Bronzeville By Night (Archibald Motley, Southern migrant & Bronzeville resident): Cotton clubs, not cotton fields!

Bronzeville: The Heart of the “Black Metropolis”

47th St. & S. Parkway (MLK)

The Diaspora & the Evolution of Urban Black America

(See Drake & Cayton, 1945))

Urban Centers of Black Entertainment IndustryPlantation Inn - Home of Sunset Earle Shines

Regal Theater’s House Dancers: World Famous Fairly Land Wonders

Fairly Land Wonders

Sunset/Grand Terrace Café: Home of Louis Armstrong

315 E 35th St

Bronzeville’s Black Celebrities?• Ida B. Wells (journalist, civil

rights activist & founding member of NAACP)

• Duke Ellington

• Gwendolyn Brooks (author & 1st black Pulitzer prize winner)

• Richard Wright (author)

• Marla Gables (actress)

• Sam Cooke

• Lou Rawls

• Andrew “Rube” Foster (founder of Negro National Baseball League)

• Home of the Chicago Black Giants!

Duke Ellington

Chicago Black Giants

The Diaspora & the evolution of “Black Celebrity” - Cognitive geography of race evolves!

Bronzville’s Celebration of Black CultureVictory Monument erected in 1926 to honor 8th Regiment of Illinois National Guard for achievement in France in WW I (MLK Dr. & 35th St.)

Bronzeville Map (1996, by Gregg LeFevre); on MLK, Jr. Boulevard, 3 blocks east of MLK branch of public library

Time to Unite (41st & Drexel); sponsored by Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies (CCICS) of NEIU; artist a grandchild of a Delta migrant!

Contemporary Celebration of Culture &Place?

Chicago’s Black Institutions: Cause and Effect of Diaspora– Civil Rights Organizations• NAACP (Hansberry vs. Lee, 1940; Shelley vs. Kraemer, 1948); Urban League; CORE

– Black owned Businesses• Evolution of a new, urban, black consumer culture

– Pullman Porters• 1st & largest Black owned labor union

Overton Hygienic Company; maker of High Brown Cosmetics

Selling The Defender

Pullman Porters & the Psychology of Regional Opportunity?

• Paul Robeson as Brutus Jones in Emperor Jones (1933)

Agents for Change!

Chicago Defender: The “Voice of Black America”- largest black-owned newspaper in the World

The Role of the Black Press?

- Associated Negro Press (ANP); HQ in Chicago

Narrating the migration to the “Promised Land” focusing on its causes & its impacts!

Note: Headline prior to full impact of Diaspora (political mobilization) on federal New Deal policies!

Other “Black Voices” from Chi-townBlack America’s “Reader’s Digest” Black America’s Life Magazine

Dorothy Dandridge

Artistic narrations of the Southern Diaspora ex. Jacob Lawrence; Migration Series

Slums

Other forms of Diaspora “Narration”

- Oral traditions - Journalism- Music?

- Was music the Diaspora’s MOST significant conduit for mainstream cultural exchange & influence?

* Mass migrations & movements (diasporas) have as much to do with ways of noticing or documenting as they do with ways of moving*

Result of Migration?

Jacob Lawrence; Migration Series

Heavyweight champ Jack Johnson (Bronzeville resident) vs. ‘The White Hope” James Jeffries (1910)

Post-diaspora publicity apparatus transitions champ from “brute” to “AMERICAN hero”- Victory over public opinion

Joe Lewis (“The Prince of Bronzeville”) & John Roxborough, symbolic of institutional resources of The Black Metropolis

Diaspora’s impact on evolution of Black “Manhood”?

Bessie Smith – a “post-migration” woman?

Ida Cox, the “Sepia Mae West”

“You never get nothing by being an angel child, You better change your ways and get real wild” (Wild women don’t have the blues – Ida Cox, 1924)

Impact on Womanhood? Gender Relations?

Musically engineered shift in female iconography - icons of female power, earthly wisdom & raw sexuality, etc.

The Diaspora & the evolution of the nature & geography of religion? - Influence of Diaspora makes religion REALLY matter!

Archibald J. Motley; Gettin’ Religion (1925)

Northern vs. Southern Religious Traditions: Transformation & eventual mergence of two distinct

components of African-American culture

Chicago Storefront Church

Re-creation & re-establishment of rural, Southern church-life

Grace Presbyterian Church in Chicago

Role of “Old Settler”, established churches as agents of assimilation to northern, urban life

Broader impacts of Southern Diaspora on American religion?

• Religious diversity

• Revival & diffusion of evangelical Protestantism – Evangelical Christianity attains a more

respectable face?

– Did U.S. become more southern spiritually?

“Man with the Million Dollar Voice,” Rev. C. L. Franklyn (born in Sunflower County, MS; Preached from Cleveland, MS to New Bethel Baptist; Detroit)

Elder Lucy Smith (here in 1941) led  All Nations Pentecostal Church, Chicago’s largest Pentecostal assembly Elder Lucy Smith (here in 1941) led  All Nations Pentecostal Church, Chicago’s largest Pentecostal assembly

Elder Lucy Smith (faith healer at All Nations Pentecostal, Chicago)

Billy Graham; ministry originally HQ in Minneapolis?