We forget that racist violence permeated the lower Midwest from the pre-Civil War period until the 1930s. From Kansas to Ohio, whites orchestrated extraordinary events like lynchings and riots while engaged in a spectrum of brutal acts made all the more horrific by being routine. Also forgotten is the fact African Americans forcefully responded to these assertions of white supremacy through armed resistance, the creation of press outlets and civil rights organizations, and courageous individual activism. Drawing on cutting-edge methodology and a wealth of documentary evidence, Brent M. S. Campney analyzes the institutionalized white efforts to assert and maintain dominance over African Americans. Though rooted in the past, white violence evolved into a fundamentally modern phenomenon, driven by technologies such as newspapers, photographs, automobiles, and telephones. Other surprising insights challenge our assumptions about sundown towns, who was targeted by whites, law enforcement's role in facilitating and perpetrating violence, and the details of African American resistance.| Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Antebellum Old Northwest: "For the white man, and the white man only" 2. Illinois and the Legacy of Antebellum Racist Violence: "The peculiar climate of this region" 3. Indiana during Reconstruction: "This negro elephant is getting to be a pretty large sized animal 4. Black Families and Resistance in Kansas, 1880–1905: "There is nothing like reputation" 5. Missouri's Little Dixie, 1899–1921: "They flog a negro up there every week" 6. The Missouri Ozarks and Beyond, 1894–1930: "Whence all negroes have been driven forth" 7. The Old Northwest, 1890s–1930s: "If we do our duty no mob can ever get into this jail" 8. The Midwest in the Late Lynching Period: "A queer precipitate of the old and the new" Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index Back cover |"Brent M. S. Campney details lynchings and other forms of anti-Black violence from the antebellum era to the 1940s in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas. . . . Hostile Heartland succeeds in demonstrating that the Midwest was not paradise for African Americans." —Journal of African American History
"With clear, engaging prose, Campney's Hostile Heartland: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest speaks to the historiographies of the Midwest's importance, lynching and antiblack violence more generally, and activism." —American Historical Review
"Brent M. S. Campney returns to the themes of his groundbreaking work This is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927 in which he argued that white Kansans liked to imagine that their state was a model of enlightened progress in race relations. . . . Hostile Heartland thoroughly and convincingly documents the chilling ferocity of racist violence." —Kansas History
|Brent M. S. Campney is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He is the author of This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861–1927.