Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance: New Negro Writers, Artists, and Intellectuals, 1893-1930

The Black Chicago Renaissance emerged from a foundational stage that stretched from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition to the start of the Great Depression. During this time, African American innovators working across the landscape of the arts set the stage for an intellectual flowering that redefined black cultural life.

Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed have brought together essays that explore the intersections in the backgrounds, education, professional affiliations, and public lives and achievements of black writers, journalists, visual artists, dance instructors, and other creators working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Organized chronologically, the chapters unearth transformative forces that supported the emergence of individuals and social networks dedicated to work in arts and letters. The result is an illuminating scholarly collaboration that remaps African American intellectual and cultural geography and reframes the concept of urban black renaissance.

Contributors: Richard A. Courage, Mary Jo Deegan, Brenda Ellis Fredericks, James C. Hall, Bonnie Claudia Harrison, Darlene Clark Hine, John McCluskey Jr., Amy M. Mooney, Christopher Robert Reed, Clovis E. Semmes, Margaret Rose Vendryes, and Richard Yarborough

Richard A. Courage is a Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York, and a professor of English at Westchester Community College/SUNY. He is the coauthor of The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932–1950. Christopher Robert Reed is a professor emeritus of history at Roosevelt University. His books include Knock at the Door of Opportunity: Black Migration to Chicago, 1900–1919 and The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1920–1929.