Wylliam Smith​

​After my first year, I started to embrace my Blackness, and there was a massive backlash. Whenever I tried to speak out both in my classes and when I wrote for the DI, I was met with hate mail and bigotry.

​Felicity Williams

I started having conversations with my remaining friends and family in the city about how this multigenerational, deeply ingrained identity of Pittsburgh was ever going to change if no Black people stayed in the city.

Tanisha C. Ford

​In February 2016, three young men were murdered in a house in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Sixty years ago, in that same house, my grandfather shot and killed my grandmother, then himself. How can one address hold so much history—and so much tragedy?

​Tamara Winfrey-Harris

​I am a black woman born and raised in the space between the coasts and above the Mason-Dixon line. I am a face of the heartland, but you might not know it if you’ve been following the Trump-era reporting and commentary about the lives and political choices of people in the Midwest.

​​Tenicka Boyd

​Every time I returned to Milwaukee, I was forced to be 15 again. I was forced to remember people I had long forgotten about. I was forced to remember restaurants I could never afford to eat in.

​​Njaimeh Njie

For me, living so close to the Ohio River evokes mixed feelings. The river trail that I like to walk along near my apartment is scenic, yet long stretches of it are flanked by the railroad, warehouses and industrial sites on either side.

​Vanessa Taylor​

Within this imagined landscape of white blue-collar life, there’s the dismissal of Black people that shaped Midwestern cultures. Cities with rich Black culture and history, like Chicago and St. Louis, get pushed into their own class.

​Melissa Stuckey

​Although African Americans have been minorities for the entirety of their history in the Lower Midwest, their presence and experiences in this space brought forth some of the most critical debates, conversations, and issues that gripped the nation in the nineteenth century.

​​Randy A. Simes

Navigating the world as a biracial child can be tricky. While I grew up within a very loving family, sometimes it was difficult to figure out where I fit in to the traditional American racial dichotomy.

Shannon Shelton Miller

In the midst of the mess in Detroit, I think of the many children deprived of the opportunity to spend their days with someone like my dad.

Ruth Terry

But soon I realized that as much as I was exoticizing them, they were exoticizing me. Many students knew each other from feeder schools like Grand Rapids Christian High, Holland Christian, or Timothy Christian near Chicago.

Jonita Davis

I was momentarily floored by the rampant misinformation and bigoted, anti-Black statements. But, Indiana, outside of the Northwest corner abutting Chicago and a few spots near Indianapolis, was a red state.

Marissa Jackson Sow

Classmates laughed at our old car, my kinky hair, and my bulky corduroy pants. The ’90s — the era of the Huxtables and Living Single — were about upward mobility, conformity, and respectability amongst the petit bourgeoisie.

​Walter Johnson

Even a moderate rain can flood the intersections and lowlands of Centreville. When it rains heavily, much of the town is submerged in two or three feet of water. Water wears away at the foundations of homes and shorts out furnaces and hot water heaters.

​Mark V. Reynolds

The Cuyahoga essentially divides Cleveland into the East Side and the West Side. But the divisions between those two sides aren’t just geographical, dictated by nature’s path. Once you clear the downtown area, the East Side is where the black folk live, and the West Side is where the white folk live.

L.L. McKinney

The questions are relatively harmless, and the sharp fascination with my cadence and the rhythm of my mumbling meter can be amusing. Sometimes I indulge these requests for linguistic gymnastics, letting words roll off my tongue as I juggle letters like a circus performer, swapping them back and forth, cutting them out entirely or forcing them in where they weren’t before[...]

​Tara L. Conley

I only​ know weathered women. Women like my great-grandmother who stared at the lines on her palm to predict a change in the air. Like my aunt, an exercise instructor who ran away to Chicago only to return home with a stroke[…]

​Britt Julious

​Black girlhood is summer. It arrives quick and dies just as fast. Suddenly we are young women, even if we don’t feel it, even if we know intrinsically there is life left to live

​Marlon James

Because we are the most northern of the north, especially in the many fucked up ways the state views and acts on issues of race, and not just in asserting that second amendment rights were only meant for white people

John Samuel Wright

There was another, lesser-known Great Migration going on in the early 20th century–but in reverse, from the North back to the South, by northern-born African Americans seeking professional opportunities; and it included my aunt, my father, and my mother[..]