Baldwin, Davarian L. Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

While the book follows the stories and innovations of Madame CJ Walker, Thomas A. Dorsey, Oscar Micheaux and baseball's Rube Foster, it also provides a space in which we get to hear the thoughts and words of everyday people, those who sat in beauty parlors, enjoyed the early years of cinema, and made a way despite the racial, social and economic limitations. While the book is a scholarly monograph, Baldwin's expedition into social and cultural theory is so nuanced as to make the book accessible to a wider audience. Davarian Baldwin argues overall that this mass consumer marketplace generated a vibrant intellectual life and planted seeds of political dissent against the dehumanizing effects of white capitalism.

This book overall is great wonderful if you want to learn about black innovators in Chicago. But if you are interested in Oscar Micheaux in particular, then the best chapter would be the fourth entitled, “The Birth of Two Nations: White fears, black jeers, and the rise of a race film consciousness”.  The chapter begins by discussing the history and impact of Birth of a Nation. It was an escape in which the traditional white power structure of the South was asserted and black migrants had never come north. But Baldwin proves this point invalid in his historical evidence and he also shows that Griffith’s film created two nations because people like Micheaux had to respond to the story that was told in Birth of Nation. A really interesting point that he mentions is that fact that films like Within Our Gates had to constantly battle with showing the truth of the South to the masses, but also still keeping the traditional black amusement forms. He calls this “sensational realism”. He then goes on the mention Micheaux’s life and Baldwin notes the significance of Oscar Micheaux's five silent and nine sound films in constructing a New Negro racial consciousness. He gives plenty of historical evidence and reviews from the time, which helps to put the films in a clear cultural perspective.

11/21/97
Episode 84

A parable of politics and race in America. The story of Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington, told on the anniversary of his death. We first broadcast on the tenth anniversary of his death and reran this on the 11th. Washington died November 25, 1987.
Act One. Yesterday. A history of the brief mayoral career of Harold Washington, and its lessons for black and white America, as told by people close to him. Many of them are activists and politicians: Lu Palmer, Judge Eugene Pincham, Congressman Danny Davis, then-alderman Eugene Sawyer. There are people from his administration--Jacky Grimshaw and Grayson Mitchell--and some reporters who followed his story: Vernon Jarrett, Monroe Anderson, Gary Rivlin, Laura Washington (who became his press secretary). Plus a few ordinary voters, and a political opponent of the late mayor. Act One continues after the break.
Act Two. The present and the future. Thoughts about why there are no black mayors in the nation's largest cities today--New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. Plus a visit to a white Chicago ward, to see if ordinary voters have learned any tolerance in the last ten years since Washington's death.
Song: "At Last" Etta James