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ABSTRACT
This article analyzes the life of Dr. Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs, a teacher, writer, artist, and public historian who founded Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History in 1961. Throughout her life, Burroughs used art, education, and public history to forge a distinct brand of diasporic cultural feminism that linked Chicago to the African world. I use this term to elucidate the transnational and intersectional feminist consciousness of Burroughs, who rejected perceptions of black women as sexually promiscuous, reshaped dominant practices of respectability through her art and travel, and emphasized connections among racial, gender, and class oppression in diasporic terms. As a theoretical framework, diasporic cultural feminism extends the geographical scope of the African diaspora to include the Midwest, demonstrates how black women were authoritative progenitors of black internationalist thought, and illuminates how race, space, and gender shaped diasporic politics in Chicago.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Blain borrows the term ‘proto-feminist’ from political theorist Joy James, who uses it to describe ‘historical women … who preshadowed contemporary black feminist radicalism’ (James Citation1999, 41).
2 The Black Chicago Renaissance was a dynamically prolific period of African American cultural, literary, musical, and artistic expression that began in the 1930s and lasted into the 1950s (Hine and McCluskey Citation2012).
3 My conception of diaspora derives from Tiffany Patterson and Robin D.G. Kelley’s seminal article, ‘Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World,’ which advances the notion that diaspora is both a process and a condition. As a process, it is continually made through movement, cultural production, and political struggle; as a condition, the diaspora exists within global race and gender hierarchies that are similarly formulated and reconstituted (Citation2000, 20).
4 Historian Frank Andre Guridy uses the phrase ‘forging diaspora’ to describe the ways Afro-Cubans and African Americans ‘reached across cultural and linguistic differences to develop cultural exchanges, forge economic relationships, and construct political solidarities’ based on the idea that they belonged to a broader African diasporic community (Citation2010, 2).
5 I borrow the phrase ‘freedom dreams’ from Robin D.G. Kelley, who introduced the term in his 2002 study Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. For Kelley, black social movements begin within the radical imagination, and dreaming marks the initial moment of resistance and refusal (Citation2002).
6 Key works on black women’s internationalism include (Horne Citation2000; Boyce Davies Citation2007; McDuffie Citation2011; Gore Citation2011; Ransby Citation2013; Blain Citation2018; Blain and Gill Citation2019; Joseph-Gabriel Citation2020) .
7 Historian Kim D. Butler argues that the expressive arts and public history often function as important repositories for African descended communities and comprise crucial sites for the creation and representation of African diasporic communities (Citation2010, 39–40).
8 Conditions in the Black Belt varied, but the majority of homes and kitchenettes were rundown and overcrowded. Many homes lacked ordinary conveniences such as bathrooms, hot water, furnaces, and electric lighting (Chicago Commission on Race Relations Citation1922, 152–3, 189–92).
9 Margaret Burroughs, ‘Remembrance of Paul Robeson,’ Box 46, Folder 370, Margaret Burroughs Papers, DuSable Museum of African American History Archives and Special Collections, DuSable Museum of African American History [hereafter MB].
10 Margaret Burroughs, resume, Box 6, Folder 35, MB.
11 In response to the international crises of fascism and world depression, the Communist Party called for the organization of an interracial, ‘Broad People’s Front’ coalition of liberals, antiracists, radicals, unionists, farmers, socialists, and anti-colonialists. The Party inaugurated a campaign to promote a ‘people’s culture,’ which it hoped would unify the diverse coalition. As Lawrence Schwartz argues, the Popular Front marked the first time that the Communist Party sought to create culture as part of its struggle toward revolution (Schwartz Citation1980; Denning Citation1996).
12 The origins of the SSCAC are murky. Some activists and scholars argue that Burroughs and four other black women originated the idea for the center. Others maintain that a North Side gallery owner named Peter Pollack first proposed the center. Though somewhat peripheral to this article, the inconsistent origin stories are revealing, for as Bill Mullen writes, ‘The conflicting community lore illuminating [the SSCAC’s] origins begins to delineate … the tensions in black cultural politics that it came to symbolize in Chicago’s Negro People’s Front’ (Mullen Citation2015, 81–105; Knupfer Citation2006, 67–72).
