In 1940, Richard Wright created an international sensation with his novel about racism and alienation set in the “Black Belt” of Chicago’s South Side. A year later, government photographers helped Wright illustrate grim, overcrowded conditions there in the non-fiction “12 Million Black Voices.”
But the photographers found there was more than despair in what came to be known as Bronzeville. Their lenses took in a community bursting with migrants from the South, bustling with businesses and professionals, and bubbling with talent and creativity. From 1941 to 1943, they documented a full sweep of life in the country’s black capital at Depression’s end and the entry into war.
Their work became part of an expansive photo album of America collected by New Deal and, later, war agencies. More than 100 of the images are on display in the Du-Sable Museum of African American History. They capture parts of Bronzeville that were later lost to urban blight, as well as values that are helping sustain the neighborhood as it revitalizes.
— Charles Storch
Hardship and hope
DuSable Museum exhibit looks at Bronzeville in the early 1940s
Older visitors to a gallery in the DuSable Museum of African American History are peering at walls of black-and-white pictures, searching for familiar faces in pictures taken 60 years ago. Children are seeing images of businesses, nightspots and other establishments once frequented by their grandparents but subsequently lost to the wrecking ball.
They are taking in the exhibit “Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures 1941-1943,” which opened at the DuSable on Dec. 8 and continues there through Feb. 29. The show was originally shown last year at the International Center of Photography in New York and was brought here through a $50,000 grant from Chicago’s Joyce Foundation.
Bronzeville — a South Side neighborhood with boundaries often given as 26th Street on the north, 67th Street on the south, Cottage Grove Avenue on the east and the Dan Ryan Expressway on the west — is undergoing a long-awaited revitalization. The exhibit is a reminder of a time of both hardship and promise there, of a ghetto that bustled with commerce and talent at the end of the Depression and the approach of war.
“The pictures,” wrote guest curator Maren Stange in her accompanying book, “remind us today of urban possibilities yet to be recognized and fulfilled.”
They also remind us of an amazing collection of 77,000 photographic images produced between 1935 and 1943 that are stored in the Library of Congress and readily accessible over the Internet (www.memory.loc.gov). They were part of a New Deal social documentary project that helped produce such photo-text classics as James Agee and Walker Evans’ “Let Us Now Praise Fellow Men” and Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor’s “An American Exodus.”
Stange says the Farm Security Administration project was intended to document the rural poverty and displacement of people caused by the Great Depression and drought of the 1930s. It also was to highlight efforts of the Roosevelt administration to bring relief.
In April 1941, two FSA photographers, Edwin Rosskam and Russell Lee, followed that displacement to Chicago’s Black Belt, a 10-square-mile area then bursting at the seams from an unremitting migration of African-Americans from the South begun three decades earlier. Their immediate assignment was to illustrate a section of a historical survey on black Americans being written by Richard Wright, who had made a sensation the year before with “Native Son,” a novel of racism and alienation set in Chicago.
Wright introduced the two white photographers to those struggling in the community. He showed them condemned buildings that were being reinhabited by the newer migrants, many of them crowded in mean “kitchenette” flats.
But he wasn’t their only guide. Sociologist Horace Cayton (co-author with St. Clair Drake of the 1945 study “Black Metropolis”) introduced them to members of a growing middle class, a large churchgoing population, and a concentration of talent that helped the area overtake Harlem as the U.S. capital of black culture.
Later in 1941 and during 1942 and 1943, with the project now part of the Office of War Information, photographers John Vachon and Jack Delano went to Bronzeville. Their assignment: show blacks participating in the war effort and help promote an image abroad of an inclusive American society.
In an interview, Stange, 56, a professor of American studies at New York’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, said the photographers’ work transcended the agendas of their Bronzeville guides and government bosses.
“They knew exactly how to come into a community and record salient elements in telling photos,” she said.
The four produced 1,500 pictures in Chicago. Only 19 were used in “12 Million Black Voices.” Most haven’t been exhibited in decades.
Stange and DuSable’s chief curator, E. Selean Holmes, have organized the 116 pictures in the exhibit around four themes: house and home; work; church; and going out.
Perhaps most compelling are Lee’s forays into flats and homes. Using a midsize press camera and one or more synchronized flashguns, he produced stark images of family members posed together or doing routine chores.
The photos “are so compelling,” said Holmes, “because they allow us to peer into the lives of individuals and into their homes.”
