Radical Culture in Black Necropolis

Abstract

Post–World War II urban history, by prioritizing either political economy or cultural consumption, has tended to produce narratives of African American experience that emphasize marginalization or incorporation. This article examines a group of Chicago activists and musicians surrounding the jazz experimentalist Sun Ra and his business partner Alton Abraham to explore the contribution of radical political currents and heterodox cultural practices to black urban culture of the early postwar period. Sun Ra and his colleagues engaged in various modes of vernacular dissemination—public preaching, political broadsheets, and, especially, musical performances for community associations and local commercial audiences—to challenge what they saw as the catastrophic degradation of black Americans in the postwar city and to present utopian alternatives. In the process, Ra, Abraham, and their associates developed a distinctive form of cultural production, one that departed from the market-liberal, race-relations orthodoxies of metropolitan elites, black or white, and that anticipated the more visible black cultural radicalism of the 1960s.