LIT
The Soil From Which We Grew
A new collection explores the early twentiethcentury artists and institutions that made the Black Chicago Renaissance possible. BY MALIK JACKSON
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ost cultural movements start small: in the bedrooms of budding orators, around the table at a thrifty pub, or in the margins of an artist’s sketchbook. But humble beginnings are foundations nonetheless. Their influence, as history tells us, can grow from four people around a table to 4,000 people across a city—all that’s necessary is for a seed to be planted, and for surrounding conditions to foster its growth. Many people know about the richness of the Black Chicago Renaissance, but the midcentury movement that cemented Chicago as a center for Black literary excellence surely required its own foundation, laid by lesser-known names, relationships, and ideas. Pioneers by definition, their stories are chronicled in Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance, a 2020 collection of essays edited by Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed. In the decades following the end of the Civil War, a fresh and righteously freed Black population sought to make a new world for themselves within a world that was still unsure about whether they had the right to one. While most had yet to journey North, early arrivers to Chicago were building the frameworks through which newcomers would be able to flourish, imagine new ways of living, and claim new opportunities. Roots serves as an anthology that honors their contributions, from the writers, artists, and intellectuals who reinvented what 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
Black representation could look like, to the entrepreneurs and financiers who created the spaces that would insulate and incubate Black culture and thought, which continue to influence the city and the world a century later. But first, every event needs a convener. 1893 was a critical year in American history for both the everexpanding white population and the newly freed Black population. Chicago’s World’s Fair was an opportunity for the American nation to represent itself in ways that broke from classical European forms, and it was also an opportunity for Black people to begin thinking about how they ought to represent themselves on the world’s stage. Frederick Douglass, the curator of Colored American Day at the World’s Fair, among other things, would orchestrate one of the first opportunities for freed Black folks to ask themselves this question. Influenced by recent trips to Ancient Egypt and his role as a U.S. delegate to Haiti, his temperament entering 1893 was one that pondered questions of Black pasts and futures, dignity, and civility. The essay “Journey to Frederick Douglass’s Chicago Jubilee,” by John McCluskey Jr., explores how these preoccupations, however valid, would have deep implications for the “tensions within and among urban Black Renaissances of the early twentieth century.” After having to convince much of Chicago’s Black culturati to attend the World’s Fair, the show went on. Singers and musicians
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like Desiree Plato, Sydney Woodward, and Maurice Arnold Strathotte performed their renditions of Romantic classics. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poetry recitations would propel him to national prominence, and a closing from Frederick Douglass himself, in which he spoke to the commendable progress of Black people since the Emancipation, minted the day of events as one that would be formative for the future of Black culture. McCluskey cautions the reader, though, that “in terms of original and vernacular expression, Colored American Day may be important for what it was not.” Douglass’s preoccupations with propriety curated a day of events that didn’t do too much to push the boundaries of what authentic Black expression could look like on the world’s stage. But Colored American Day did provide a stage, a gaping avenue for self-definition and expression for one of the first times in American history.
Another presenter at the World’s Fair managed to set fire to expectations, including those of Douglass, in a speech called “The Intellectual Progress and Present Status of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation.” Fannie Barrier Williams was a nationally renowned writer, orator, leader, and settlement house activist who took the world by storm in a speech that reintroduced Black women to the world, and demanded the recognition of their moral authority and democratic participation. Her efforts sought to define “the New Colored Woman,” who she envisioned as community leaders. Women who, contrary to gendered distinctions of the time, balanced professional and service work, worked to create “new and renewed communities,” and were concerned with social and political matters both within the race and in broader contexts. Her dogma, Black feminist pragmatism, carved out a “third way”
