Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life [Paperback]

Davarian L. Baldwin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0807857998 | ISBN-13: 978-0807857991 | Publication Date: April 2, 2007

Pushing the traditional boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance to new frontiers, Baldwin identifies a fresh model of urban culture rich with politics, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An important book on the New Negro. . . . Stands tall beside works that have shaped Great Migration historiography. . . . For the pleasure it provides as well as for the intellectual challenges it presents, it should be required reading. I borrow from a cultural icon from another era to sum it up: r-e-s-p-e-c-t."
—Journal of American History

"Richly researched and a welcomed democratization of intellectual history. Baldwin's vibrant prose accentuates the excitement of the city and the stimulating interplay between cultural innovators and their active patrons."
-- Journal of Illinois History

Baldwin skillfully combines original sources such as newspapers and magazines of the period with secondary material to create a work that examines issues of class, economics, socialization, politics, and gender. . . . [Chicago's New Negroes] is a fine addition to not only urban history, but also racial and economic historiography. Highly recommended.

--Choice

"This monograph is much more than an intellectual history . . . . [It] is a fine addition to not only urban history, but also racial and economic historiography."
-- CHOICE

"A theoretically informed and thought-provoking monograph. . . . A risk-taking, important, and creative work that deserves to find a wide readership among students of popular and consumer culture, and U.S., working-class, and African American history."
— The Journal of African American History

"[A] bold and innovative book [which] seeks to challenge commonly held assumptions about the lack of a thriving black intelligentsia in early twentieth-century Chicago. . . . A pioneering work."
— Journal of American Ethnic History

"Makes a significant contribution in shifting the focus of intellectual history from the erudite to cultural producers. . . . Centralizes mass consumers' ideas of modernity alongside key producers and entrepreneurs. . . . A must-read in African American and cultural studies."
— The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

With this publication Baldwin emerges as one of the dynamic and innovative voices in contemporary African American studies.
--Mark Anthony Neal, author of New Black Man

Baldwin breaks new ground in his critique . . .
--A'Lelia Bundles, author of On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker

From the Inside Flap

As early-twentieth-century Chicago swelled with an influx of at least 250,000 new black urban migrants, the city became a center of consumer capitalism, flourishing with professional sports, beauty shops, film production companies, recording studios, and other black cultural and communal institutions. Davarian Baldwin argues that this mass consumer marketplace generated a vibrant intellectual life and planted seeds of political dissent against the dehumanizing effects of white capitalism. Pushing the traditional boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance to new frontiers, Baldwin identifies a fresh model of urban culture rich with politics, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (April 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807857998
• ISBN-13: 978-0807857991
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #344,902 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Delivers a punch!, May 3, 2007

By 

Beverly Larsen (Ann Arbor, MI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Paperback)

From its opening pages, Chicago's New Negroes delivers a knockout punch. Baldwin opens his monograph with a retelling of Jack Johnson's 1910 heavyweight victory and its impact on Black Chicago, and thus only begins to weave an epic and compelling tapestry that demonstrates how Black people "acted" rather than were "acted upon." He resituates ideas once limited to discussions of the Harlem Renaissance and moves them geographically to Great Migration-era Chicago. There, dots are connected to demonstrate the very tangible relationship between consumer culture and intellectual life.

To the reader's delight, Baldwin resists the tendency to provide a straightforward "history" of African Americans in Chicago in the early twentieth century. While the text does follow the stories and innovations of such major players as Madame CJ Walker, Thomas A. Dorsey, Oscar Micheaux and baseball's Rube Foster, it also provides a much needed space in which we get to hear the thoughts and words of everyday people, those who sat in beauty parlors, enjoyed the early years of cinema, attended sporting events, and made a way despite the racial, social and economic limitations. We soon determine that southern migrants to Chicago brought with them not country ways, but entirely new, entirely modern, ways of thinking.

For authors, allowing everyday people to speak for themselves is sometimes difficult. Yet, Baldwin manages to make these voices heard and it is a credit to his writing style. His presentation is especially adept in the sports chapter. Here, Baldwin takes the reader on a tour of Black Chicago's various "playgrounds." We have no problem envisioning the juking, the fakes, the fast forwards, the trucking, the passing and dribbling and their possible meanings for building a better world.

Through chapters devoted to the "mapping" of the Black Metropolis, beauty culture, film exhibition and filmmaking, the rise of gospel music and the sporting life, Baldwin allows a glimpse into a world of possibility, a world where popular culture is just as, if not more, worthy of study as so-called arts and letters. He forces a new understanding of even the Harlem Renaissance, an ambitious project for sure. While the book is a scholarly monograph, Baldwin's forays into social and cultural theory are so nuanced as to make the book accessible to a wider audience. And for that we should be thankful. Even though the urgent and triumphant stories within Chicago's New Negroes take place seventy five or a hundred years ago, the lessons we learn from them and the hope we take with us when we close the book are timeless. And are even more so in an era when Black culture is appropriated, diffused, and often taken for granted.