ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the theater enlisted an array of print media in articulating a public image of itself as a locus of enterprise, class dynamics, and racial identity. The implications of both strategies for black self-representation are especially marked in the case of a unique entrepreneurial venture begun on Chicago's South Side in 1904, the Pekin Theater, the nation's first wholly black-owned stage. Historians assign the most dramatic change in this distribution to the Great Migration, which began in 1915 in response to the northern demand for industrial labor created by the First World War. In 1905 the New York philanthropic journal Charities devoted its October number to the growing problems faced by blacks in the "cities of the North." The issue of racial identity could have scant relevance for these earlier cultural productions, as it presupposes a Du Boisian racial consciousness that rejected as a loathsome stereotype the minstrel mask still worn by songs like "Take Your Time."
