From Hyde Park to the Highlands: St. Clair Drake and the Struggle Over Black Land in the African Diaspora

This essay considers the origins, scope, and content of the Cayton-Warner research project and St. Clair Drake’s senior role in writing Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), with the sociologist Horace Cayton. Based on data collected by the Cayton-Warner project, between 1937 and 1941, Drake and Cayton’s Black Metropolis represented the first ethnography of Chicago’s all-Black Bronzeville; it also represented a new way of theorizing about Black communities, by illustrating the attachment developed by Black Chicagoans, for an organized way of life they did not want to see all together disappear with integration. Produced within the context of a vibrant Chicago renaissance, Black Metropolis pushed back against racist academic discourses on Blacks and the city, and linked the University of Chicago to Black intellectuals, writers, and activists in, and beyond, Chicago’s South Side. Following the publication of Black Metropolis, a legal struggle with the University of Chicago over the razing of Black homes in Hyde Park sensitized Drake to the land struggle of the Kikuyu people in Kenya. The politics of urban renewal and the struggle against settler colonialism in East Africa would ultimately lead Drake to Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana at the dawning of that nation’s independence.