Davarian L. Baldwin's Chicago's New Negroes and Adam Green's Selling the Race revise the dominant view of black Chicago as an object lesson in the history of ghetto formation and urban decline. As early as the 1920s and 1930s, scholars surveyed the city's increasingly segregated African American neighbourhoods and found – to borrow a phrase from black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier – a ‘city of destruction’, where migrants failed to adjust to modern urban life, and where black urbanites who managed to rise to the middle class became wrapped up in a fantasy world of self-interested consumerism. In subsequent decades, historians and sociologists have depicted black Chicagoans as increasingly divided by class differences and unable to break down structures of segregation and discrimination in the substantially flawed ‘promised land’. Baldwin and Green offer an important qualification to this standard narrative, showing the ways in which black Chicago was, in Green's words, ‘a site of creativity rather than constraint: a space of imagination as much [as] one of brute fact’ (Green, p. 2). Carefully avoiding nostalgic celebration of a functional black city within a city, and recognizing the limits of racial progress in the Black Metropolis, Baldwin and Green reveal Chicago's underappreciated role in the construction of a national black culture.

Baldwin places black Chicago of the 1920s on the same map as the more celebrated Harlem Renaissance and uncovers the roles working-class black migrants played in transforming the city's public spaces and ideals of respectable behaviour and appearance. For example, as black men and (mostly) women built a booming beauty products industry, they also replaced idealized visions of black female beauty with more practical looks for working-class black women. Similarly, black moviemakers rejected informative films about how to behave in the city in favour of more entertaining, even bawdy, productions for audiences seeking release from work and alternatives to racist films. Working-class black musicians popularized gospel music even among the most respectable of preachers by demonstrating its appeal to diverse migrant audiences in auditions, performances and ‘race records’. And black baseball players, boxers and basketball's Harlem Globetrotters (actually of Chicago origin) transformed the sporting life from a Progressive Era social control project to an affirmation of a new kind of black manliness that celebrated the spectacle of black stars starring in an otherwise largely white market. Arenas of black cultural production, Baldwin suggests, ‘ultimately became the structural foundation for Chicago's New Negro intellectual life’, informing, for instance, the consumer boycotts and labour and civil rights organizing of the 1930s (Baldwin, p. 25). This connection between the newly popular pleasures of urban nightlife and social movement politics requires further investigation, but Baldwin convincingly shows that Chicago's New Negroes offered the possibility for cross-class and ideologically hybrid political, economic and cultural movements.

Green examines the development of black Chicago's mass media in the 1940s and 1950s, highlighting middle-class and elite African-Americans' efforts to employ social science, music, radio and the press to re-imagine a national black culture in ways that were both liberating and deeply conformist. The telling moment occurred in 1955 when John Johnson's Jet magazine published brutal photographs of the body of Emmett Till, the young black Chicagoan murdered for allegedly harassing a white girl while on a trip to Mississippi. The Till photographs created a public outcry across America, which represented the culmination of ‘the project of fashioning institutional, entrepreneurial, market-driven and national forms of black culture from the pivot point of Chicago’ (Green, p. 12). The upshot, Green suggests, was ambiguous. Black Chicagoans grew increasingly capable of spreading a message that criticized the legacies of slavery and built hope for a better future – the Till photographs, after all, helped spark the modern Civil Rights Movement. On the other hand, black Chicago's cultural leaders presented a hope for racial progress that reinforced ‘classic liberalism as a dominant structure of modern black life’ – they sold the race on the benefits of consumer culture, individual economic improvement and an aversion to radical political ideologies (Green, p. 15).

These books provide an imaginative complement to Arnold Hirsch's history of the making of the second ghetto, the many sociological studies of black poverty and persistence in Chicago and recent investigations of black religious and political creativity by historians such as Wallace D. Best and James N. Gregory. Yet Chicago's New Negroes and Selling the Race also point to the need for more social history of the relationships between cultural production and everyday life in black Chicago. How did the working-class cultural dissent Baldwin uncovers inform efforts to sustain what historian Earl Lewis calls the ‘home sphere’, where residents educated children, maintained households and neighbourhoods and pressured the city's political system to work for local communities? How did the masses of black Chicagoans who do not appear in Green's study practise or resist the black liberalism he describes? And, how did black liberalism clash with or transform other political currents in black Chicago, such as working-class black self-determination and black feminism? These questions attest to the richness of the two studies, which leave us wanting more.