Chicago and its New Negro swagger hum throughout 'Sinners'
(WARNING: spoilers)
"Chicago ain’t s- - - but Mississippi with tall buildings instead of plantations," Elijah "Smoke" Moore says to his impressionable younger cousin Sammie in the movie “Sinners.” They’re driving in the Mississippi Delta in 1932 next to Smoke’s twin, Elias "Stack" Moore. After living seven years up North, the citified brothers returned home to the devil they knew.
"Sinners" — a movie nominated for a record-breaking 16 Oscars — is a Jim Crow-era story of allegorical vampires wrapped in blues, sharecropping and spirituality. The film frequently nods to the unseen character Chicago: a Pullman train car in the background, the sweet Buddy Guy cameo and Outfit mob references.
Chicago shaped the Smokestack twins, and so did World War I.
"Ain’t you a soldier?" a shopkeeper challenges a twin in "Sinners."
"I’m a soldier," a brother confidently says in another scene.
Veterans like the Smokestacks fought for democracy abroad but found their country hemmed them in second-class citizenry, and that dichotomy sparked a national movement. In the 1920s, scholar Alain Locke conceived the term "New Negro" to express an understanding of self and agency in the face of racism. The Harlem Renaissance is most closely associated to the period, but that reflected the cultural aspect. New Negro thought spread to other Northern cities.
I peeped the New Negro swagger of Smoke and Stack revealed early in the film. During a deal to purchase an old sawmill for a juke joint conversion, the white owner called one of the twins a boy. A twin snapped back that they were grown men, flashing money and bullets. I knew a suspected Ku Klux Klan leader wouldn’t take kindly to that urban uppity attitude.
Chicago’s Black population soared by more than 100,000 from 1920 to 1930, and the twins would have joined an influx of WWI vets settling on the South Side. Scholar Chad L. Williams writes about the racial militancy vets brought to the New Negro ideology: "Emerging from the war, the New Negro rejected the conservatism, parochialism, and political accommodationism of the 'Old Negro,' a signifier of individual leaders and methods of civil rights protest deemed outdated in the context of the postwar period."
During the 1919 Chicago race riots, vets used military-style defense of their neighborhoods from white rioters. In 1926, the Victory Monument was erected at 35th and Grand Boulevard in the Black Belt to honor an African American unit that served in France during WWI. It remains there today, the street now King Drive.
In “The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis 1920-1929,” Christopher Robert Reed writes "the New Negro personality of the 1920s bloomed and grew enormously in terms of an expanded African American worldview, expectations, and accomplishments." Chicago represented a place to dream, as migrants transitioned from cotton fields to concrete sidewalks. WWI produced a Black industrial proletariat. Negro women’s clubs worked to advance the race. An upper-class community of doctors, teachers, dentists and social workers expanded. Churches and new political leaders emerged alongside cultural events such as the Bud Billiken Parade. "The father of gospel music," Thomas Dorsey, entertained migrants who couldn’t afford the club and in 1929 switched piano blues chords for a new gospel sound.
Second City ingrained mark on brothers
I imagine Smoke and Stack settled in this new milieu reading the Chicago Defender, purchasing an insurance policy from a Black-owned firm and partying like a scene from an Archibald Motley painting. Maybe shaking the hands of Jesse Binga, who owned the first Black bank in the city, or cosmetics businessman Anthony Overton. At night, the twins headed to South State Street nightclubs on The Stroll. Elsewhere in the Black Belt, the Vendome, Phoenix and Grand Theaters singers Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith graced the stages. Ma Rainey belted blues numbers at the Monogram Theatre, a major vaudeville house on 34th and State Street. One hundred years ago this month, educator Carter G. Woodson launched Negro History Week at the Wabash YMCA. Later that year, on Christmas Day, police raided the Plantation and Sunset clubs for patrons doing a dance called “the black bottom.” Officers also found 20 gallons of liquor. Al Capone’s syndicate controlled those two clubs during Prohibition. Smoke and Stack probably sipped and foot-tapped in their fancy suits before hooking up with his henchmen.
The Second City made its ingrained mark on the brothers. In "Sinners," Smoke and Stack recall serving in the German trenches and hustling in Chicago gangways, their bond unshakable. One of the last scenes reveals that the former sawmill owner indeed led the KKK. It’s "getting a little too uppity around here," he smirks as he and his racist pals prepare to kill Black juke joint revelers at sunrise. Only Smoke is left, and he ambushes the men, tossing grenades and triggering a machine gun; they never saw the attack coming.
The New Negro brandished his own brand of democracy, courtesy of the WWI tools and skills given to him.
Natalie Y. Moore is a senior lecturer at Northwestern University.