Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest

Description

Retracing the contours of racist violence beyond the South We forget that racist violence permeated the lower Midwest from the pre–Civil War period until the 1930s. From Kansas to Ohio, whites orchestrated extraordinary events like lynchings and riots while engaged in a spectrum of brutal acts made all the more horrific by being routine. Also forgotten is the fact African Americans forcefully responded to these assertions of white supremacy through armed resistance, the creation of press outlets and civil rights organizations, and courageous individual activism. Drawing on cutting-edge methodology and a wealth of documentary evidence, Brent M. S. Campney analyzes the institutionalized white efforts to assert and maintain dominance over African Americans. Though rooted in the past, white violence evolved into a fundamentally modern phenomenon, driven by technologies such as newspapers, photographs, automobiles, and telephones. Other surprising insights challenge our assumptions about sundown towns, the people targeted by whites, law enforcement's role in facilitating and perpetrating violence, and the details of African American resistance. "In this very smart book, Brent Campney builds upon his vast research unearthing the history of racist violence in America’s heartland. Hostile Heartland is a thorough and impressive work that challenges midwesterners’ time-honored penchant for claiming progressive superiority over the South when it comes to matters of racial egalitarianism and violence. Any reader who has ever contemplated race relations or racist violence in the Midwest today will find clear answers and lines linking the present to the past within these pages. Hostile Heartland opens much-needed windows onto the histories of race relations in the Midwest and the Great Migrations of African Americans to the region."—Kidada E. Williams, author of They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies about Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Contents......Page 6 Acknowledgments......Page 8 Introduction......Page 12 1. The Antebellum Old Northwest: “For the white man, and the white man only”......Page 24 2. Illinois and the Legacy of Antebellum Racist Violence: “The peculiar climate of this region”......Page 46 3. Indiana during Reconstruction: “This negro elephant is getting to be a pretty large sized animal......Page 65 4. Black Families and Resistance in Kansas, 1880–1905: “There is nothing like reputation”......Page 85 5. Missouri’s Little Dixie, 1899–1921: “They flog a negro up there every week”......Page 103 6. The Missouri Ozarks and Beyond, 1894–1930: “Whence all negroes have been driven forth”......Page 124 7. The Old Northwest, 1890s–1930s: “If we do our duty no mob can ever get into this jail”......Page 147 8. The Midwest in the Late Lynching Period: “A queer precipitate of the old and the new”......Page 172 Conclusion......Page 198 Notes......Page 212 Bibliography......Page 244 Index......Page 246 Back cover......Page 254