Chicago: Black Culture and Impact of Allen Stringfellow
The south side of Chicago where Stringfellow worked in the 1940's became the center for jazz, blues, and soul music. Between 1915 and 1960, a mass migration of people moved to major cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York. This included more than 3 million blacks between the 1940's and 60's in the pursuit to escape racism and lynchings in the south, especially during the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement. The other goal was to escape economic limitations from occupations that included sharecropping, tenant farmings, and farm laborers, jobs that could never adequately sustain a family, especially following the Civil War and World War I. When blacks moved up north, the culture began to shape significantly along with the development of jazz music, theater, and exclusive groups such as the Cotton Club and Juke Joints that housed black musicians.
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In the 1920's, Chicago developed a community of people referred to as Bronzeville, also known as the Black Metropolis. This was a social institution that grew as cultural and economic grounds for black urban life in Chicago. Club De Lisa, Stringfellow's father's club, was one of the popular clubs during the Bronzeville era that attracted the Chicago homosexual community near the late 1930's, where Stringfellow worked. The Chicago Cotton Club also became a gathering place for homosexuals in the 1930's and housed several jazz musicians. It was considered the "nicest of its kind in town," at the time ("Bronzeville's Queer Nightlife"). Club De Lisa was also the only club in the Chitlin Circuit that blacks could sit in. The Chitlin Circuit is a small club that showcases musicians and entertainers, where a soul food dinner and chitlins (chitterlings) are served. It was considered a safe place for blacks during the Jim Crow era on the South Side, along with other Juke joints that were poorly funded.
From the beginning, Chicago has been a relatively segregated city. Once means of transportation through trains and buses by companies such as the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), had grew after World War II, black families gravitated toward the south side of Chicago and whites had started to move away. Race riots triggered along Trumbill Park homes between south Deering and Englewood. By the 1960's the south side became heavily populated with blacks, Hispanics, and Latinos. As blacks moved around, they were less accepted depending on the neighborhood that they moved to. In communities such as Englewood, blacks were more or less accepted based upon the shade of their skin tone. However, now it is considered a dangerous city. Some black families could get away with passing for white because of their skin tone, such as Allen Stringfellow who passed as white living on the north side of Chicago for several years because of his olive skin, blonde hair, and grey eyes.
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Despite some negative aspects that came from poverty and violence that branched from racial division, what Stringfellow provided for the south side and the rest of Chicago was a sense of unity, joy, and pride through his artwork. His time spent at the Community Art Center grounded his place as a black artist and set the scene for many more artists to come within the youth. "Because we were black, the white galleries just weren't open," Stringfellow says. The Center opened in 1941 and became Chicago’s first center for black artists (Chicago Tribune).
"When I was coming up, church and nightclubs were our complete society. With my work, I try to capture the movement, the rhythm, the happiness, the glamour of those times. People looked their best. You didn't go anyplace undressed."
1992
