Midwest Unrest
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Midwest Unrest
In the nation’s so-called heartland, racism is sometimes subtler than in other parts of the country but just as insidious. When Black communities across the United States went up in flames in the 1960s, Midwest cities, where racial inequity was endemic, were among those most likely to burn. Midwest Unrest explores those rebellions, paying particular attention to the ways that region, race, class, and gender all played critical and often overlapping roles in shaping Black people’s resistance to racialized oppression. Focusing on the uprisings in three midsize midwestern cities—Cincinnati, Ohio; Omaha, Nebraska; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin—Ashley Howard argues that urban rebellions were a working-class response to the failure of traditional civil rights activism and growing fissures between the Black working and middle classes. Utilizing arrest records, Kerner Commission documents, and author-conducted oral history interviews, Howard registers the significant impact the rebellions had in transforming the consciousness of African Americans and in altering the relationship between Black urban communities and the state. Specifically, multiple parties, including municipal governments, city residents, and most importantly rebels, wielded urban revolt as a political tool to achieve their own objectives. Revealing a new dimension of the Black Freedom Movement, Howard moves the understanding of these disturbances from aberrant acts of violence to historically contingent acts of resistance, highlighting the coeval nature of organized protests and violent outbursts.
Bygone Utopias and Farm Protest in the Rural Midwest
This book explores those who long for “bygone utopias,” times before rapid, culturally destructive social change stripped individuals of their perceived agency. The case of the wave of foreclosure protests that swept through the rural American Midwest during the 1930s illustrates these themes. These actions embodied a utopian understanding of agrarian society that had largely disappeared by the late 19th century: hundreds to thousands of people fixed public auctions of foreclosed farms, returning owners’ property and giving them a second chance to save their farm. Comparisons to later movements, including the National Farmers’ Organization and the protests surrounding the 1980s Farm Crisis highlight the importance of culturally catastrophic social change occurring at a breakneck pace in fomenting these types of bygone utopian actions. These activists and movements should cause scholars to re-think what it means to be conservative and how we view conservatism, helping us better understand why we’re seeing a contemporary resurgence in nationalist and reactionary movements across the globe.
The American Midwest
Author: Andrew R. L. Cayton
language: en
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Release Date: 2006-11-08
This first-ever encyclopedia of the Midwest seeks to embrace this large and diverse area, to give it voice, and help define its distinctive character. Organized by topic, it encourages readers to reflect upon the region as a whole. Each section moves from the general to the specific, covering broad themes in longer introductory essays, filling in the details in the shorter entries that follow. There are portraits of each of the region's twelve states, followed by entries on society and culture, community and social life, economy and technology, and public life. The book offers a wealth of information about the region's surprising ethnic diversity -- a vast array of foods, languages, styles, religions, and customs -- plus well-informed essays on the region's history, culture and values, and conflicts. A site of ideas and innovations, reforms and revivals, and social and physical extremes, the Midwest emerges as a place of great complexity, signal importance, and continual fascination.