Putting the Black Midwest Front and Center

Black in the Middle represents a brilliant use of interdisciplinary methodology and analysis to interrogate the Black experience in the Midwest. Forty-eight pieces featuring oral testimony, photographs, fiction, and poetry—and offering perspectives from the disciplines of history, sociology, geography, environmental studies, and literary criticism—paint a complicated picture of being Black and midwestern. The following premise expressed by the collection's editor, Terrion L. Williamson, guides its offerings: "just because we do not live in a place doesn't mean that we are not of a place" (49). The anthology's biggest contributions are its discussions of the local history of small-town midwestern Blacks and of midwestern Blacks as outsiders; they were caught between the South and the North, and it was upon their backs that the bridges for integration were built. Black in the Middle showcases the agency of people of color in creating and then adjusting their survival strategies in order to make space and create home. The discussion of southern racial influences in midwestern towns, large and small, makes this an engaging, valuable book for scholars and non-academics alike.

Williamson, an associate professor of African American & African Studies and American Studies at the University of Minnesota, masterfully weaves together seemingly disparate historical essays and other pieces. This collection contains a forward, introduction, and five sections titled "Home," "Past," "Love," "Now," "Onward," and "Future." This organization is a creative and effective means of orientation; introductory essays prepare readers for the immersive experience that subsequent pieces provide. The overarching themes are as follows: How to create home, how to create space, and how to survive—and sometimes thrive—in a space that was not made for Black people and was often hostile to them. Black people have always been present in the rural and urban Midwest, this collection stresses. The themes of creating space against invisibility and racial suppression resound throughout. Short environmental racism essays discuss segregated geographical spaces as forms of environmental racism, but also address how segregation interacted with people's history and actions.

Williamson's introduction argues the following: "Those of us who have spent our lives in the Midwest don't need business models or economic data to tell us what we have lived—what our bodies have felt, what our eyes have seen. Even those among us who don't have a bunch of degrees or fancy academic jargon . . . understand the maneuverings of racialized disinvestment and dispossession." She continues, "As the brilliant poet and activist Sunni Patterson once so eloquently put it in reference to her beloved New Orleans, 'we know this place'" (15). In many ways, Williamson's own essay, "Peoria, Prior, and Me," frames this compilation. Readers who are interested in how past meets present, as well as in what lessons the past holds for the present, would be well advised to read this essay. Placing Pryor into the framework of what it means to be a "guerilla intellectual", Williamson discusses how the actor's sensibility stayed with his experiences in Peoria even as he traveled away from the city to fame in other places. Williamson posits that even as Blacks traveled from the South, they kept these sensibilities and adapted southern survival tactics and philosophies to new spaces and realities. Pryor created space just as Williamson and others in the anthology created it to survive against forms of midwestern racism that differed only in legality, but not in practice or ferocity.

Williamson brought together this interdisciplinary group of scholars and artists—first at the inaugural 2019 Black Midwest Symposium hosted by the University of Minnesota—to make the invisible visible. The anthology that resulted contains mainly qualitative research, and it is significant for its topic and for its approach. It deftly interweaves oral testimony told over Spades games in Milwaukee with the poetry of Minneapolis and Columbus with discussion of how the Ohio River and the cheap, unhealthy land near its industry became the segregated space of Black Pennsylvanians.

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