Here, we spotlight essays that detail the historical and contemporaneous experiences of black people living in the region.
For most of my adult years in Columbus, I have been thinking about the way monuments can vanish. For the kids in my east-side neighborhood, downtown was a distant planet, only a few miles and an entire universe away from where we kicked broken glass off of basketball courts or climbed atop the roofs of neglected school buildings. I grew to love the monuments of my neighborhood, while also coming to understand that they could disappear, without warning, at any moment... |
A week ago, I was up during the middle of the night trying to figure out if I was really having chest pains or if I was just tripping. Until now, I didn’t realize that these chest pains could have been attributed to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery or the exhausting situation between Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper. And before that, I felt more panic and pressure from trying to help a black mother help her son finish an English assignment minutes before the deadline to make sure he’d graduate from high school... |
It was a fashion show and a car show. It was a place for culture and music and celebration. It was a bastion of Black pride, joy and fellowship, and there was nothing else quite like it in Columbus. |
It is Saturday morning and I have spent all weekend packing up my belongings from my parents northside Milwaukee home into my first apartment. Nina Simone’s “Baltimore” is on repeat. My best friend and now roommate is on the opposite side of town doing the same; it will be her first time living on the northside. I have constantly reassured her that despite what we see on television, Milwaukee is more than its problems... |
Addressing Racism’s Toll: My Minneapolis Experience
Michele Goodwin Minneapolis is a challenging city on race—largely because it is a tale of two different realities. |
My Black womanhood has always felt like a cloak of safety in Chicago. I have been so fortunate to spend a lot of time watching people on buses and trains, and walking through neighborhoods that are not my own to write poems. As long as it isn’t too late, I feel that I can move freely in and out of any and all Chicago neighborhoods in search of a muse. I know that there are Black men in Chicago who do not feel that same freedom. My feminine energy and my empathy allow me to roam freely in this complex and beautiful city... |
My name is John Samuel Wright the 2nd, named after my paternal grandfather, John Samuel Wright the 1st. I am a fourth generation Minnesotan on my father’s side. My mother’s family immigrated from Barbados in the West Indies at the turn of the 20th century. I was born into the Phillips neighborhood, and bred in one of the apartment buildings owned by my grandparents, near Franklin and Chicago, in 1946, while Harry Truman was President... |
Rust: A Black Woman's Story of Growing Up in Northeast Ohio
Tara L. Conley I only know weathered women. Women like my great-grandmother who stared at the lines on her palm to predict a change in the air. Like my aunt, an exercise instructor who ran away to Chicago only to return home with a stroke. And my grandmother, who left one morning in her burgundy Pontiac. She died three months later, after the car accident. My mom withered down to 90 pounds while taking care of my grandmother when she was in a coma. I lost my memory... |
I Am a Black Kansan in a Sea of Red, White, and Blue
L.L. McKinney The questions are relatively harmless, and the sharp fascination with my cadence and the rhythm of my mumbling meter can be amusing. Sometimes I indulge these requests for linguistic gymnastics, letting words roll off my tongue as I juggle letters like a circus performer, swapping them back and forth, cutting them out entirely or forcing them in where they weren’t before. For example, you can pick pecans, but when you bake them with a crust, it’s PEE-CAN pie. Also, there’s an R in “wash.” Webster and Siri will deny it, but where I’m from, we wedge it in after the A... |
|
Cleveland and Chicago: Cities of Segregation
Mark V. Reynolds The Cuyahoga essentially divides Cleveland into the East Side and the West Side. But the divisions between those two sides aren’t just geographical, dictated by nature’s path. Once you clear the downtown area, the East Side is where the black folk live, and the West Side is where the white folk live. There are exceptions—some white folk live in ethnic neighborhoods on the southern tip of the East Side and the northeastern edge by the lake; there is a long-standing pocket of black folks on the far West Side—but East is essentially black and West is essentially white. It has been this way since everyone I know can remember... |
American Bottom
Walter Johnson Even a moderate rain can flood the intersections and lowlands of Centreville. When it rains heavily, much of the town is submerged in two or three feet of water. Water wears away at the foundations of homes and shorts out furnaces and hot water heaters. Outside some of the houses in Centreville, you can see three or four generations of ruined appliances lined up in a row. A resident I met last year told me that he had spent most of the winter living in the back room of his house with a space heater running around the clock... |
Finding my Home in Motown's Margins
Marissa Jackson Sow Classmates laughed at our old car, my kinky hair, and my bulky corduroy pants. The ’90s — the era of the Huxtables and Living Single — were about upward mobility, conformity, and respectability amongst the petit bourgeoisie. Amongst my peers, my father’s Jamaican accent was equally verboten; my peers mocked me mercilessly about the way he spoke both at church and at school until I reached high school. There were other families of African or West Indian descent in Detroit, but the city was much more culturally homogenous than it is today... |
I was momentarily floored by the rampant misinformation and bigoted, anti-Black statements. But, Indiana, outside of the Northwest corner abutting Chicago and a few spots near Indianapolis, was a red state. I graded those essays with a raging headache that would not subside despite my attempts to treat it. I took walks, cleaned my house, baked pies (lots of pies as it was apple season), and even drank a little wine to loosen my nerves and relax. But, every time I returned to that stack of essays my blood boiled... |
But soon I realized that as much as I was exoticizing them, they were exoticizing me. Many students knew each other from feeder schools like Grand Rapids Christian High, Holland Christian, or Timothy Christian near Chicago. For them, arrival at Calvin was like — or literally was — an extended family reunion. I was not part of that family. Neither were the other Black students, who were mostly from Ghana — yep, there are Reformed churches there, too — and weirdly sequestered in the “diversity dorm” at the far end of campus... |
What did my father mean to his black male students? Everything.
