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

by Davarian L. Baldwin

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. Baldwin explores an abundant archive of cultural formations where an array of white observers, black cultural producers, critics, activists, reformers, and black migrant consumers converged in what he terms a "marketplace intellectual life" Here the thoughts and lives of Madam C. J. Walker, Oscar Micheaux, Andrew "Rube" Foster, Elder Lucy Smith, Jack Johnson, and Thomas Dorsey emerge as individual expressions of a much wider spectrum of black political and intellectual possibilities. By placing consumer-based amusements alongside the more formal arenas of church and academe, Baldwin suggests important new directions for both the historical study and the constructive future of ideas and politics in American life.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Sociology, Grad School, American History, Race

384 pages, Paperback

First published April 2, 2007

About the author

Davarian L. Baldwin is a historian, cultural critic, and social theorist of urban America.
Baldwin was Associate Professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College and Professor of American Studies at Tinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.

Degrees:
Ph.D., New York Univ. (2001)
M.A., New York Univ. (1997)
B.A., Marquette Univ. (1995)

Reviews

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

I recently read this book for a class (African American historiography). While I preferred Righteous Propagation (Mitchell) which was assigned for the week prior, most of the class found this to be the superior book. I will chalk up my preference for Mitchell to its relation to my dissertation research. Baldwin's book looks at the effects of migration (and the Great Migration)into Chicago. What is most interesting about this book is he examination of material culture. The chapter on Beauty culture is my favorite. This book provides an interesting analysis of gender/power.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good one. I had to read this for a class I had on African-American historiography, and I really enjoyed it. I'm actually incorporating some of it into my master's thesis.