Forgetting and the Forgotten

A Thousand Years of Contested Histories in the Heartland

Michael C. Batinski

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“In A Brick and a Bible, radical Black working-class women take center stage as the shapers of their own destinies. By charting these women’s diverse engagement with Communist-affiliated groups across the Midwest, Melissa Ford reveals the centrality of the region as a key site for Black radical politics. With clarity and grace, Ford recovers the stories of Black women determined to bring an end to race, gender, and class oppression.”—Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom

Uncovering the social revolution led by Black women in the heartland

In this first study of Black radicalism in midwestern cities before the civil rights movement, Melissa Ford connects the activism of Black women who championed justice during the Great Depression to those involved in the Ferguson Uprising and the Black Lives Matter movement. A Brick and a Bible examines how African American working-class women, many of whom had just migrated to “the promised land” only to find hunger, cold, and unemployment, forged a region of revolutionary potential.

A Brick and a Bible theorizes a tradition of Midwestern Black radicalism, a praxis-based ideology informed by but divergent from American Communism. Midwestern Black radicalism contests that interlocking systems of oppression directly relate the distinct racial, political, geographic, economic, and gendered characteristics that make up the American heartland. This volume illustrates how, at the risk of their careers, their reputations, and even their lives, African American working-class women in the Midwest used their position to shape a unique form of social activism.

Case studies of Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, and Cleveland—hotbeds of radical activism—follow African American women across the Midwest as they participated in the Ford Hunger March, organized the Funsten Nut Pickers’ strike, led the Sopkin Dressmakers’ strike, and supported the Unemployed Councils and the Scottsboro Boys’ defense. Ford profoundly reimagines how we remember and interpret these “ordinary” women doing extraordinary things across the heartland. Once overlooked, their activism shaped a radical tradition in midwestern cities that continues to be seen in cities like Ferguson and Minneapolis today.

Melissa Ford is an assistant professor at Slippery Rock University specializing in African American history. Her work has appeared in American Communist History. She is a former Black Metropolis Research Consortium fellow.

“This is an exquisitely crafted study that highlights the ways that local pastkeepers in Jackson County, Illinois, marginalized and silenced Native American, African American, and working-class experiences and stories.”—Sean Farrell, coauthor of The Irish in Illinois

Revealing the forgotten in community histories

Histories try to forget, as this evocative study of one community reveals. Forgetting and the Forgotten details the nature of how a community forged its story against outsiders. Historian Michael C. Batinski explores the habits of forgetting that enable communities to create an identity based on silencing competing narratives. The white settlers of Jackson County, Illinois, shouldered the hopes of a community and believed in the justice of their labor as it echoed the national story. The county’s pastkeepers, or keepers of the past, emphasizing the white settlers’ republican virtue, chose not to record violence against Kaskaskia people and African Americans and to disregard the numerous transient laborers. Instead of erasing the presence of outsiders, the pastkeepers could offer only silence, but it was a silence that could be broken.

Batinski’s historiography critically examines local historical thought in a way that illuminates national history. What transpired in Jackson County was repeated in countless places throughout the nation. At the same time, national history writing rarely turns to experiences that can be found in local archives such as court records, genealogical files, archaeological reports, coroner’s records, and veterans’ pension files. In this archive, juxtaposed with the familiar actors of Jackson County history—Benningsen Boon, John A. Logan, and Daniel Brush—appear the Sky People, Italian immigrant workers, black veterans of the Civil War and later champions of civil rights whose stories challenge the dominant narrative.

Michael C. Batinski, a professor emeritus of history at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, first expressed his interest in historical consciousness in small places by writing Pastkeepers in a Small Place: Five Centuries in Deerfield, Massachusetts. He is also the author of two books on early American politics, The New Jersey Assembly, 1738–1775: The Making of a Legislative Community and Jonathan Belcher: Colonial Governor.

Paper: 978-0-8093-3837-5

E-book: 978-0-8093-3838-2 $28.50, 268 pages, 8 illus Shawnee Books

Read more and order at www.siupress.com/forgetting.