Chicago's African American Community In Photographs

Many novels, poems, and works of nonfiction have explored Chicago's African American community and the Great Migration from the South which vastly expanded it. This short new book, "African Americans in Chicago" (2012) is part of the "Images of America" series of photographic histories which capture the nature of local American communities. I have learned much from the series about places that I have visited and places that I don't know. Born on Chicago's South Side in the Bronzeville neighborhood, author Lowell Thompson (b. 1947), worked in advertising for most of his adult life and is a lifelong resident of Chicago.

In the short introduction to the book, Thompson accurately describes what he has done: "although much of the information here is historical, this is not a history book. I see it more like an African American family album. I have tried to include the visage of the entire family, from those of the 'usual celebrated subjects' to the ones most usually ignored." Thus, photographs of famous places and community leaders in Chicago's African American community, including Robert Abbott of the Chicago Defender, Ida Wells, Jesse Jackson, Ernie Banks, Pinetop Perkins, pioneering aviator Beatrice Brown, Barack Obama, and many others appear side by side with unfamiliar individuals from the pages of family albums collected by the author. Thompson also wants to offer a positive portrayal of his subjects to counter the stereotypes that plagued American portrayals of African Americans up to the mid-1960's. He writes: "Because African American images have been so historically stereotyped, debased, distorted, or ignored, the images here act as evidence of our existence as real, dignified, positive, and sentient human beings." The book includes many photographs of artists and art studios, musicians, academics, writers, business people, and well-dressed young people and students.

Although the book begins with early Chicago and its first non-native American resident, an African American named Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, its focus is on the Great Migration, as described in Elizabeth Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns" and other books. In a chapter called "Goin' to Chicago 1", Thompson describes the first part of the Great Migration between 1915 and 1920, spearheaded by the African American newspaper, the "Chicago Defender", while in the following chapter, "Goin' to Chicago II" he describes the even larger second wave around WW II from 1940 to about 1960. The photographs emphasize the Bronzeville community where the author, as he states many times, was born and raised. As the influx of people continued through the Migration, the African American community expanded, as documented in the book. Large housing developments were constructed, which became breeding grounds for crime and poverty, and many have since been demolished. Thompson describes how in recent years, Chicago's African American community has become somewhat reduced in size, leaving many empty places. The chronological ordering in the chapters of the book is not precise and frequently shifts back and forth in time, resulting in a collage-like presentation which on occasion is confusing and repetitive.

The book draws heavily of photographs from the Works Project Administration and other archival sources, showing people and places. I learned a great deal from the photographs of Chicago's Bronzeville that no longer exists, with its banks, churches, rowhouses, nightclubs, parks, theaters, and schools. The book captures the changing rhythms of African American city life. The book emphasizes Chicago as a center of African American publishing, with the Chicago Defender and Chicago Bee newspapers and the Johnson Publishing Company,the publisher of "Ebony" and the largest African American publisher in the United States. The book makes frequent reference to Richard Wright's "Native Son" and "12 Million Black Voices". But the book that receives the most attention is "Black Metropolis" Black Metropolis, a lengthy 1945 study of Chicago's South Side by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton.

As Thompson says, Chicago's African American community is far too vast and complex to be covered in a 128 book of photographs. He writes that his book "cannot claim to be the full story of the incredibly deep and rich saga of African Americans in Chicago, but I have tried my best to make it a good start." Another recent book in the Images of America series, for example, is devoted to a photographic history of the "Chicago Defender" alone, as an integral part of Chicago's African American community. Chicago Defender (Images of America) Thompson's book is a good introduction but both in text and in photographs, I would like to see much more of Chicago's Bronzeville.