Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest by Brent M. S. Campney

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest by Brent M. S. Campney Amy Louise Wood Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest. By Brent M. S. Campney. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2019. Pp. x, 240. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-252-08430-0; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-0-252-04249-2.) Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest is a welcome follow-up to Brent M. S. Campney's earlier book, This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861–1927 (Urbana, 2015), which challenges the popular illusion that Kansas was a bastion of pastoral virtue, free of the racial conflict that consumed the South or urban locales in the North. Instead, Campney argues that racist violence was as important to maintaining racial hierarchy in this midwestern state as it was in the South. Hostile Heartland expands this same argument to the larger region, with chapters that cover histories of racist violence in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Missouri, as well as Kansas. He also extends his time frame, reaching back to the antebellum era and spanning through the 1930s. Campney makes a number of important contributions. First, he is one of just a handful of scholars who have examined lynching as part of a continuum of violence that includes threatened lynchings, homicides, rapes, whippings, and expulsions. Hostile Heartland makes clear that all these various forms of racist violence terrorized African Americans and supported white efforts to institute segregation, by law or custom, in public life. Second, Campney's chapter on [End Page 733] antebellum violence in the Old Northwest upsets the common presumption that Jim Crow–era lynchings represented a new phenomenon. Third, Campney shows how African Americans resisted white attacks, often through armed selfdefense. Black resistance happened organically and locally, rather than through official civil rights activism, and that resistance could engender further attacks and retribution. Fourth, his chapter on the role of law enforcement in aiding and—over time, as the police became more professionalized—stopping lynchings is a careful analysis of the topic that should plant the seed for more scholarship on the relationship between policing and mob violence. Finally, Hostile Heartland contributes to a historiographical trend that seeks to challenge the notion that racism and racist violence were distinctive features of the South. In Campney's reading, what distinguished the South was not white supremacy but demographics; if there were fewer lynchings and other forms of attacks in the Midwest, it was only because there were fewer African Americans in the region. On the whole, white midwesterners targeted African Americans as fiercely as their southern counterparts did. Neither was racist violence merely a product of white southern migrants to the Midwest, as other scholars have assumed. Rather, Campney shows that white migrants from the Northeast were just as protective of white supremacy as those from southern states. The modes of violence that northern and southern migrants used, however, often differed, a point Campney could have elaborated upon. Campney also does not spend much time discussing what motivated this violence beyond white supremacy. He provides thorough context on the racial climate in each state he covers. Readers do not learn much, however, about the political, social, or economic contexts that might have precipitated acts of racist violence. He does note that African Americans were at times targeted because they posed an economic threat to local whites. Were there local circumstances that made those attacks more likely? What other factors might have prompted white attacks? If white supremacy was a persistent fact, why did violence break out only at certain times in certain places—and take the forms that it did? Still, despite these questions, Hostile Heartland is a thickly researched survey that draws a striking picture of just how precarious life was for African American migrants to the Midwest. Amy Louise Wood Illinois State University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association