View a video recording of this event.
What words come to mind when you think about Chicago?
How did poets and writers in this city develop a voice and a language distinct to the city?
If Chicago after the 1919 Race Riots cordoned off Black neighborhoods through restrictive housing covenants and other means, then the writers of Bronzeville also were emboldened by their community's quest for cultural self-determination. By the 1930s, Bronzeville became the city's most creative zone of literary and artistic ferment, a place that inpired work by such writers as Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank Marshall Davis, Margaret Walker, and Richard Wright.
This program will feature readings and conversation about literary language that gives voice to Chicago's difficult and often violent history.
Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots
Visit this page for a complete list of Chicago 1919 public programs.
This event is part of the Newberry's year-long initiative, Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots. It has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor, and by generous support from Edith Rasmussen Ahern and Patrick Ahern. Our Youth Engagement Sponsor is Allstate.
Collaborative partners in Chicago 1919 include the Black Chicago History Forum, Black Metropolis Research Consortium, Blackstone Bicycle Works, Chicago Architectural Club, Chicago Collection Consortium, Chicago History Museum, Chicago Public Library, Chicago Urban League, City Bureau, Kartemquim Films, Middle Passage Production, and Young Chicago Authors.
Chicago 1919: Confronting the Race Riots received the 2020 Outstanding Public History Project Award from the National Council on Public History.
Speakers
Eve L. Ewing, Assistant Professor, University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, is a sociologist of education and a writer from Chicago. She is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection 1919 and the nonfiction work Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side.
Kenneth Warren, Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor, Department of English and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, focuses on American and African American literature from the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. He is author of Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism.
Moderated by Liesl Olson, Director of Chicago Studies, Newberry Library.
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Past Public Programs
Check out video recordings of past Newberry public programs on our YouTube channel.