13 George White to Margaret Burroughs, 13 March 1956, Box 23, Folder 176, MB.
14 Charles Gordon Burroughs, Home, ca. 1981, Susan Cayton Woodson Papers, Box 11, Folder 18, Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature, Carter G. Woodson Regional Library.
15 Elizabeth Catlett, interview with Clifton H. Johnson, 1984, Box 3, Folder 24, Elizabeth Catlett Papers, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.
16 Burroughs’s use of the descriptor ‘salon’ is significant. Scholars of early modern France have shown that salons were active spaces of intellectual debate and cultural production in France during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and women played a central role in salons’ development. Salonnières typically guided the agenda of topics to be discussed and regulated conversations. Because of this involvement, some feminist scholars have argued that salons constituted distinctly female spaces. Burroughs invoked this tradition of female political and cultural agency when she chose to name her home a ‘salon’ (Goodman Citation1994; Lilti Citation2015).
17 ‘Exhibit on Africa Art Set,’ CD, 30 April 1959.
18 Du Sable is believed to have been born in Haiti to a French seaman and a black Haitian woman around 1745. Little is known about his early life, but scholars suggest that he migrated north to the mudflats of Lake Michigan and became a licensed fur trader sometime in the 1770s. As a trader, he negotiated exchanges between Native Americans and French and British settlers. He eventually settled in the Chicago area and founded a prosperous farm, which he sold around 1800 before moving to the Missouri (Cain Citation2017).
19 Natalia Molina deploys the concept of racial scripts as a metaphor to describe the range of attitudes, beliefs, practices, customs, policies, and laws that underlie the racialization of certain groups. Racial scripts, she concludes, are relational, and they endure as cultural representations and as institutional structures and practices. Moreover, each time a racial script is invoked, ‘it has a hidden power because … we tend to appreciate the force of past arguments.’ In other words, racial scripts endure in part because they constitute a racial ‘common sense’—a way of comprehending, explaining, and acting in the world. Racial scripts do not go unchallenged, though, as dominated communities formulate their own racial scripts, what Molina terms ‘counterscripts.’ Counterscripts, Molina argues, directly challenge dominant racial scripts by presenting egalitarian scripts encoded with an alternative racial common sense (Molina Citation2014, 6–7).
20 ‘Afro-American History Classes at Museum,’ CD, 26 August 1967.
21 ‘New Negro History Bulletin is Out,’ CD, 11 June 1966.
22 Margaret Burroughs, ‘Negro History Class,’ CD, 16 October 1965.
23 Black Venus postcard, ca. 1977, Archibald Motley, Jr. Papers, Box 6, Folder 9, Chicago History Museum.
24 Charles Burroughs to Margaret Burroughs, 3 January 1974, Box 27, Folder 200, MB.
25 Margaret Burroughs Travel Diary, 23 February 1973, Box 116, Folder 1208, MB; Margret Burroughs to Slim Coleman, August 29, 1983, Box 16, Folder 119, MB.
26 Wendy Simmons to Margaret Burroughs, 27 September 1985, Box 13, Folder 18; Weinberg to Burroughs, October 3, 1986, Box 5, Folder 29; Weinberg to Burroughs, February 23, 1989, Box 13, Folder 88, MB.
27 Margaret Burroughs to Gwendolyn Brooks, ND, Box 26, Gwendolyn Brooks Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
28 Taylor uses the term ‘community feminism’ to describe Amy Jacques Garvey’s feminist activism. Community feminists, Taylor writes, are women whose activism ‘discerns the configuration of oppressive power relations, shatters masculinist claims of women as intellectually inferior and seeks to empower women by expanding their roles and options’ within and from the position of helpmate (Taylor Citation2002, 64).
29 Margaret Burroughs and Dudley Randall, memorandum, September 1966, Box 8, Folder 44, MB.
30 Haki Madhubuti, interview with Cornel West, October 25, 1996, in Restoring Hope: Conversations on the Future of Black America, ed., Kelvin Shawn Sealey (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 170–171.
31 Margaret Burroughs to Handy Lindsay, May 1, 1989, Box 6, Folder 35, MB.