Black Bostonians and the Politics of Culture, 1920-1940
ISBN: 9781613764770
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University of Massachusetts Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Arts; Theater; African American authors; African American artists; African American arts; African Americans; African Americans;

In the 1920s and 1930s Boston became a rich and distinctive site of African American artistic production, unfolding at the same time as the Harlem Renaissance and encompassing literature, theater, music, and visual art. Owing to the ephemeral nature of much of this work, many of the era's primary sources have been lost.

In this book, Lorraine Elena Roses employs archival sources and personal interviews to recover this artistic output, examining the work of celebrated figures such as Dorothy West, Helene Johnson, Meta Warrick Fuller, and Allan Rohan Crite, as well as lesser-known artists including Eugene Gordon, Ralf Coleman, Gertrude "Toki" Schalk, and Alvira Hazzard. Black Bostonians and the Politics of Culture, 1920-1940 demonstrates how this creative community militated against the color line not solely through powerful acts of civil disobedience but also by way of a strong repertoire of artistic projects.

Lorraine Elena Roses is professor emerita of Spanish at Wellesley College. She is coeditor of Harlem's Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900-1950 and Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of One Hundred Black Women Writers, 1900-1945 .

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