Black and Indigenous Histories of the Ohio Valley

On March 13, 2020, Louisville Metro Police entered the home of Breonna Taylor with a no-knock warrant in search of illegal drugs. They found no drugs in her apartment, but the incident ended with officers gunning down Breonna, a 26-year-old paramedic. Breonna spent her young career responding to emergency calls and saving the lives of fellow Louisvillians, but on the night of March 13, 2020, fatally wounded by police bullets and struggling to breathe, she laid on the floor for more than twenty minutes without medical attention. No one came to her aid—as she had done for many others—before she expired.

Most Americans had not heard of Breonna Taylor until George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020. Massive protests against police violence erupted nationwide following Floyd’s death. And the world finally heard her name: Breonna Taylor. Those protests placed a spotlight on Louisville in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, causing historians to rekindle conversations about race and state violence, class and inequality, and populations and public health.

We present this open-access issue of Ohio Valley History during an unsettling time. As a noun describing an uncomfortable set of emotions, the term “unsettling” speaks to our current moment. It is also resonates in its verb form: to unsettle, to disrupt. For this special issue, Ohio Valley History is highlighting scholarship and archival collections that engage in forms of generative unsettling. Nationally, protests demanding racial justice continue across the country and the coronavirus pandemic worsens. In the Ohio Valley, many Louisvillians and their allies mourn the killing of Breonna Taylor and demand the arrest and charging of the three police officers involved in her death, while COVID-19 rates and unemployment from the pandemic’s economic fallout continue to rise. A housing crisis looms, with forty-four percent of renter households in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana at risk of eviction.¹ Economic stress on health care institutions has exposed vast and longstanding inequalities in public health that reaches into and beyond access to care, intersecting with concerns about fair housing and education, among other issues.

Unsettling can be necessary and generative work, as activists for racial justice and the Movement for Black Lives make clear. Presented here are essays that challenge established narratives about the region’s past, re-tell more familiar stories from diverse perspectives, and unpack the mythology that continues to shape popular understandings about the region’s history. With Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and the Louisville unrest in mind, we have selected scholarship that speaks to colonialism, racial tensions, regional identity, and activism in the Ohio Valley from ancient Indigenous metropolises through to 20th century struggles over civil rights. In these essays, unsettling takes many forms. Several authors featured here unsettle popular mythologies about the region, while others center profoundly destructive histories of unsettling—of dispossession and eviction, of violence and exclusion.

Several questions guided our selection process, including: How have past Ohio Valley History authors analyzed issues of colonization, Indigenous dispossession, systemic racism, and class inequality? How have OVH authors drawn connections between Indigenous, Black, women’s, queer, and working-class histories in the region? How can this open-access journal issue invite more research in these fields? Such questions illuminate significant gaps in scholarship and highlight the authors’ efforts to retrieve buried narratives. The stories we selected map both Louisville and the region from their origins in settler violence and racial capitalism through the racial and class underpinnings of the city’s long record of urban protests, helping explain how we arrived at May 28, 2020. They reveal how the best historical writing recovers fragments and revives entire chronicles of the past— stories and interpretations that, while always known, have been repressed buried, suppressed, sidelined, whitewashed, or actively erased.

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The nightly demonstrations began as a response to profound and longstanding injustices: segregated communities, violence, municipal neglect, and low wages. The crowds were peaceful and interracial. The Courier-Journal pointed out that there were few white people among the initial protestors. Those protestors expressed their dissent by marching on downtown Louisville. With little trepidation, city leaders, led by the mayor, came down on the side of law, order, and property. Officials boarded up parts of downtown and converted City Hall into a veritable fortress. They suspended businesses and closed main thoroughfares. While groups of heavily armed “anti-mob” militias roamed Louisville’s streets, politicians and media across the nation blamed the demonstrations on “the spread of socialism.” At last, city officials used property damage—broken street lamps and smashed windows—as a pretext to escalate. The mayor and chief of police called out nearly two hundred police officers, who responded first with blank cartridges, then with live ammunition. A handful of protestors, and some bystanders, soon lay dead.²

This disquieting scene did not occur in the summer of 2020; it occurred in the summer of 1877. Its instigators were not racial justice and Black Lives Matter protestors from various walks of life; they were Black sewer workers. Its backdrop was not a global pandemic; it was the constant threat and deadly cycle of cholera, yellow fever, and smallpox epidemics that killed tens of thousands of Americans during the decade. The widely castigated “shadow organization” was not BLM or Antifa; it was the Workingmen’s Party of the United States. Indeed, what became known as the Great Railroad Strike involved hundreds of thousands of workers from New York to San Francisco, but in Louisville it was galvanized by elements of the Black working-class. In this sense, the recent protest movement is not only a predictable response to a history—or perhaps an elemental bedrock—of systemic inequality and race-class policing in Louisville; it also fits squarely within the city’s experience of popular uprisings from below and the region’s history of marginalized communities.

