Adam Green. Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955.

Adam Green. Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. 306 pp. $35.00.

Adam Green positions his impressive study of postwar black Chicago against the writings of a generation of sociologists who found little to celebrate about a period marked by economic stagnation and vicious segregation. Devoting his attention largely to the media institutions that originated (and in some cases thrived) in Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s, Green offers a more balanced appraisal of black experience in the city. Chronicling the ambitions of key figures in industries such as publishing and popular music as well as the social context in which they moved, Green depicts Chicago as the focal point of an emergent national black identity on the eve of the civil rights movement.

The concept of "rehearsal" serves Green well in the chapters that bookend this study. Chapter One, "Imagining the Future," describes the African American Exposition of 1940, intended to celebrate seventy-five years of progress since emancipation. Green does not gloss over the attendance problems and severe financial setbacks that made the "first Negro World's Fair" (so christened by the Chicago Defender) less than the success organizers had hoped for. But as Green persuasively argues, the event drew nationwide attention to Chicago as a center for black life (such prominent figures as Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and Duke Ellington participated) and became essentially a "rehearsal for more sustained imaginative enterprises within Black Chicago in years to come" (41). As an example, Green foregrounds exposition organizer Claude Barnett, a reappearing figure in this study, who went on in the 1940s and 1950s to establish Chicago as a center for the dissemination of news about black America through the Associated Negro Press, which distributed features, opinion pieces, and photographs to dozens of black newspapers around the country.

Green's last chapter also makes use of the concept of rehearsal, but this time the precipitating event is the brutal lynching of Chicago native Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. African Americans around the country were already reading about racially based violence and discrimination in Ebony magazine, an outlet of the Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Company. Ebony had been covering the 1955 murder of Belzoni, Mississippi minister George Lee and housing riots in Chicago's Trumbull Park housing development with uncharacteristic frankness, and it was within this context that news of Till's murder broke. At this point Ebony's sister publication, Jet magazine, became the chief venue through which the event would be interpreted nationally. Green gives sustained attention to the photos of Till that appeared in Jet, iconic images of black suffering and humanity indelibly imprinted on what became known as "the Emmett Till generation." Green argues that the national response to these images originating from Chicago represented a "moment of simultaneity," a temporary forging of a self-conscious, national community of African Americans that gestured toward later cohesiveness and activism. Singled out for praise is a figure Green believes has been insufficiently appreciated in historical analysis of the Till tragedy: Mamie Bradley, Emmett's mother, who courageously demanded an open casket for the memorial service, so that the world could see what had been done to her son. She later toured the United States to speak about the event, offering the country a model for activist black motherhood. Green's uncommonly broad intellectual scope is on display in this chapter, where he interprets the response to the Till images in light of such works as Susan Sontag's On Photography and Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain. In other chapters, Green meaningfully invokes the work of various theorists (Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams, Benedict Anderson) to interpret findings that are always carefully grounded in archival research.

Even readers only casually familiar with postwar Chicago will recognize some of the main subjects of Green's chapter on the city's music scene, including Mahalia Jackson, Muddy Waters, and Willie Dixon. But such readers might be surprised at the acuity and verve with which the author demystifies interpretation of black music. Not content with facile statements about music as a natural (and therefore decontextualized) expression of African American identity, Green looks closely at the commercial side of the industry, finding in market developments (the rise of recorded music to replace published sheet music as a revenue stream, the development of commercial radio and the corresponding influence of local deejays) conditions that allowed black artists to exercise unprecedented authority over the production and distribution of their work. His analysis of Mahalia Jackson's career is an example of how Green subjects long-held views to needed scrutiny. Whereas African American music is often assumed to possess a legitimacy that derives from its working-class roots, Green demonstrates that Jackson succeeded in part thanks to decidedly bourgeois entrepreneurial skills. Or while many interpreters have seen the persona of the "bluesman" as cultivated by artists like Waters and Howlin' Wolf as expressing some archetypal (and misogynist) version of black masculinity, Green traces this persona to songwriting and production decisions made by a single individual, Willie Dixon, who was a musician, arranger, and songwriter for Chess Records, the label for which both artists recorded. The significance of Green's title is especially apparent in this chapter, where Green sees the music industry's developing networks of distribution driving a "standardization of race culture across the United States" (90).

A reviewer must be careful not to overstate Green's optimism concerning the experiences of post-World War II black migrants to the urban North. In his thoughtful conclusion, Green reminds readers of the injustices, joblessness, and despair that prompted Richard Wright to depict Chicago as a place where black people were alienated and overwhelmed. Never losing sight of harsh realities, Green successfully restores a degree of agency to African American Chicagoans, seeing them as something more than passive victims of modernity. This message is enhanced by Green's deft use of some twenty-nine handsomely reproduced photographs. While a few of them depict subjects in scenes of urban peril, others show African American professionals at work in the city, and by their collective effort nurturing the sense of community that Green views as central to this formative moment of black history.

Reviewed by

Carl Ostrowski

Middle Tennessee State University