Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort this week as the discussion turns to an overlooked event in the history of activism, which is the subject of a chapter in Melissa Ford’s new book A Brick and a Bible: Black Women's Radical Activism in the Midwest during the Great Depression, recently published by SIU Press.
In May of 1933, Black female workers at the Funsten Nut Factory in St. Louis organized a strike which would pave the way for future activists not only in St. Louis, but throughout the entire Midwest. Although the 1820 Missouri Compromise had legalized slavery in the state, St. Louis’s geographical location “squarely in the middle of the Yankee North and the Jim Crow South” made racial attitudes and policies complicated and uncertain.
Blanket Fort Radio Theater is a storytelling initiative of SIU Press in collaboration with the SIU Creative Writing Program and WSIU Radio.