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This book is a visionary illustration of the life-transforming soul-work of body of pro-womanists. Its purpose promotes writings by women and men of color having come together in solidarity as models of activist-consciousness. The contributors to this collection embody shades of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, culture, and nation-state affiliations centered in womanist “universal[ism].” Including writings by teachers/professors, students, and creative artists (poets as well as actors/directors)—they collectively exemplify an unwavering defense of human rights and social justice. Communicating the self-liberatory value of the meaning(s) of womanism in their writings, the contributors counter ideologies of separatism, domination, and systemic oppression. Collectively, they promote activist comradeship in resistance to wall-building ideas of exclusionism. In sum, this volume represents the unwavering commitment of individuals courageously willing to cross borders of personal, social, political, and spiritual difference(s) to create bridges for liberatory alliances.

Hostile Heartland examines racial violence—or, more aptly, racist violence—against blacks (African Americans) in the Midwest, emphasizing lynching, whipping, and violence by police (or police brutality). It also focuses on black responses, including acts of armed resistance, the development of local and regional civil rights organizations, and the work of individual activists. Within that broad framework the book considers patterns of institutionalized violence in studies of individual states, like Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas over a number of decades; it also targets specific incidents of such violence or resistance in case studies representative of changes in these patterns like the lynching of Joseph Spencer in Cairo, Illinois, in 1854 and the lynching of Luke Murray in South Point, Ohio, in 1932. Significantly, Hostile Heartland not only addresses the years from the Civil War to World War I, which are the typical focus of such studies, but also incorporates the twenty-five years that precede the Civil War and the additional twenty-five that follow World War I. It pioneers new research methodologies, as exemplified by Chapter 4’s analysis of the relations between and among racist violence, family history, and the black freedom struggle. Finally, Hostile Heartland situates its findings within the historiography more broadly.

Entering the 1960s, the University of Illinois typified “Middle America,” with its midwestern campus, middle-class enrollment, and midcentury quiescence—the unlikeliest of settings for protest, rebellion, and riots in the streets. But all of that came to pass. Born of free-speech issues in the Red Scare era and nourished by anger with an unpopular war, protests grew into a general antiestablishment frustration, climaxing in a student strike and days-long violent disturbances that shut down one of the nation’s largest land-grant universities. How could this happen, here? The story is one of self-important legislators, well-intentioned administrators, a conservative citizenry, and “outside agitators,” but mostly of a minority of confident, determined, somewhat naïve students. Virtually all white, relatively privileged, raised in a postwar economic boom, believers in and embodiment of American exceptionalism, they would confront moral questions around race, justice, war, life, and death that became existential as the body count rose in Vietnam. This is the story of how those Illini students responded. No one could have predicted rebellion would happen here. But it did. These young people helped bring down one president, shamed a second, and helped lead the nation to end a wretched war. By their agency they changed history. And if such a movement could happen in such an unlikely place, who is to say that another, equally unlikely, might not happen again?