Reviewed by Tiffany M. Gill | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 27.4

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Reviewed by Tiffany M. Gill | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 27.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

*Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life.* By Davarian L. Baldwin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xiv + 363 pp. Maps, photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).
Davarian Baldwin's bold and innovative book seeks to challenge commonly held assumptions about the lack of a thriving black intelligentsia in early twentieth-century Chicago. Refusing to limit his analysis to "the traditional intellectual spheres of church and academe" (p. 19), Baldwin takes his readers into beauty shops, public theaters, storefront churches, and sporting arenas to gain insight into Chicago's New Negro intellectual consciousness. Baldwin reconceptualizes the history of the Great Migration and rejects the Harlem-centric model of black intellectual and cultural production in this period by illuminating what he calls a "marketplace of intellectual life" (p. 5), a physical and ideological space where consumer culture and the development of ideas converge.	1
Baldwin begins his study with an analysis of the cultural geography of Chicago's so-called Black Metropolis. In particular, he focuses on an area known as the Stroll, a thirteen-block section along State Street that was the leisure and entrepreneurial center of African American life in the city. According to Baldwin, the Stroll was the main space where old settlers and new migrants negotiated the meaning of modernity in the urban marketplace and where institutions of vice and respectability commingled and supported one another.	. . .

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