I’m happy to announce the official release of the paperback issue of The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers! On Saturday, April 18, 2-4 p.m., I will be celebrating at 57^th Street Books, one of the premier independent bookstores in Chicago. I’m honored to be joined by Chris Benson, University of Illinois journalism professor.

You can find the event on Facebook or at the 57^th St. Books website.

My talk will be titled, “A New Deal Town: The WPA & Black Writers on Chicago’s South Side.” I’ll be discussing the influence of the “Chicago School of Sociology” on black WPA workers, many of whom were students at the University of Chicago including Horace Cayton, Arna Bontemps, and Katherine Dunham.

Cayton&Wright with a map of the South Side.

Among them was Horace Cayton who, as a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Chicago, supervised some two dozen WPA projects. This research became the basis of Black Metropolis, the landmark sociological work he co-authored with St. Clair Drake. Although never a college student, Richard Wright had sought out Louis Wirth, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago, who gave him several book titles to read.

I’ll also talk about a letter I discovered by Horace Cayton registering his “most emphatic protest” to the idea of a study of the South Side conducted by the University of Chicago under the auspices of the WPA. The letter was written before Cayton was on the WPA payroll. Ironically, it helped him get a job administering a similar project that would be black-led.