The articles we have selected trace those community frameworks of violence, removal, segregation, and inequality to the nation’s original unsettling: the bloody work of Euro American colonists seeking the dispossession and erasure of Indigenous peoples. This unsettling laid the foundation for the contemporary United States and Ohio Valley. “Native Nations set the conditions for the creation of the United States,” Muskogee/Creek scholar K. Tsianina Lomawaima explains, because “Native lands were claimed as U.S. land.” By 1826, the United States claimed by executive order and treaty the homelands of Cherokees, Delawares, Kickapoos, Miamis, Osages, Potawatomis, Shawnees, and other Native Nations within the Ohio River Valley. To force these land cessions and to implement Indigenous removal, the U.S. government regularly resorted to violence.

Since the first Europeans arrived on North America’s shores, Euro Americans have crafted elaborate narratives of Indigenous disappearance to justify the unsettling of Indigenous peoples. In late nineteenth-century Kentucky, Jacob F. Lee explores how the Filson Club’s founding in 1884 rested on the mythologizing work of Colonel Rueben T. Durrett and his allies, who eulogized early Euro American explorers and colonists in the region and depicted Indigenous inhabitants as doomed to vanish. Lee’s essay illustrates how the Filson Club, with its emphasis on white family genealogies and veneration of Anglo-Saxon “pioneers and progress,” played a critical role in constructing a specific interpretation of Kentucky’s past. In addition to being white, elite, gendered, and steeped in Old South sentimentality, this version of events was stridently anti-Indian, using the monolithic Native and the romance of settlerism as a part of a shared past around which (unlike the sometimes-contested Lost Cause of the Confederacy) virtually all whites could agree and rally.

This regional mythmaking obscures histories of Native presence and power. Recent scholarship featured in Ohio Valley History centers Indigenous histories and challenges narratives of disappearance. Terry A. Barnhart’s scholarship draws attention to elaborate Indigenous earthworks and mounds near present-day Cincinnati—physical monuments to a deeper, longer urban history along the Ohio River. Barnhart unpacks how early non-Indigenous residents of Porkopolis denied Indigenous production of the mounds while simultaneously looting and destroying them in name of capitalist development. Articles by Elizabeth Mancke and Jason Herbert, meanwhile, examine power, politics, and territoriality among and within Native Nations, and between Native Nations and Euro-American agents in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Collectively, these pieces serve as potent reminders that the Ohio Valley was and is Indian Country.

Though white communities on both sides of the Ohio River were largely united in their nostalgia for white conquest, slave and free labor politics, Civil War loyalties, and cultural identities divided citizens within states and united them across boundaries. Neither North nor South, East nor West, spatial identities in the Ohio River Valley have been shaped by white invasion, national expansion, and shifting political borders. It is still a place where regions intersect. The Ohio River “border” often proved remarkably porous, and this borderland status Further resists—unsettles—fixed histories and identities.

This political fluidity and cultural hybridity reveals a region that defies binaries and resists simple narratives. As Thomas Bahde and Matthew Salafia explain, rather than a straightforward beacon of freedom, the antebellum Lower Middle West featured large-scale slaveholding and rampant slavecatching. While the racial domination of slavery and Jim Crow prevailed on the south side of the Ohio River, the north side was often characterized by the brutal violence of exclusion. Jack S. Blocker, Jr.’s study of the Lower Midwest exposes the prevalence of mobbings, sundown towns, and “race riots” (a euphemism for white mobs attacking Black communities) immediately north of the Ohio River. In fact, lynchings may have been proportionally greater in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois than in the former slave states. The region that eminent historian of Black life after slavery Leon Litwack referred to as “north of slavery” was no safe harbor.³

Nor is the Ohio’s south bank reducible to a regional monolith. Essays by Stephanie Cole and Luther Adams, which explore Black migration to and Black experiences in Louisville from the antebellum era through the early 20th century, demonstrate how the region was shaped by the city’s reputation as a place of southern charm and a northern, urban economy. Despite the appearances of a progressive city, both Cole and Adams stress that while the Ohio Valley was distinctly different than the Deep South, African Americans were still required to navigate the racial tensions of a southern city. Yet rather than a place that was debilitatingly oppressive, the urban and cosmopolitan aspects of the regional middle ground afforded discrete opportunities for mobilization, resistance, and agency. Distressed actors—victims of systemic and interpersonal assault and systemic persecution—nevertheless shaped their own worlds in myriad and dynamic ways. Studies by Jonathon Free and Tracy K’Meyer reveal the extent of African American community activity, civil rights organizing, and anti-segregationist party politics south of the Ohio River “boundary.” Despite resistance from Black communities and small groups of white allies (labor unions and progressives), these accounts betray the more general role of elite (white and wealthy) institutions in creating public space, defining urban development, and shaping the physical characteristics and spatial parameters of Black and working-class life.

