Origins of the BMRC
Chicago has been a central site of efforts to document, understand, share and preserve Black history and culture for over 100 years. Many of these efforts laid the foundation for the BMRC. Historian Carter G. Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) in Chicago in 1915. Dissatisfied with segregated historical associations and the devaluation of African American history, Woodson sought to create an organization for scholars and the public that would promote the study and appreciation of African American history. The Chicago Public Library’s George Cleveland Hall Branch Library, the first full-service library for Black Chicagoans on the South Side, opened in 1932 and quickly became the center of a robust Black literary community under the leadership of librarian Vivian G. Harsh. Like Woodson, Harsh championed the study and preservation of African American history.
Major New Deal era research studies focused on Chicago’s Black Belt – the areas of the city’s South and West sides that were predominantly Black. The Illinois Writers Project: Negro in Illinois study looked at the experiences of Black people statewide from enslaved Africans in the 18th century to the cultural, political and economic realities of African American Illinoisans during the 1930s. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton was one of the first studies to document Black history, culture and race relations in Chicago. It is from this seminal, groundbreaking text that the Black Metropolis Research Consortium takes its name.
Courtesy of the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, Rare Books, University of Chicago
St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
London : Jonathan Cape, 1946
Black Metropolis spanned the history of Blacks in Chicago from the 1840s through 1940, documenting race relations and racial discrimination against Blacks as well as the culture and forms of community they were able to build in the city. A significant portion of the study focused on Bronzeville, the center of Chicago’s Black South Side. Prior to Black Metropolis, Drake and Cayton worked on research projects that explored racial caste systems in the South, and Black labor organizing, respectively. Drake and Cayton were also influenced by their studies at the University of Chicago with sociologist and anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, and what would later become known as the “Chicago School” of Sociology.
Courtesy of the Chicago Public Library, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection
Noted sociologist, researcher and writer, Horace Cayton Jr. (1903-1970) was born into an illustrious family. His father Horace Cayton Sr. was publisher the Seattle Republican newspaper, and his mother Susie Revels Cayton was a teacher, writer and daughter of Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first African American United States senator. In addition to the research project that would eventually become Black Metropolis, Cayton wrote for the Pittsburgh Courier for nearly thirty years and served as director of Parkway Community House, a central arts hub of the Chicago Black Renaissance.
Courtesy of Roosevelt University Archives
St. Clair Drake (1911-1990) developed a distinct appreciation for African American and African diasporic cultures, often through the lens of anthropological research. A graduate of Hampton University, Drake worked as an instructor and researcher before matriculating into the anthropology graduate program at the University of Chicago in 1937. After publication of Black Metropolis, Drake held faculty appointments at several universities including Roosevelt and Stanford where he was instrumental in founding some of the first Black Studies programs in the nation. Drake also taught at universities in Liberia and Ghana while serving as an advisor to Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah in the 1960s.
The George Cleveland Hall Branch and Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection
George Cleveland Hall (1864-1930) was a prominent doctor, original member of ASNLH, civic leader and the second African American appointed to the Chicago Public Library Board. Hall lobbied for a library branch on the South Side that would serve a growing number of African Americans and secured financial support for the branch from the NAACP, the Chicago Urban League and the Julius Rosenwald Fund. The George Cleveland Hall Branch opened in January 1932 and was the first full-service branch of the Chicago Public Library to serve Bronzeville. Vivian G. Harsh (1890-1960), the library branch manager at Hall, created the “Special Negro Collection” at Hall Branch, which she modeled off of similar collections held at the Schomburg Center, Fisk University Library and Atlanta University Library. The collection grew to contain books, photographs, pamphlets, newspaperclippings,donationsfromlocalpatrons,writers,activistsandresearchers. In 1975 the collection was relocated to the Carter G. Woodson Regional Branch and renamed the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature. The Harsh Collection is the oldest and largest Black history collection in the Midwest.
Courtesy of the Chicago Public Library, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection
The Women’s Reading Group was one of many groups that met at Hall Branch. Vivian Harsh, branch librarian is pictured standing left. Standing right is Charlemae Hill Rollins, the first children’s librarian at Hall Branch. Rollins served in that capacity for thirty years and focused her efforts on building a children’s collection that would inspire self-worth and a sense of broad possibilities for African American children. Rollins frequently spoke to parents about Hall branch resources.
Courtesy of the Chicago Public Library, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection
In 1933, Vivian Harsh started the Book Review and Lecture Forum. Held bimonthly, the forum provided a venue for the wider Bronzeville community to engage the works of Black writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Alain Locke and St. Clair Drake. The forum was a key site of the Chicago Black Renaissance, a cultural movement akin to the Harlem Renaissance that produced formative works of literature, art and music emanating out of the city’s Black South Side.
Courtesy of Regenstein Library, University of Chicago
Brian Dolinar, ed.
The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers
Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2017
From 1936 to 1942, over one hundred researchers led by poet Arna Bontemps and writer Jack Conroy conducted a massive study documenting the African American experience in Illinois from 1779 to 1942. The project was commissioned as part of the Illinois Writer’s Project, a state-based initiative under the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. Bontemps and Conroy attempted to have the study published in 1943, but were unsuccessful. The bulk of the project was then placed in the Special Negro Collection at Hall Branch. In the early 2000s scholar Brian Dolinar working closely with archivist Michael Flug, painstakingly compiled chapters from the Harsh Collection and other repositories that held parts of the project: the Newberry Library, Syracuse University and Fisk University. The volume was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2013.
Photo by Laura Rose
Danielle Allen, an esteemed classicist and political scientist, founded the Civic Knowledge Project in 2003 and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium in 2006. Both efforts were founded collaboratively with the goal of bridging the academy with knowledge communities outside of its walls on the South Side. From 2004 to 2007, Allen served as Dean of the Division of Humanities at the University of Chicago. Allen went on to join the faculty at Princeton in the Institute for Advanced Study before assuming her current roles as the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard and Director of the Safra Center for Ethics.
Courtesy of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium
This document, authored by Danielle Allen, laid the foundation for the Civic Knowledge Project and influenced the early vision of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium.
Courtesy of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium
Outlined in this document is the early vision for the BMRC, including its goals, member institutions and proposed activities. Today, the BMRC continues to operate as a membership-based consortium with staff, a central office and a governing board of directors made up of representatives from our member institutions.
