SOURCE: Rodgers, Lawrence R. “Richard Wright, Frank Marshall Davis and the Chicago Renaissance.” Langston Hughes Review 14, no. 1-2 (spring-fall 1996): 4-12.

In the following essay, Rodgers presents a brief overview of the Chicago Renaissance, especially comparing the differences and similarities between its two best-known authors, Richard Wright and Frank Marshall Davis.

Of the many similarities between Frank Marshall Davis and his more celebrated contemporary Richard Wright, one in particular stands out. Both men were products of the Great Migration, the epic rearrangement of African American culture that saw over six million black southerners leave their homes for Northern and Midwestern border cities between 1916 and the early 1960s. Wright spent his childhood in the Mississippi Delta, miles away from Davis' boyhood home of Arkansas City, Kansas, but despite the distance, they would later record similar frustrations about the lack of opportunity, the general sense of deprivation, and the prejudice each...