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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).
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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. |
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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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Beauty shops—owned, operated, and patronized by African American women—were a major part of Chicago's Stroll. Indeed, Chicago played a major role in the development of the black beauty industry and provides Baldwin with a fruitful site to explore the gendered nature of the consumer and intellectual marketplace. In the beauty industry, black female migrants found labor opportunities working as sales agents and beauticians and ways to embody their new modern identities through sophisticated hairstyles. Baldwin demonstrates how black women negotiated and put forth their ideas about the meaning of modernity through their participation in consumer culture, thereby transforming a previously exploitative industry into a significant part of black intellectual and political life in Chicago. |
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Somewhat less convincing, but significant nonetheless, are Baldwin's two chapters on cinema: the first on theaters as a site of New Negro consciousness and the second on film production as creative process. Relying on recent scholarship that analyzes cinema as social phenomenon, Baldwin demonstrates that public debates concerning the nature of the films—and the contestations that occurred within theaters—highlight the ways black migrants asserted an intellectual challenge to racial and social stereotypes. Chicago's migrants participated in intellectual debates surrounding the meaning of entertainment in African American urban life, a discussion Baldwin cleverly identifies as the "dialectic of sin(sation) and sentimentality" (p. 124). |
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The book's final examples investigate the "aesthetics and authority" of gospel music and the significance of sport and physical culture to urban black manhood (p. 155). Admonishing against oversimplifying the spirituality of Chicago's black inhabitants into the binaries of "folk" and "refined," "down-home" and "artificial," Baldwin concludes that the production, performance, and mass consumption of gospel music became "the most recognizable New Negro symbol of black sacred modernity" (p.192). Similarly, Baldwin's chapter on the role of sports and recreation in the lives of black Chicagoans offers compelling new insights into the history of race and sports by situating athletic competition within a spatial and geographic framework. For example, he not only considers the style of play, but the social contexts in which sporting events were held. Indeed, what is most compelling about this chapter is Baldwin's recognition of the way that sports intersected with so many other aspects of Chicago's "marketplace of intellectual life"; illuminating similar connections would have been useful in previous chapters. |
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Giving voice to the ways migrants played an active role in expressing their complex ideas through their engagement with and consumption of mass culture will hopefully inspire future scholarship that intersects with intellectual, urban, and cultural history. Baldwin's contribution is not in unearthing an unknown tale or historical figures or moments; the beauty industry mogul, Madam C. J. Walker, filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, gospel music pioneer Thomas Dorsey, and prizefighter Jack Johnson are familiar to most scholars of African American history. Analyzing their cultural and entrepreneurial contributions within the realm of intellectual history is what makes this a pioneering work.
Tiffany M. Gill
The University of Texas at Austin
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