"Defiantly Ambiguous": Life in the Black Midwest

Abstract

THE MIDWEST, GEOGRAPHICALLY AND CULTURALLY, is a particularly difficult region to define. Writer Tamara Winfrey-Harris, for example, describes the nation’s middle zone as ‘the space between the coasts and above the Mason-Dixon line’, a definition of the Midwest that relies more on other regions than it does on the Midwest itself (p. 168). Recently, Midwestern scholarship has begun seeking to draw more attention to a region often overlooked in favour of the East and West Coasts, questioning long-held assumptions about the region and beliefs about whose voices we should turn to in order to understand life there. Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest, the first publication from the newly formed Black Midwest Initiative, participates in this conversation by arguing that in mainstream efforts to define the region, Black stories of the Midwest have been ignored or misrepresented, despite the fact that the Midwest is home to millions of Black residents who have formed robust and thriving communities. In seeking to fill in this representational void, the anthology brings together academics, activists, artists, and students to explore the question of what it means to be Black in a region itself often overlooked or misunderstood. What emerges is a collection of poems, essays, oral histories, and photographs that consider the Black Midwestern experience from many different angles to create a reading experience that is sometimes disjointed and frustratingly organised but always compelling, and that speaks both to academics engaged in Black and Midwestern studies as well as to a more general audience seeking a starting place for learning about Black lives in the United States. The Midwest’s significance in the history of Black Americans is, at least factually, well established. The Midwest was a frequent destination for many Black Americans looking to escape the South and find new opportunities in factories during the Great Migration, which saw the movement of approximately 8 million Black people from the South to the North, Midwest, and West between 1890 and 1980 (p. 92). As a result, the Black