The Rise of Chicago's Black Metropolis, 1920-1929

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. Demography and Ethos 9 2. ''The Whirl of Life'': The Social Structure 34 3. The Golden Decade of Black Business 71 4. Labor: Both Fat and Lean Years 118 5. The Struggle for Control over Black Politics and Protest 146 6. Transformed Religion and a Proliferation of Churches 186 7. Cultural and Aesthetic Expressions 201 Conclusion and Legacy 209 Notes 213 Bibliography 253 Index 265 Illustrations follow page 70

''An important contribution to the field of African American urban history and the history of black Chicago in particular. Reed persuasively cites the need for a reappraisal of Cayton and Drake's classic depiction of Chicago's 'Black Metropolis' by illuminating the role of professionals and political and religious organizations.'' Robert E. Weems Jr., author of Black Business in the Black Metropolis: The Chicago Metropolitan Assurance Company, 1925-1985 ''What is perhaps most beneficial to scholars of urban studies is the convincing and systematic way that The Rise of Chicago's Black Metropolis helps us to reconsider the analysis that has long held ground as the authority on the rise of African American Chicago in the early twentieth century, namely, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton's Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945). Reed invites future scholarship on the subject in offering not only a call for rethinking but also a method for doing so... Reed highlights what Drake and Cayton touched on when he identifies what made the 1920s distinct, and revises their classic text as he applies the historical method to describe business, politics, religion, and activism in considerable detail [...] What Reed has produced with The Rise of Chicago's Black Metropolis, 1920-1929 is a persuasive argument for the emergence of a relative African American triumphalism without the piety and sentimentalism that can often accompany such renderings, and a thorough accounting of the developments and contexts that made such possible.''- Keona K. Ervin, University of Missouri, on H-Urban, Dec 2012