Standing in the Center of the Black Belt Only Tells Part of the Story: Teaching the Migrations and African American Cultural Formation in Chicago during the 1910s and 1920s

“Stand in the center of the Black Belt-at the corner of Chicago’s 47^th St. and South Parkway,” St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton wrote in Black Metropolis, and “[a]round you swirls a continuous eddy of faces-black, brown, olive, yellow, and white. Soon you will realize that this is not "just another neighborhood" of Midwest Metropolis.”  These oft-quoted lines come from perhaps most famous section of the Black Metropolis.  Here we find a discussion about social, political, and cultural heart of Black Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s and the formation of community a survival culture where residents, across race, class, political, and gender lines, find their place in the larger social milieu. 

While generations of urban scholars still consult, reference, and  teach this invaluable text, it has a weakness.   By fixating the discussion of African American cultural politics at this particular temporal and spatial moment, Cayton and Drake missed an opportunity to show that while 47^th and South Parkway may have been the center of African American culture in Chicago during this time, the cultural activities that existed at this intersection neither started there nor was the only place where cultural politics were fostered.   

This paper, while paying attention to how the centers of African American cultural politics in Chicago, just as Southern migrants, moved into the city, it,  more specifically, will focus on strategies to teach and help students these cultural shifts within larger social and political movements of Black urban life and Northern migration during the decades before the 1930s.