"A profitable investment for every one": The Present and Future of Black Midwestern Historical Scholarship

"A profitable investment for every one"1The Present and Future of Black Midwestern Historical Scholarship David Brodnax Sr. (bio) The 2020 U.S. Census reports that the roughly eight hundred black residents of Muscatine, Iowa comprise 3.4 percent of the town's population.2 Despite the small black presence in this small Midwestern town, Muscatine's junior high school, along with the woman that the school was recently renamed for, play a major role in Midwestern history. When the Iowa Territory was created in 1839, the territorial legislature followed the precedent of older Midwestern states in banning black children from the public schools.3 In 1857 a new state constitution allowed for the creation of segregated black schools despite opposition from lawmakers who said, among other things, that "I will not have blacks made equal with my children, and the children of my constituents, who are white and I thank God they are white."4 In Grinnell a race riot nearly erupted when fugitive slaves began attending the preparatory school, but anti-integrationists were ultimately able to implement a new policy that was facially race neutral but made it nearly impossible for the black students to keep attending; those students were then forced to flee when their location was publicized to their former masters.5 In larger cities, on the other hand, black children attended underfunded segregated schools.6 Black migration to Iowa during and after the Civil War caused a massive increase in the number of black schoolchildren, including one girl who integrated the school in the small town of LeClaire, spurring a school board member to withdraw his own children and evict the teacher from his home.7 One of those black schoolchildren was twelve-year-old Susan Clark of Muscatine. A member of one of Iowa's most prominent black families, she attended the town's black school, but it was far from her home and would not prepare her to take the high school qualifying exam.8 In 1867 she attempted to enroll at her neighborhood school but was turned away by End Page 17 school officials. Her parents then sued the Muscatine school board, leading one white resident to promise that "If Clark sends his children there, kick the damned niggers down the stairs and I'll pay the bill."9 The case made its way to the Iowa Supreme Court, which in the 1868 Clark v. Board of Directors decision ruled that because the state constitution guaranteed "all the youths of the State" a public education without any mention of segregated schools, local school boards did not have the discretion to create such schools.10 Iowa thus became the first northern or western state to strike down school segregation after the Civil War, although the struggle for truly equal access to education required additional litigation and still persists.11 In 2019, the Muscatine school board decided to rename the school that Clark had desegregated. The most popular options were Muscatine Junior High School and Mark Twain Junior High School (Twain had briefly lived in Muscatine and written about it), but after a concerted effort by some residents to highlight Clark's legacy, the board chose Susan Clark Junior High School. It also worked with the African American Museum of Iowa and legal scholars to create videos about Clark, one of which plays on repeat in the school hallway, and a plaque that hangs near the video screen.12 Only a few years after Iowa's public school system honored its native daughter for breaking the barriers that they had imposed upon her in the first place, it has become potentially more difficult to teach her story in those schools, and thus the current state of Midwestern history must include contending with this. Although the problem of sanitizing or overlooking America's racist legacy and the contributions of racial minorities is centuries old, its current form consists of banning CRT (Critical Race Theory, a legal concept that is taught by some academics at the graduate level) and other so-called "woke" pedagogies. The myriad of anti-CRT laws and policies that have been enacted throughout the Midwest and beyond are typically premised on...