding their own historical circumstances. With these intellectual resources, they moved beyond the superficialities of the Harlem School. A transformation of consciousness which began in one generation was completed in the next.

In a still larger time frame, we should perhaps be thinking in terms of cycles of ethnicity. It may be that such a cycle was launched during the Harlem Renaissance, when ethnic sentiment ran high. A weakening occurred in the Wright generation (1935-1950), when assimilationist tendencies appeared, under the influence of Parkian sociology and Marxist ideology. The true decadence emerged, however, in the Baldwin generation (1950-1965), when the expatriate phenomenon becomes a measure of the loss of roots. A new cycle, marked by a strong resurgence of ethnicity, commences in the mid-sixties. Such are the speculations induced by the neglected facts of the Chicago Renaissance.

Notes

1. Arna Bontemps, The Old South (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1973) 18.

2. Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: the Federal Writers' Project 1935-1943 (Boston: Little Brown, 1972) 119-31.

3. Arna Bontemps, “Famous WPA Authors,” Negro Digest (June 1950): 46-47.

4. Minor novels of the Chicago School include William Attaway, Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939), Arna Bontemps, Drums at Dusk (1939), Waters Turpin, O Canaan! (1939), Alden Bland, Behold a Cry (1947), and Willard Motley, We Fished All Night (1951).

5. The original version of Black Boy contained a long section on Wright's early years in Chicago. Excised at the request of his editors, it was published in an abridged version by Edwin Seaver in Cross Section (New York: McClelland, 1945), under the title “Early Days in Chicago.” The full version, entitled American Hunger, was published in book form in 1977.

6. From reminiscences of Horace Cayton, Jack Conroy, and Margaret Walker, as well as Michel Fabre's biography, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (New York: Morrow, 1973), it can be established that Wright returned to Chicago on at least six occasions after moving to New York.

7. Richard Wright, American Hunger (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) 1.

8. Wright, op. cit., 42.

9. Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis (New York: Harper and Row, 1945) xvii.

10. Wright, op. cit., 46.

11. Cayton and Drake, op. cit., 88.

12. Horace Cayton, Long Old Road (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1970) 248.

13. I am indebted for this account to Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 232.

14. For the section on Robert Park I am indebted to Stanford Lyman, The Black American in Sociological Thought: a Failure of Perspective (New York: Putnam, 1973); Fred Matthews, Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1977); and Winifred Raushenbush, Robert E. Park: Biography of a Sociologist (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1979).

15. According to Winifred Raushenbush, “The Library of Congress papers show that Park assisted Washington in writing three books: The Story of the Negro (1909), My Larger Education (1911), and The Man Farthest Down (1912). The first two were signed by Washington alone.” Raushenbush, op. cit., 57.

16. Quoted in Raushenbush, op. cit., 98.

17. Stanford Lyman, op. cit., 27-28.

18. For such a critique see Lyman, op. cit., 27ff.

19. Quoted in Fred Matthews, op. cit., 104.

20. I am indebted for this anecdote, and many of the facts concerning Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Fund to Edwin Embree and Julia Waxman, Investment in People: the Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund (New York: Harper, 1949).

21. During the war, while her husband was away in the army, Vandi Haygood served as Acting Director of Fellowships. For her role in the Rosenwald Fund see Chester Himes' novel, The Primitive, and his autobiography, The Quality of Hurt.

22. The following quotations are from Charles Nichols, editor, Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes, Letters 1925-1967 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), 130 and 136.

23. Owen Dodson, poet, playwright, and novelist, and Charles Sebree, painter (both Rosenwald Fellows), were among a group of Negroes serving at the Navy's Great Lakes Training Base during World War II.

24. I am indebted for this sketch of Abbott's life and career to Roi Ottley, The Lonely Warrior: the Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott (Chicago: Regnery, 1955).

25. Wright, American Hunger, 62.

26. Michel Fabre, op. cit., 118-19.

27. Fabre, op. cit., 126.

28. Margaret Walker Alexander, “Richard Wright,” in Robert Farnsworth and David Ray, editors, Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1973), 35-46.

29. The essay appeared in New Challenge, Fall, 1937. In an article called “Negroes Launch Literary Quarterly,” (Daily Worker, June 8, 1937), Wright makes it clear that the positions on Negro nationalism and social realism put forward in “Blueprint for Negro Writing” were first formulated at meetings of the South Side Writers' Group.

30. Challenge, 2:1 (Spring 1937): 41.

31. I am improvising, but only slightly, on a reminiscence of Gwendolyn Brooks. See her autobiography, Report From Part I (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972), 65-68.

32. When Mrs. Stark remarried and left Chicago in 1942, the class continued under the guidance of Margedant Peters, associated editor of Poetry and the wife of S. I. Hayakawa.

33. One of the earliest critical studies of Afro-American writing was Vernon Loggins, The Negro Author: His Development in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931).

34. Letter from Fern Gayden to Robert Bone, October 19, 1980.

35. Constance Webb, Richard Wright: a Biography (New York: Putnam, 1968), 180.

36. Letter from Alice Browning to Robert Bone, October 21, 1980.