Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we begin a look at the books the SIU Press is spotlighting in our celebration of Black History Month.
During the Great Migration of the 1920s and 1930s, southern African Americans flocked to the South Side Chicago community of Bronzeville, the cultural, political, social, and economic hub of African American life in the city, if not the Midwest. The area soon became the epicenter of community activism as working-class African Americans struggled for equality in housing and employment. In A New Deal for Bronzeville: Housing, Employment, and Civil Rights in Black Chicago, 1935-1955, which won an Illinois State Historical Society Certificate of Excellence in 2016, Lionel Kimble, Jr., demonstrates how these struggles led to much of the civil rights activism that occurred from 1935 to 1955 in Chicago and shows how this working-class activism and culture helped to ground the early civil rights movement.
In Duty beyond the Battlefield: African American Soldiers Fight for Racial Uplift, Citizenship, and Manhood, 1870-1920, in a bold departure from previous scholarship, Le’Trice D. Donaldson locates the often-overlooked era between the Civil War and the end of World War I as the beginning of Black soldiers’ involvement in the long struggle for civil rights. Donaldson traces the evolution of these soldiers as they used their military service to challenge white notions of an African American second-class citizenry and forged a new identity as freedom fighters willing to demand the rights of full citizenship and manhood.
Melissa Ford’s A Brick and a Bible: Black Women’s Radical Activism in the Midwest during the Great Depression won a 2023 Illinois State Historical Society Certificate of Excellence in “Books, Scholarly.” In this first study of Black radicalism in midwestern cities before the civil rights movement, 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.
