The Chicago Black Renaissance

Alex Holland

Do Now-Share ideas on Homework with a classmate.

Objectives-To understand the Chicago Black Renaissance and to evaluate it to how Chicago is today

How did the Chicago Black Renaissance Start?

General Background

• Somewhat like the Harlem Renaissance• Occurred in the mid-twentieth-century• Known as the “Great Migration”• Major reforms in Literature, Art, and Music,

and Dance

Established Organizations

• Chicago Defender-Robert Abbott produced the first issue of

the Chicago Defender on May 6, 1905.• Southside Community Art Center• New Deal’s Works Progress Administration

Southside Writers Group started by Richard Wright

Recent Issue of Chicago Defender

Older Issue of the Chicago Defender

Literature

-“The Spirit of the city, conflict between the races, questions of identity, and the quest for meaning and dignity anchor the novels, poems, and short stories of Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks.”

-Evaluate words in red

Visual Art

-William Edouard Scott

-Charles White

-Archibald John Motley Jr.

-Eldzier Cortor

Richard Wright

Charles White

Archibald John Motley Jr.

Eldzier Cortor

Music• Music types that became popular included jazz, gospel music, and the

urban blues.

• Today:“By almost every measure, Chicago is a great music city…Yet other cities with smaller music industries and less vibrant scenes are much better known for their music. Unlike Nashville or Atlanta, Chicago has no carved out a specialty niche as a recording capital for a particular genre, nor has it established itself as a hub for the music industry’s trade shows, as Austin has done. And its variegated music scene has not developed a distinctive physiognomy like those found in some other cities with readily identifiable music districts…What [the music scene] becomes in the future depends on the genius of its music makers, to be sure, but also on what industry leaders, policymakers, and other stakeholders do with these findings.”

Dance

Interesting Quote

“The move to Chicago was a journey out of bondage into freedom, like the journey of the israelites out of Egypt, a reversal of another journey branded in the cultural memory, the Middle Passage, the journey out of Africa into slavery in the New World. The Great Migration, including both the dream of the promised land and the failure of that dream, forms the “historical unconcious” of the literature of the Black Chicago Renaissance and of much African-American writing in Chicago since the Renaissance.”

Do you think the Chicago Black Renaissance has impacted the music and arts industry today in Chicago?

Works Cited:

1.http://www. Encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/240.html2.http://www.chicagohistoryfair.org/for-teachers/curriculum/chicago-black-renaissance.html3.http://www.lib.niu.edu/2000/iht720032.html4.http://www.uchicago.edu/features/20081020_goldsby/

QUIZ TIME!