Bronzeville By Night Archibald Motley Southern migrant Bronzeville
Bronzeville By Night (Archibald Motley, Southern migrant & Bronzeville resident): Cotton clubs, not cotton fields!
The Diaspora & the Evolution of Urban Black America Bronzeville: The Heart of the “Black Metropolis” (See Drake & Cayton, 1945)) 47 th St. & S. Parkway (MLK)
Urban Centers of Black Entertainment Industry Plantation Inn Terrace Sunset/Grand - Home of Sunset Café: Home of Louis Armstrong Earle Shines 315 E 35 th St Fairly Land Wonders Regal Theater’s House Dancers: World Famous Fairly Land Wonders
The Diaspora & the evolution of “Black Celebrity” - Cognitive geography of race evolves! Bronzeville’s Black Celebrities? • Ida B. Wells (journalist, civil rights activist & founding member of NAACP) • Duke Ellington • Gwendolyn Brooks (author & 1 st black Pulitzer prize winner) • Richard Wright (author) • Marla Gables (actress) • Sam Cooke • Lou Rawls • Andrew “Rube” Foster (founder of Negro National Baseball League) • Home of the Chicago Black Giants! Duke Ellington Chicago Black Giants
Bronzville’s Celebration of Black Culture Bronzeville Map (1996, by Gregg Le. Fevre); on MLK, Jr. Boulevard, 3 blocks east of MLK branch of public library Victory Monument erected in 1926 to honor 8 th Regiment of Illinois National Guard for achievement in France in WW I (MLK Dr. & 35 th St. )
Contemporary Celebration of Culture &Place? Time to Unite (41 st & Drexel); sponsored by Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies (CCICS) of NEIU; artist a grandchild of a Delta migrant!
Chicago’s Black Institutions: Cause and Effect of Diaspora – Civil Rights Organizations • NAACP (Hansberry vs. Lee, 1940; Shelley vs. Kraemer, 1948); Urban League; CORE – Black owned Businesses • Evolution of a new, urban, black consumer culture – Pullman Porters • 1 st & largest Black owned labor union Selling The Defender Overton Hygienic Company; maker of High Brown Cosmetics
Pullman Porters & the Psychology of Regional Opportunity? • Paul Robeson as Brutus Jones in Emperor Jones (1933) Agents for Change!
Chicago Defender: The “Voice of Black America” - largest black-owned newspaper in the World
The Role of the Black Press? - Associated Negro Press (ANP); HQ in Chicago Narrating the migration to the “Promised Land” focusing on its causes & its impacts! Note: Headline prior to full impact of Diaspora (political mobilization) on federal New Deal policies!
Other “Black Voices” from Chi-town Black America’s “Reader’s Digest” Black America’s Life Magazine Dorothy Dandridge
Artistic narrations of the Southern Diaspora ex. Jacob Lawrence; Migration Series Slums
Other forms of Diaspora “Narration” - Oral traditions - Journalism - Music? - Was music the Diaspora’s MOST significant conduit for mainstream cultural exchange & influence? Result of Migration? * Mass migrations & movements (diasporas) have as much to do with ways of noticing or documenting as they do with ways of moving* Jacob Lawrence; Migration Series
Diaspora’s impact on evolution of Black “Manhood”? Heavyweight champ Jack Johnson (Bronzeville resident) vs. ‘The White Hope” James Jeffries (1910) Post-diaspora publicity apparatus transitions champ from “brute” to “AMERICAN hero” - Victory over public opinion Joe Lewis (“The Prince of Bronzeville”) & John Roxborough, symbolic of institutional resources of The Black Metropolis
Impact on Womanhood? Gender Relations? Bessie Smith – a “postmigration” woman? Musically engineered shift in female iconography - icons of female power, earthly wisdom & raw sexuality, etc. Ida Cox, the “Sepia Mae West” “You never get nothing by being an angel child, You better change your ways and get real wild” (Wild women don’t have the blues – Ida Cox, 1924)
The Diaspora & the evolution of the nature & geography of religion? - Influence of Diaspora makes religion REALLY matter! Archibald J. Motley; Gettin’ Religion (1925)
Northern vs. Southern Religious Traditions: Transformation & eventual mergence of two distinct components of African-American culture Chicago Storefront Church Role of “Old Settler”, established churches as agents of assimilation to northern, urban life Re-creation & re-establishment of rural, Southern church-life Grace Presbyterian Church in Chicago
Elder Lucy Smith (here in 1941) led All Nations Pentecostal Church, Chicago’s largest Pentecostal assembly Broader impacts of Southern Diaspora on American religion? Elder Lucy Smith (faith healer at All Nations Pentecostal, Chicago) • Religious diversity • Revival & diffusion of evangelical Protestantism – Evangelical Christianity attains a more respectable face? – Did U. S. become more southern spiritually? Billy Graham; ministry originally HQ in Minneapolis? “Man with the Million Dollar Voice, ” Rev. C. L. Franklyn (born in Sunflower County, MS; Preached from Cleveland, MS to New Bethel Baptist; Detroit)
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