The Black Chicago Renaissance

(p. xv) Darlene Clark Hine and John McCluskey, Jr. have responded to this negligence, editing an ambitious anthology that has moved this vibrant cultural and intellectual period from the margins of African American history. While artists and intellectuals of both awakenings faced a plethora of challenges in their endeavor to syncretize black vernacular art and literature with more modern styles and tastes, they nonetheless recognized explicit relationships between artistic and intellectual expression, pan-African and Black Nationalist thought, and the efforts of black people to gain full inclusion into the American body politic. The anthology's essays traverse important themes in the fields of African American urban, social, and cultural history, including but not limited to migration, class (particularly working-class politics and consciousness), community and institutional development, and black resistance to white racism.