Margaret Bonds’s upbringing and education inculcated in her a profound sense of pride in her racial and familial heritage and an equally profound sense of obligation to “go farther” than those who came before her in using her art for the betterment of the lives of others. Moving from her youth through her years as a struggling musician in New York and Los Angeles during the Depression and World War II, through her ascendance to national and international fame, this chapter traces the development of these themes in her personal philosophy and compositional work over the period ca. 1939–63 in works including the incidental music to Shakespeare in Harlem, The Ballad of the Brown King, and Simon Bore the Cross, leading to their coalescence in The Montgomery Variations (1963–64). The Variations thus emerges as the summit of Bonds’s works centered on the theme of racial justice up to that point.

The Great Migration, which began in the late nineteenth century and witnessed the movement of more than six million Black folk from the agrarian US South to the urban North between 1919 and 1970, and the flourishing of “Black Renaissances” in Harlem, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other Northern urban centers were the essential soil in which are rooted not only the two works that are the subject of this book, but also the lives and careers of Margaret Bonds, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes. This chapter explores the roles of those two large societal seizings of freedom for the poor and oppressed as the context for Margaret Bonds’s career and the source of her career-long commitment to using her art to uplift what she in 1942 called “our oppressed Race” and work for global equality.

The 1930s and the onset of the Great Depression mark a generic and geographic detour that illuminates Black women writers’ radical aims. Their short stories extend and revise aesthetics associated with New Negro women’s writing, like domesticity and racial passing. Black women’s protest short fiction also disrupts the masculinist character of proletarianism by demonstrating how gender and sexuality complicate notions of work, radical politics, and desire. These writers supplant urban crisis narratives with an emphasis on everyday struggles – to find work, to secure decent housing, to raise children, often alone, and to deal with racial as well as intimate partner violence. Their emphasis on intimacy attests to the roots of Black women’s protest traditions in nineteenth-century abolitionism. The intersectional approaches of 1930s writers anticipate not only the postwar fiction of writers like Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Alice Childress but also Black feminist writing in the latter part of the twentieth century by Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, Louise Meriwether, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker, among others.

From the Great Depression to the early 1950s, Chicago was the center of African American literary production. On the South Side, writers such as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank Marshall Davis, Margaret Walker, and William Attaway authored works that broke new ground in African American letters. They came of age artistically in the wake of the Great Migration, and the migratory experience and the challenges of creating new lives in the city became the grand themes of their writing and underpinned a broader creative flowering first manifested in the vibrant jazz and blues of the 1920s. Through local institutions, New Deal cultural agencies, and left-wing artists’ organizations, writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance interacted with performing and visual artists and social scientists, achieved unprecedented critical and commercial success, and sought to build infrastructures supporting black cultural initiatives. Collectively, they created a body of literature that was thematically powerful enough to portray a time of massive economic desperation and social dislocation while stylistically supple enough to incorporate many of the formal innovations of literary modernism.

This chapter outlines the literary history of Chicago from the city’s inception to the present day. Guided by the idea of Chicago as the crossroads of modern America, the chapter argues that the city occupies a distinctive place in American literature by virtue of its particular geographic and material features. As Chicago developed from prairie outpost to modern metropolis inthe nineteenth century, it became home to a diverse range of literary voices that grappled with representing the city’s new urban realities in its literature. The introduction also outlines how especially women, African Americans, and ethnically diverse immigrants have contributed to Chicago literature, and how successive generations of writers have provided different visions of the city that are influenced by the complex cultural and historical contexts of both the city and America at large. Pointing out that the literary history of Chicago is one of reaction by individual writers to their urban environment, the introduction considers the centrality of Chicago literature for styles and movements such as realism, naturalism, and modernism, before providing a short outline of the book’s five sections.

This chapter examines Gwendolyn Brooks’s representation of everyday African American lives in what was at midcentury affectionately known as “Bronzeville.” Her literature elevates the ways these people – especially Black women – found meaning and value in their regular lives, even as they lived in the shadow of a disinterested and segregated city. With a focus on Brooks’s first collection of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, and her novel, Maud Martha, this chapter explores how Brooks’s writing exemplifies humanism and places it in the same populist Chicago tradition of Carl Sandburg, while also maintaining ties to the sociologically informed neighborhood writing of Richard Wright, James T. Farrell, and Nelson Algren. Even though Brooks did not define herself as an African American humanist, she engages with some of its core concepts. Namely, she shows how Black people challenge Christian ideals and how they process death and loss without relying on religious doctrines. Instead, Brooks’s characters look inward and toward their community for aid and redemption.