Overview

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 E. 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.

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9781625342423

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Reviews

Engaging and highly readable, Black Bostonians and the Politics of Culture, 1920-1940, is well-suited for general audiences as well as scholars interested in learning more about the history of African American contributions to the culture of Boston and New England. Roses provides a welcome and much-needed foundation for further study by documenting the important cultural leaders and artists who created an independent arts movement aimed at elevating and publicizing black cultural creativity while working to dismantle the color line. --The New England Quarterly

"""Roses’s thoroughly researched histories of several theater companies and biographies of their founders and players provide evidence for her measured analysis of why black theater thrived in ways that, say, literature did not. [...] As a sourcebook, Black Bostonians is amazing. Roses’s research is deep and her footnotes are meticulous. [...] Black Bostonians and the Politics of Culture is defined by its expansiveness and inclusiveness."" — ALH Online Review, XXVI.1 (2018)"

Author Information

Lorraine E. 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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