Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City

by St. Clair Drake, Horace R. Cayton, Mary Pattillo

Overview

Ground-breaking when first published in 1945, Black Metropolis remains a landmark study of race and urban life. Few studies since have been able to match its scope and magnitude, offering one of the most comprehensive looks at black life in America. Based on research conducted by Works Progress Administration field workers, it is a sweeping historical and sociological account of the people of Chicago's South Side from the 1840s through the 1930s. Its findings offer a comprehensive analysis of black migration, settlement, community structure, and black-white race relations in the first half of the twentieth century. It offers a dizzying and dynamic world filled with captivating people and startling revelations.

A new foreword from sociologist Mary Pattillo places the study in modern context, updating the story with the current state of black communities in Chicago and the larger United States and exploring what this means for the future. As the country continues to struggle with race and our treatment of black lives, Black Metropolis continues to be a powerful contribution to the conversation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226253213
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	11/10/2015
Edition description:	Enlarged
Pages:	912
Sales rank:	852,968
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 2.20(d)

About the Author

John Gibbs St. Clair Drake (1911-90) was an African American sociologist and anthropologist who founded African American Studies programs at Roosevelt University and Stanford University. His books included Social Work in West Africa, Race Relations in a Time of Rapid Social Change, and Black Religion and the Redemption of Africa. Horace R. Cayton (1903-70) was an American sociologist known for his studies of working class black Americans, particularly in mid-twentieth century Chicago. His books included Black Workers and the New Unions and Long Old Road—An Autobiography.

Table of Contents

Author's Acknowledgment
Introduction by Richard Wright
Introduction to the 1962 Edition by Everett C. Hughes
Author's Preface to the 1962 Edition
Foreword to the 1993 Edition by William Julius Wilson
Introduction: Midwest Metropolis
Part I
1. Flight to Freedom
2. Land of Promise
3. The Great Migration
4. Race Riot and Aftermath
5. Between Two Wars
Part II
6. Along the Color-Line
7. Crossing the Color-Line
8. The Black Ghetto
9. The Job Ceiling
10. The Shifting Line of Color
11. Democracy and Economic Necessity: Breaking the Job Ceiling
12. Democracy and Economic Necessity: Black Workers and the New Unions
13. Democracy and Political Expediency
Part III
14. Bronzeville
15. The Power of Press and Pulpit
16. Negro Business: Myth and Fact
17. Business Under a Cloud
18. The Measure of the Man
19. Style of Living—Upper Class
20. Lower Class: Sex and Family
21. The World of the Lower Class
22. The Middle-class Way of Life
23. Advancing the Race
Part IV
24. Of Things to Come
A Methodological Note by W. Lloyd Warner
Notes and Documentation
Bronzeville 1961
Appendix: Black Metropolis 1961
Postscript 1969
A List of Selected Books Dealing with the American Negro
Suggestions for Collateral Reading, 1962
Suggestions for Collateral Reading, 1969
Index

Editorial Reviews

By virtue of its range, its labor and its insight, the book seems certain to become a landmark not only in race studies but in the broader field of social anthropology.

New Republic

This volume makes a great contribution to the building of the future America and the free world.

New York Times

Black Metropolis is a rare combination of research and synthesis, a book to be deeply pondered. . . . No one who reads it intelligently can ever believe again that our racial dilemma can be solved by pushing buttons, or by gradual processes which may reach four or five hundred years into the future.

Nation

"Black Metropolis has long occupied a place of honor on urban studies syllabi. Its authors combine the imaginative, methodical discipline of Chicago School urban sociology with the razor-sharp critical legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois."

Places

“Black Metropolis is a rare combination of research and synthesis, a book to be deeply pondered. . . . No one who reads it intelligently can ever believe again that our racial dilemma can be solved by pushing buttons, or by gradual processes which may reach four or five hundred years into the future.

Nation Daryl

The cry "Up North!" and the city of Chicago became synonymous as America's second city absorbed the masses during the great black migration of 1910 to 1940. This great migration was a watershed event in American history, transforming the lives of millions of black people and the cities to which they flocked. It had the obvious outcome of turning a primarily southern, rural people into one identified, for better or worse, with the inner cities of the American North and West.

Originally published in 1945, the award-winning, two-volume Black Metropolis is the work of two eminent social scientists, anthropologist St. Clair Drake and sociologist Horace Cayton, trying to describe what this massive movement of people had wrought. It takes as its subject for study one of the largest black communities in the world, at the time, Chicago's inner city, nicknamed Bronzeville. Richard Wright wrote the preface to the 1945 edition. In it he said:

Chicago is the city from which the most incisive and radical Negro thought has come; there is an open and raw beauty about that city that seems to either kill or endow one with the spirit of life. I felt those extremes of possibility, death and hope, while I lived half hungry and afraid in a city to which I had fled ... it was not until I stumbled upon science that I discovered some of the meaning of the environment that battered and taunted me. . . . BIack MetropoIis, Drake's and Cayton's scientific statement about the urban Negro, pictures the environment out of which the Bigger Thomases of our nation come.

This study is critical in locating the site and tracing the circumstances under which southern dreams of freedom and prosperity up North were dashed. It is critical to understanding the modern history of the disenfranchisement of the African American.

Sacred Life

**** Revised edition of the classic work on the socioeconomic condition of blacks in Chicago. Original was cited in BCL3. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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