<p> Gordon Parks, who directed <em>Shaft</em> and <em>The Learning Tree</em>, took up many weapons in his life-long struggle against racism. The most powerful items in his armory were never bullets or bombs but his pen and camera. As Elizabeth Schultz writes in her essay contribution to <em>Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance</em> (University of Illinois Press), his aesthetic came from the collision of beauty and tragedyelements he found in the landscape and society of his boyhood in rural Kansas. </p> <p>Parks was forced onto the road as a teenager, and like many African Americans of the 1920s and '30s, he found his way to “Sweet Home Chicago.” The difficulty of including Parks in this important collection of essays is that he was truly cosmopolitan. During his decades-long stint as a photographer for <em>Life </em>magazine, he was sent all over the world. Many of his photo essays, not to mention <em>Shaft</em>, were set in Harlem. A prolific writer, Parks wrote no less than six autobiographies, and as Schultz emphasizes, all of them point to the importance of his 1940 move to Chicago, where he was exposed to the collection of the Art Institute and, more importantly, the artists and writers clustered at the South Side Community Art Center. This is his link to the movement that is the subject of <em>Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance</em>. </p> <p>Even casual students of African American culture know of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts Movement of the '60s, but somehow the Black Chicago Renaissance in between has gotten lost. Edited by Steven C. Tracy, the Writers collection works to redress the forgetfulness about a movement that nurtured Richard Wright and Lorraine Handsberry as well as Gordon Parks and dozens more. In his introduction, Tracy, professor of African-American studies at the University of Massachusetts, carefully places the subject in context. Although the collection focuses on writers, some of them pursued other media and all were touched by the wider culture of black Chicago, especially the city's flourishing music scene (Parks even played piano at rent parties). The subjects of the book were neither segregated from white Chicago writers of the era nor isolated from black culture in other cities. Some participants in the Black Chicago Renaissance emerged from the earlier Harlem Renaissance and others survived as elders to the Black Arts Movement. They weren't bound to a manifesto but all were committed to addressing social problems in a realistic or naturalistic mode. </p> <p>The artists represented in Tracy's book may not have changed the world, but their efforts helped inspire a shift in its axis. </p>
