Taylor Dorrell

What would have become of the famous American poet Langston Hughes had he not attended Cleveland’s Central High School during those turbulent years of 1916 and 1920?

Audrey Henderson

The holistic village-building vision of Blacks in Green, founded in 2007 in the West Woodlawn community on Chicago’s South Side includes eight essential principles that drive the work and vision of its founder Naomi Davis: wealth, energy, products, homestead, culture, organization, education and economy.

By D.A. Hosek

Father Pfleger sits at the piano keyboard and fingers a diminished seventh.

Jennifer Sdunzik

The beginning of the twentieth century marks a time when many southern Black people started to contemplate alternatives to sharecropping by moving out of the South, sparking what is commonly known as the Great Migration.

Ian Ritter

Magnus Lindgren is baffled that Kansas City doesn’t have a street named after saxophonist Charlie Parker.

Siobhan Moroney

In its Sunday, September 30th edition, the Chicago Tribune in 1945 announced a major project for the benefit of the city and its surrounding suburbs.

Adin Alem

Organizers in Kansas City have worked tirelessly to bring the topics of police abolition, affordable housing, climate justice, and more to the mainstream in our city.

Dominique Jackson

When I reflect on my past trips, I see that one, in particular, ignited in me the confidence to travel solo: a road trip across the Midwest.

Linda Villarosa

Long before the pandemic, the story of Chicago’s yawning disparity between Black and white life spans was written through my own family history. How did a Promised Land to generations of Black families become a community of lost lives?

Yanick Rice Lamb

Hair has history. These coils of memory bond children to the adults in their lives in places they call home, including hair salons and barber shops.

Michael Kleber-Diggs

When I survey the sky around me, I don’t see towers of smoke. I see something resembling the way things were. I wonder what the country would be like if George Floyd hadn’t been killed or if we had sheltered in place a little longer. But he was, and we didn’t.

Saeed Jones

“Why Columbus?” you ask? How much time do you have? The thing is, my explanation is always iridescent, taking on the color of the person asking as well as my mood and the moment itself. The answers are legion and varied; the answers are all the truth. And so, this one is for Columbus and all the colors of why.

Tiera Chantè Tanksley

Concerned about how seeing images of Black people dead and dying would affect young social media users, Tanksley conducted a study to understand how digitally mediated traumas were impacting Black girls’ mental and emotional wellness.

Britt Halvorson and Josh Reno

The popular image of the U.S. heartland as only a place of rural, hardworking white farmers has always been a larger-than-life myth. In a new book, Imagining the Heartland, two anthropologists show how these seemingly banal portrayals of the Midwest perpetuate white supremacy.

Christy Clark-Pujara, Ashley Howard and Erik S. McDuffie

In 1539, an enslaved African set foot in what we today we call Nebraska as part of a Spanish expedition.

​​A.D. Carson

Southern Illinois is distinct from the rest of the state because of its curious history, which not only includes the racial violence in Cairo, but it is also one of the very few places in what is now known as the Land of Lincoln where slavery was permitted

​Amirah Mercer

Because in the metal community, especially out in the Midwest, the racism is a little different. People are not afraid to be vocal when they see something they don’t like. So we would walk into a show out there and a big bearded dude might say, “There’s a black person in here! I can’t believe it! What are you doing here?”

​Aaron Foley

I don’t want to say we’re stagnant. But being set in your ways, I guess, doesn’t always make for fruitful conversation. Especially here in Detroit. Each time I go out as a black male, I always have to prepare myself for the following

​​Josh Birnbaum

Before you dismiss Peoria rappers as having little to rap about, consider that nearly half of the city’s black residents live below the poverty line and that Peoria’s violent crime rate is the fourth highest in Illinois.

​Brian Crooks

people can be totally cool for years and years but suddenly decide that they need to be super racist because they want to hurt you. They'll say they're sorry, they'll explain how you misinterpreted what they said, but the fact is, they reach for racism because they think it'll emotionally and psychologically destroy you, and that's what they want to do at that moment.