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Reviewed by Clovis E. Semmes | Book Review | The Indiana Magazine of History, 104.3 | The History Cooperative
104.3  
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September, 2008
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Selling the Race
Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955

By Adam Green
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 306. Illustrations, notes, index. $35.00.)

In Selling the Race, Adam Green examines Black Chicago and its role in shaping a national consciousness among African Americans. Green argues that blacks in Chicago during and after World War II developed an imagination and a sense of group life that reconfigured existing views of politics and racial identity—changes that remain influential today. For Green, blacks, at this time and in this city, engaged the challenges of modernity in an unprecedented fashion. 1
      The substance of Green's analysis is found in five chapters. Chapter one investigates the history of the 1940 American Negro Exposition in Chicago, the first black-organized world's fair. Green pays particular attention to the role of the event's principal organizer, Claude Barnett, founder of the Associated Negro Press. He points out that, although the exposition failed to attract sufficient attendees or revenue, the event offered evidence of Black Chicago's awareness of its pivotal place in American life. 2
      Chapter two examines the centrality of Black Chicago in the nation's popular music. Green argues that Chicago blacks gained significant leverage in a music business that became more decentralized after 1940. He explores this thesis through brief investigations of Chicago-con nected music icons Mahalia Jackson, Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, and Willie Dixon, and through a consideration of Chicago's role in black- appeal radio and its central progenitor, disk jockey Al Benson. . . .
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