Race, Place, and Belonging in the Midwest

Abstract

Race, Place, and Belonging in the Midwest Kathryn Schumaker James Endersby and William Horner, Lloyd Gaines and the Fight to End Segregation. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2016. 336 pp. $36.95. Mary Lou Finley, Bernard Lafayette Jr., James R. Ralph Jr., and Pam Smith, eds., The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 495 pp. $40. Lena Hill and Michael Hill, Invisible Hawkeyes: African Americans at the University of Iowa during the Long Civil Rights Era. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016. 230 pp. $20. Natalie Y. Moore, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016. 272 pp. $28.99, cloth. $17, paper. Kerry Pimblott, Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 334 pp. $45. Sun Yung Shin, ed., A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 2016. 224 pp. $18.95, paper. June Manning Thomas, Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. $32.99, paper. In January 1966, Martin Luther King Jr., arrived at his new apartment in Chicago’s West Side, where he and his fellow activists faced a set of concerns that could not properly be classified as the Jim Crow of the South. Legally, the shape of racial injustice differed in the Midwest. Many states in the region [End Page 121] had relatively liberal civil rights laws. And yet African Americans in the Midwest experienced many of Jim Crow’s most pernicious effects including high rates of poverty, limited access to jobs and housing, and poorer educational opportunities compared to their white counterparts. The books reviewed here explore the tension between the image of the Midwest as a welcoming land of opportunity and the reality of persistent racial discrimination and the attendant perpetual struggle for equity and inclusion. Ultimately, each book confronts the issue of belonging—the ability to be recognized as a constituent part of a community, not in the name of “diversity” but instinctively, as it if were common sense. The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North, which chronicles King’s Chicago years, includes a series of essays by historians, musicians, and activists. The collection as a whole argues for the importance of King’s work in Chicago as a turning point in a longer struggle for racial justice in the city. The first chapter, “In Their Own Voices,” includes a wealth of first-person accounts that tell of the distinct issues addressed by the short-lived Chicago Freedom Movement and the diverse ways in which black Chicagoans engaged in the struggle. The rest of the book, which contextualizes the Movement and examines its legacies, focuses heavily on issues of housing, including efforts to secure open housing policies, combat discrimination in lending to black homebuyers, and defend the rights of tenants. Many of the essays confront the characterization of the Chicago Freedom Movement as a failure, which likely accounts for the focus on housing, where the experiences of activists and organizers in Chicago unquestionably had national significance. Less attention is paid to other issues that were central to the Movement, especially education and employment, though the essays engage with other issues including the role of gangs in community organizing, the debate over the concept of nonviolence among the city’s activists, and efforts to combat lead poisoning among the city’s children. Natalie Moore’s engaging book, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, blends autobiography, sociology, and history to understand the historical roots and contemporary shape of the color line in Chicago. The South Side focuses primarily on the issue of residential segregation and its seeming intractability, centering primarily on Bronzeville. The book is largely animated by a desire to understand how the fate of Bronzeville, once the heart of black Chicago, has diverged so dramatically from that of Harlem. The two neighborhoods share [End Page 122] similarities—historically home to vibrant black communities with proximity to natural features and urban centers...