Shannon Shelton Miller In the midst of the mess in Detroit, I think of the many children deprived of the opportunity to spend their days with someone like my dad. This Father’s Day, my family will continue to celebrate his memory and mourn his absence — not only from our lives but from the lives of the thousands of children who became part of our extended family when they stepped into his classroom and saw their faces in his... |
Navigating the world as a biracial child can be tricky. While I grew up within a very loving family, sometimes it was difficult to figure out where I fit in to the traditional American racial dichotomy. I could never be white but I was never black enough. Most white people assumed I was 100 percent black until they saw my father. American society has always followed a “one drop” rule for classifying individuals as black if they had any ounce of African ancestry. On the other hand, many black people thought I must be mixed with something because I had that “good hair.” I eventually began to self identify as black, although I never denied my father’s blood... |
Slavery, Freedom and African American Voices in the Midwest
Melissa Stuckey Although African Americans have been minorities for the entirety of their history in the Lower Midwest, their presence and experiences in this space brought forth some of the most critical debates, conversations, and issues that gripped the nation in the nineteenth century. |
Black & Midwestern: On the Mississippi and Sites of Memory
Vanessa Taylor Within this imagined landscape of white blue-collar life, there’s the dismissal of Black people that shaped Midwestern cultures. Cities with rich Black culture and history, like Chicago and St. Louis, get pushed into their own class. But if there’s something unique and differentiating about white people from the Midwest versus white people from the Coasts, then why isn’t there recognition for the complexities of Blackness? |
For me, living so close to the Ohio River evokes mixed feelings. The river trail that I like to walk along near my apartment is scenic, yet long stretches of it are flanked by the railroad, warehouses and industrial sites on either side. At home, I drink water from a filtered pitcher because of years of elevated lead levels in Pittsburgh’s water... |
Every time I returned to Milwaukee, I was forced to be 15 again. I was forced to remember people I had long forgotten about. I was forced to remember restaurants I could never afford to eat in. I was forced to remember neighbors who had long gone to prison. I was forced to remember the playground I was beat up at... |
Stop Pretending Black Midwesterners Don’t Exist
Tamara Winfrey-Harris I am a black woman born and raised in the space between the coasts and above the Mason-Dixon line. I am a face of the heartland, but you might not know it if you’ve been following the Trump-era reporting and commentary about the lives and political choices of people in the Midwest. |
In February 2016, three young men were murdered in a house in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Sixty years ago, in that same house, my grandfather shot and killed my grandmother, then himself. How can one address hold so much history—and so much tragedy? |
I started having conversations with my remaining friends and family in the city about how this multigenerational, deeply ingrained identity of Pittsburgh was ever going to change if no Black people stayed in the city. Two months later, I made the decision to move back to Pittsburgh with no job and to dedicate my career to changing that identity [...] |
After my first year, I started to embrace my Blackness, and there was a massive backlash. Whenever I tried to speak out both in my classes and when I wrote for the DI, I was met with hate mail and bigotry. |
|
What it's like to be black in Naperville, America
Brian Crooks [...] people can be totally cool for years and years but suddenly decide that they need to be super racist because they want to hurt you. They'll say they're sorry, they'll explain how you misinterpreted what they said, but the fact is, they reach for racism because they think it'll emotionally and psychologically destroy you, and that's what they want to do at that moment. |
Hip Hop in Peoria: A Photo Essay
Josh Birnbaum Before you dismiss Peoria rappers as having little to rap about, consider that nearly half of the city’s black residents live below the poverty line and that Peoria’s violent crime rate is the fourth highest in Illinois. |
I don’t want to say we’re stagnant. But being set in your ways, I guess, doesn’t always make for fruitful conversation. Especially here in Detroit. Each time I go out as a black male, I always have to prepare myself for the following [...] |
Because in the metal community, especially out in the Midwest, the racism is a little different. People are not afraid to be vocal when they see something they don’t like. So we would walk into a show out there and a big bearded dude might say, “There’s a black person in here! I can’t believe it! What are you doing here?” |
Anna, Illinois
A.D. Carson Southern Illinois is distinct from the rest of the state because of its curious history, which not only includes the racial violence in Cairo, but it is also one of the very few places in what is now known as the Land of Lincoln where slavery was permitted [...] |
Notes on Summer (Or, Black Girlhood Is a Thing)
Britt Julious Black girlhood is summer. It arrives quick and dies just as fast. Suddenly we are young women, even if we don’t feel it, even if we know intrinsically there is life left to live [...] |
|
Smaller, and Smaller, and Smaller.
Marlon James Because we are the most northern of the north, especially in the many fucked up ways the state views and acts on issues of race, and not just in asserting that second amendment rights were only meant for white people [...] |