This history of vast material disparities and segregated public space contains profound contemporary implications. Gentrification, too, is a destructive form of unsettling. In this issue, Samuel Abramson challenges Louisville’s “All-American city” reputation by exploring the housing crisis in the 1960s. Kathryn Ann Schumaker’s article tackles the battle for racial equity and the struggle against state violence in Ohio Valley education, and its lessons are especially germane in the era of COVID-19. While educators struggle with reopening and implementing virtual learning strategies, the Trump administration attempts to force public schools to open by threatening to withhold federal funding from districts that refuse to require in-person instruction. School funding is widely connected to property taxes, which exposes the lack of education funding in low-income areas. As such, withholding federal funding for public education would have the greatest impact on underserved populations and children with special needs—a strong echo of the push for racial equity in the 1950s.

Conversations around civil rights, equity, and citizenship aren’t limited to race and ethnicity but include sexuality. Catherine Fosl’s scholarship provides insight into the Ohio Valley’s role in the contemporary fight for LGBTQ+ rights, highlighting same-sex marriage activism in Louisville in the 1970s, one year after New York’s famous Stonewall Uprising. In the shadow of Stonewall’s fiftieth anniversary, activists continue to battle political efforts to retract the civil rights advancements made in the LGBTQ+ community. This history proves that the organizing and protests of decades past are still sorely needed. There is, indeed, always pastness in the present.

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There is both historical and moral value in destabilizing harmful myths: revealing how the romance of the “First West” is a story of settler-colonial displacement and genocide that paved the way for economies based on human bondage; how the “progress” of the New South degraded the natural environment and proved a nightmare for countless—and too often nameless—industrial workers; or how the social costs of beautification and bulldozing in the twentieth century came, without exception, at the expense of marginalized communities. This fable-busting equation must involve not only challenging the old, but creating the new (or, more accurately, reclaiming something that is not new at all): striving to salvage, contextualize, and center marginalized voices. We chose several of the aforementioned essays from recent themed issues of Ohio Valley History featuring Black, LGBTQ+, and Native histories. These editions have both highlighted first-rate scholarship and proved vital to correcting old institutional wrongs.

Yet the myths of Indigenous disappearance in the region designed and disseminated by men like Durrett are remarkably sticky. The articles presented here represent some of the strongest works addressing Indigenous history featured in the OVH, and they have all been published within the last four years. Chronologically, the scholarship on Indigenous histories in the region falls off in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, after removal. The journal has yet to publish an article addressing Indigenous histories in the twentieth century, despite the fact that the region remained an important transportation corridor for Native peoples through the railroad age and was also the site of the first meeting of the intertribal Society of American Indians in 1911. There are also opportunities for the OVH to showcase recent scholarship addressing the relationship between Indian removal and the expansion of race slavery and the intersections between Black and Indigenous histories more broadly. Honor Sachs’s review essay is featured here in large part because of her reference to recent work by Christina Snyder on Great Crossings, an interracial community of enslaved persons, Indigenous students, and White teachers and landowners in central Kentucky. Snyder’s work is just one prominent example of the critical insights drawn from intersectional scholarship.

The Ohio Valley is a region with a rich history and a diverse population with stories that must be explored no matter how tense or painful they may be. Although in recent years the OVH has published scholarship on Black and women’s histories, African American experiences are not monolithic and the journal must work diligently to amplify diverse voices in the region. Future scholarship might include more immigration and immigrant histories, from nineteenth-century immigrant groups (especially those outside Cincinnati and Louisville) to more recent incomers from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It might also spotlight the complex experiences of Black Appalachia (and of non-white Appalachia in general). Or the often-overlooked stories of double marginal communities: rural Black, non-white queer, or working-class women stories. Indeed, in addition to Indigenous, Black, and women’s histories, the region’s working-class—a working class that is of course disproportionately non-male and non-white—remains fertile ground for historical scholarship, critical investigation, and popular engagement.

In sum, we might strive for even more histories—both academic histories and public and community narratives—that spotlight the agency of common people and explore their self-activity in resisting oppression and exploitation. With this in mind, this issue includes several collections essays that spotlight archival holdings in the region. It is our hope that these essays offer readers an opportunity to contemplate sources and consider future projects at a time when the Filson and other research institutions are closed to the public. There are more unsettling histories that warrant our attention and analysis and it is imperative that scholars and community members engage in this unsettling together.

As we begin the new academic year, school districts are grappling with decisions to reopen schools in the midst of a public health crisis. COVID presents the obvious threat, but the loss of precious lives such as Breonna Taylor’s exposes the intricacies of another public health crisis: racism. This special issue gives us an opportunity to look to the past for insight on how to move forward. Our current climate encourages us to continue conversations about inequality and injustice in this country. These conversations should hold space for Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and others who have lost their lives to racial injustice. So, say her name… then create change.