A Brick and a Bible: Black Women's Radical Activism in the Midwest during the Great Depression by Melissa Ford (review)

Charting the scope and trajectory of leftist politics in the US Midwest is a current feature of historical studies. In particular, scholars of the Black Midwest are challenging the conflation of the American heartland with social and economic conservatism, “American values,” the white, nuclear family, and nostalgia for an imagined, “simpler” past by highlighting the multiple ways that Black people organized and built communities around a shared pursuit of social change. The recent explosion of organizing in Midwestern cities and suburbs to protect Black people from police violence and murder has spurred even greater interest in the history of the region. A Brick and a Bible makes an important contribution to the study of the Midwest as an epicenter of Black radicalism. Presenting a multicity analysis of Black women’s organizing in Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland during the 1930s, A Brick and a Bible indexes “Midwestern Black radicalism”—an eclectic, multidimensional project rooted in a commitment to racial justice, anti-capitalism, class struggle, and revolution. Midwestern Black radicalism, author Melissa Ford argues, defines “a distinct expression of praxis-based Black radical ideology informed by American Communism, African American community-building, Black women’s history of resistance, and the lived experiences of Black women in the Midwest.” Using primary sources such as government records, newspapers, organizational records, and oral histories, Ford outlines how the gender politics of Black radicalism and Black women’s singular contributions to its shaping highlighted the “unique racial, political, geographic, economic, gendered, and spatial characteristics that make up the American heartland.” (3) A Brick and A Bible insightfully notes that what makes the region distinct is less its “climate, environment, geography, and location” and much more its “social and cultural” dimensions, which include racism, neighborhood and housing segregation, migration, the dominance of Black labor, and radical interracial politics.