Black Metropolis : A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City [Hardcover]

St. Clair Drake (Author), Horace R. Cayton (Author), Richard Wright (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1945

Ground-breaking when first published in 1945, Black Metropolis remains a landmark study of race and urban life. Based on a mass of research conducted by Works Progress Administration field workers in the late 1930s, it is a historical and sociological account of the people of Chicago's South Side, the classic urban ghetto. Drake and Cayton's findings not only offer a generalized analysis of black migration, settlement, community structure, and black-white race relations in the early part of the twentieth century, but also tell us what has changed in the last hundred years and what has not. This edition includes the original Introduction by Richard Wright and a new Foreword by William Julius Wilson.

"Black Metropolis is a rare combination of research and synthesis, a book to be deeply pondered. . . . No one who reads it intelligently can ever believe again that our racial dilemma can be solved by pushing buttons, or by gradual processes which may reach four or five hundred years into the future."—Bucklin Moon, The Nation

"This volume makes a great contribution to the building of the future American and the free world."—Louis Wirth, New York Times

"By virtue of its range, its labor and its insight, the book seems certain to become a landmark not only in race studies but in the broader field of social anthropology."—Thomas Sancton, New Republic

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"The facts of urban life presented here are in their starkest form," Richard Wright wrote in the original foreword to this penetrating study of Chicago's South Side, first published in 1945. "To have them presented otherwise would have been to negate the humanity of the American Negro." Nearly 50 years later, sociologist William Julius Wilson wrote that Black Metropolis "allows us to consider the significance of a segregated community heavily populated with working poor adults in contrast with a segregated community largely populated with nonworking adults." Simply put, sociologist St. Clair Drake and researcher Horace Cayton produced one of the most comprehensive studies of an African American urban enclave ever written. As in W.E.B. Du Bois's groundbreaking treatise The Philadelphia Negro, the contradictions and complexities of the Afro-American experience are expertly articulated without Eurocentric bias. Using traditional scientific methods of analysis, Cayton and Drake show the existence of a racial color line that keeps blacks segregated in economics, education, and politics, creating a vital cultural city within a city. More importantly, though, Black Metropolis makes the South Side come to life, with Drake and Cayton's hilarious, idiomatic references to the areas' many social groups--from the clothes-conscious, number-running "Upper Shadies" and the respectable "Race Men" of "Bronzeville" to the hypocritical "jackleg" preachers--and their richly detailed explanations of such phenomena as "passing" and the black Chicago community's interactions with white-led organized crime. --Eugene Holley Jr. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 809 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt, Brace and Company; 1st edition (1945)
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0006AQNQY
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,210,049 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Classic, December 9, 1999

By 

D. Joseph Lane - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Paperback)

Black Metropolis is perhaps the founding document of African-American studies, a classic work of sociology that still resonates today. It is a paradigmatic expression of the Chicago School of sociology, however, a school that today stands in some disrepute, at least in some circles. Indirectly, it was the target of James Baldwin's famous attack on Richard Wright in his essay, Everybody's Protest Novel. The claim of the criticism has been that the Chicago School, due to its insistance upon using a "scientific approach", merely reproduces the very terms under which African-Americans have been oppressed--a claim that has proceeded under the warrant of European intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno. Still, Black Metropolis is a landmark study, and, unfortunately, many if not most of its observations and conclusions remain true today, and in fact it could be argued that conditions in the Black Belt of Chicago have gotten worse, not better, since 1945, the year of Black Metropolis' publication--which lends a certain credence to the criticisms mentioned above, though perhaps it should be qualified by saying that they are not so much criticisms of the Chicago School as they are criticisms of American society. Since then, as we know, we have witnessed a great shift in American public opinion away from what some consider to be the excesses of those days; so much so, in fact, that the work of Black Metropolis may again be regarded as a profoundly useful book. Embodying American liberalism as it does--which counted as a grave sin thirty years ago--Black Metropolis may possibly be due for a fresh look.

5.0 out of 5 stars A SIGNIFICANT ANTHROPOLOGICAL/SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY (FROM 1945), January 21, 2011

By 

Steven H. Propp (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Black Metropolis A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City Volume II (Paperback)

St. Clair Drake (1911-1990) was an African-American sociologist, and Horace R. Cayton, Jr. (1903-1970) was an African-American educator, researcher, government official, newspaper columnist, and sociologist.

Here are some quotations from the book:

"There were prophets of doom in the Twenties, but a general air of optimism pervaded the Black Belt, as it did the whole city." (Pg. 80)
"Why, it might be asked, do Negroes continue migrating to Chicago in the face of a color-line? The answer is simple: 'That line is far less rigid than in the South.'" (Pg. 101)
"This web of social relationship between colored people is sharply marked off from the corresponding 'social' world of white people---marked off in the South by law and in the North by custom." (Pg. 115)
"Negroes are generally indifferent to social intermingling with white people, and this indifference is closely related to the existence of a separate, parallel Negro institutional life which makes interracial activities seem unnecessary and almost 'unnatural.'" (Pg. 121)
"(S)ince white women are 'forbidden fruit' to Negro men, it is not surprising that more Negro men than white marry across the color line. It is this one-sided aspect of intermarriage that irks Negro women." (Pg. 137)
"It is undoubtedly true that mere contact is likely to result in some degree of understanding and friendliness. It is equally true, however, that contact can produce tension and reinforcement of folk-prejudices. On the adult level this is especially true if the contact is between Negroes and whites of very different socio-economic levels." (Pg. 281-282)

5.0 out of 5 stars The Relevancy of St. Clair Drake, September 28, 2010

By 

Gloria Menyweather-woods "L. C." (Winston-Salem, NC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Black Metropolis A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City Volume II (Paperback)

Following receival of this book, I immediately begin my research on the issue of Re-Africanization, a concept used in the African Diaspora particularly connecting Afro-Brazilians in their identity search. Knowledge of the impact of the often minimized Great Migration of those of African descent following the death of Booker T. Washington (1915) until 1935 (during the Great Depression). Drake's analysis unveils what Sernett's Bound for the Promise Land suggested, i. e., the migration of Blacks from South to North carried also the differing diametrically-opposite views of Washington & Du Bois. The influence of these two Blackamerican giants' ideologies were manifested as Blacks made the most dynamic, significant move which impacted the personal lives and the personal faith of a historic people. Drake shares the sociological perspective needed to understand the Black Church and its impact and changing ideology which is not necessarily based on theology, as it also may be the sociological. Drake method at examining the City-dwelling of Blackamericans, if followed more closely, takes a view of Black life in the Black Community which differs significantly from the "deficit approach" taken by White Sociologists and Blacks who bought into this belief without giving due consideration to the differences which exists between the races, especially in an age where so many are attempting to encourage one size fit all and to disprove America's heritage about the plight of the "Negro in America." The nonsensical which persists the blindness to the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's National Call to Action which authenticated the theme of the 94th Annual Session of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASLAH) founded by the late Carter G. Woodson, PhD who raised the question about when Blacks would receive the Citizenship promised. Even Moynihan responded it would be two generations in the 1965/66 report. Anyone truly interested in their minds and thoughts being rejuvenated and opened to another way of life would benefit greatly from this writing, even after all these years. An excellent guide for studying Black families today in light of the information which would prove most useful in interpreting Black Family life after the deficit and failure of many sociologists and psychologists to see the life of others through different lenses.