Selling the Race: Culture Community and Black Chicago 1940-1955 (Historical Studies of Urban America)

About this book

In Selling the Race Adam Green tells the story of how black Chicagoans were at the center of a national movement in the 1940s and 50s a time when African Americans across the country first started to see themselves as part of a single culture. Along the way he offers fascinating reinterpretations of such events as the 1940 American Negro Exposition the rise of black music and the culture industry that emerged around it the development of the Associated Negro Press and the founding of Johnson Publishing and the outcry over the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till. By presenting African Americans as agents rather than casualties of modernity Green ultimately reenvisions urban existence in a way that will resonate with anyone interested in race culture or the life of cities.