Black Metropolis, A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City.St. Clair Drake, Horace Cayton

1946 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-567
Author(s):  
Rosalind Lepawsky
Author(s):  
David T. Bailey

This chapter situates the black intellectual Horace Cayton into the vibrant community of Chicago's South Side during the Depression and World War II era. It details the research projects undertaken by Cayton in Chicago, including his labor scholarship and journalism, Cayton-Warner and WPA projects, and ultimately his crowning achievement: the coauthored 1945 Black Metropolis. In charting this flurry of activity, the chapter shows how Cayton never felt satisfied with his position in the black elite and the Chicago School of Sociology. To broaden his activities among working people and artists, Cayton managed the Parkway Community House that he fashioned into a central hub for the black arts movement. The programs, protest meetings, and cultural events at the Parkway House reflected the personality of Cayton, who crossed boundaries of class, race, and respectability.


2012 ◽  
Vol 99 (3) ◽  
pp. 960-961
Author(s):  
R. M. Jelks
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
J. M. Frank Marshall Davis

Editors’ Note: This prose poem appears as part of the introductory material in the first (1927) volume of Frederick H. H. Robb’s remarkable compilation, The Intercollegian Wonder Book or the Negro in Chicago 1779–1927. “Entering Chicago” is attributed there to “J. M. Davis,” but internal and external evidence convince us that this was in fact contributed by journalist and poet Frank Marshall Davis shortly after his arrival in Chicago from his native Kansas. As such, the piece marks the ongoing “migration of the talented tenth” to the Black Metropolis, highlights the ubiquity of the railroad train as icon of Chicago’s modern moment, evidences Davis’s early efforts in free verse influenced by Carl Sandburg and Fenton Johnson, and prefigures the documentary spirit that would animate the most memorable works by writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance....


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