How Women of the African Diaspora Made Midwestern History

This presentation is inspired by my book project, “They All Mixed in Together, the White and the Colored”: Race, Family, and Freedom in the Rural Upper Midwest, 1820-1920. It explores the nineteenth-century social construction of race, gender, and experiences of freedom among people whose lives and communities bridged African, Indigenous, and European influences and identities. They lived free and unfree, as part of Indian, French, and U.S. American communities, and as farmers, domestics, and fur traders. Their stories expand analysis of race in the Midwest beyond cities and beyond Black-white and white-Indigenous dichotomies. This presentation focuses upon African Diasporic women such as Ashwinn Bonga, Flora Revels, Caroline Shepard, Catherine Washington, and Mamie Greene. Its emphasis on family and daily life reveals joy, hope, and acceptance but also suffering, loss, and rejection that Midwestern women of color faced. This presentation shows, too, that diverse women aimed to advance freedom, self-determination, and their own sense of belonging in highly intersectional ways. They crafted cultural traditions that blended their own racial or tribal backgrounds with traditions of (often white) neighbors. Their private and public-facing activities—within sickrooms, hospitality, concert halls, newspapers, and Emancipation picnics—made freedom, race, and emerging regional identity in a dynamic, contested Midwest. Significantly, as this presentation highlights, they became key cultural preservers of history. Their activities counter nationally circulating stereotypes of a race-less, white rural Midwest, of a heartland that unproblematically welcomed to the African diaspora, or of a Midwest where men of color were the primary actors. In that way, these women’s stories are essential to understanding race and gender in the nation itself. Additionally, this presentation contextualizes women’s stories within larger conversations about Midwestern regional identity—an identity currently and actively being made through publications by and about Midwestern women, including many Black and Indigenous women.