3448 Pinkney Street
Omaha, Nebraska

By Ashley M. Howard

My 1980s childhood included reading to my Cabbage Patch Kid in a neon bean bag and practicing my moves so that I could dance with MC Scat Cat. I was (am) a nerd. I loved school. And with exception to the week set aside for standardized testing (shout out to Iowa Test of Basic Skills), field trips reigned as the most exciting occasions.

In Omaha, where I grew up, trips to the railroad museum and zoo were standard. Once when we visited the Mormon Pioneer Cemetery, I tripped and fell face first into a spiked wrought-iron fence. Relatively unscathed, I returned to the school cafeteria where my third-grade classmates and I shook a mason jar filled with cold cream until our little arms turned to mush.

It was a good day. We ate fresh baked bread and homemade butter. I didn’t lose an eye.

Another time our plaid-clad mob loaded onto a yellow bus bound for Hastings. At the end of the two-hour drive, we met global legend, well at least People magazine feature fowl and Tonight Show guest, Andy the Footless Goose.

These trips reinforced the mythologized stories taught to me about Nebraska history. Wide-open prairies, bustling stockyards, brave pioneers, and wholesome Heartland values. Absent were the stories of the displaced Pawnee, Ponca, Omaha, and Oto-Missouria Peoples. Erased were the Black, Asian, and Latinx workers who butchered livestock and built railroads. The state’s ugliest moments, those that challenged claims of Midwestern meritocracy, were swept under the rug.

Both within the popular imagination and much of the scholarly discourse, the Midwest is normalized as an exclusively white place—frozen in the past, albeit one dissociated from actual historical reality. Politicians, journalists, and everyday citizens regard the region with deep nostalgia; a “museum-piece” of a bygone era in times of great uncertainty.

I was in my thirties and a professor of African American history when I finally took my own field trip to the birth site of Malcolm X, Omaha’s oft-forgotten native son.

The opening pages of Malcolm X’s autobiography, and arguably his political radicalization, begin in Omaha. In the chapter “Nightmare,” Malcolm shares a vivid description, recounted to him by his mother, Louise Little. One evening the Ku Klux Klan rode on their home to intimidate the family into fleeing. Heavily pregnant with her fourth child, while her husband was travelling, Mrs. Little stood her ground as the terrorists “galloped around the house, shattering every windowpane with their gun butts. Then they rode off into the night, their torches flaring, as suddenly as they had come.” The Littles welcomed their son, Malcolm a few months later and remained for two more years. Although Omaha is not mentioned again in the five-hundred-page book, the violence his family experienced throughout the region looms large.

In death, as in life, Malcolm X is a divisive figure. An admitted hustler, convicted felon, racial separatist, Muslim, and provocative orator, his brilliance resonated deeply with millions across the African diaspora. Yet the memorialization of his first home at 3448 Pinkney proceeded at a near glacial pace, due in part to his political views and skepticism that one of the nation’s most prominent Black leaders hailed from Nebraska. This delay is especially stark when compared to Atlanta’s 38-acre Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park, consisting of dozens of buildings managed by the National Parks Service.

If we consider that physical sites promote our most sacred historical myths, this really should come as no surprise. America now embraces King and the sanitized narrative of his activism as proof of this nation’s redemptive, triumphalist narrative arc. Narrators distill racism as contained to the south and eradicated through the efforts of activists and federal legislation. The blocks-long King site affirms this illusion.

The Littles’ Omaha experience and the on-going struggle to create an adequate memorial of their son challenges this framework and breaks open the comfortable history of the Midwest. The Klan threatened the young family on account of Earl and Louise Little successfully organizing with the Omaha branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914, the pan-Africanist organization promoted Black economic independence and racial pride, representing a freedom agenda distinct from the integrationist model.

The struggle for recognition of Malcolm X’s home is a continuation of this tension. The city razed the modest house on Pinkney in 1965, the year Malcom was assassinated. That building’s destruction was the result of ignorance, not malice. But the wholesale demolition of homes on the surrounding blocks is indicative of the inherent racism of urban renewal.

In 1970, activist and former resident of the home Rowena Moore began the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation. While the Nebraska Historical Marker Program quickly approved the sign, another two decades passed until it was placed. On May 19, 1987, on what should have been Malcolm X’s sixty-second birthday, the official state marker was dedicated. When I visited over a decade ago the marker stood, a lone sentinel in an overgrown lot, isolated from Malcolm X’s activism and the vibrant community.

Today, that spirit is renewed. In 2018, artist and land activist Jordan Weber constructed the 4MX greenhouse, conceived as a place to nurture seedlings and people. When standing in the greenhouse with its double doors open wide, the marker is perfectly framed between them. Its final four words read “His teaching lives on.”

What might schoolchildren learn from a visit to this site? By reinscribing Malcolm X on to the landscape, his legacy comes to the fore. Put simply, this means a radical retelling of Omaha’s history. That retelling includes stories about Moore’s work organizing women meatpackers as well as Black high school students staging a walkout on May 19, 1969, demanding racially affirming educational experiences.

These histories also generate new questions: What were the work and educational experiences of Black Omahans? Why are there no local streets, government buildings, or schools bearing Malcolm’s name? Why were 311 historical markers erected around the state before one honored the contributions of a Black Nebraskan?

Neighborhood divestment and stigmatization ensures that no one will happen upon Malcolm X’s birthplace. One must intentionally seek it out. And like the physical marker, Omahans must also journey to seek answers to the above questions.

Through a deep engagement with Malcolm X’s Omaha experience, students will locate the rich social, intellectual, cultural, and political life of the city’s Black residents. In (re)visiting these sites, a more complex portrait of the construction and maintenance of Midwestern mythologies emerges. Such field trips to the past provide a roadmap to a more inclusive history and future. To supplement the white bread snack (and history) of my youth with colorful, community grown veggies is delicious indeed.

Ashley Howard is an assistant professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. A proud Omahan, her research interests include violence, social movements, and the Black Midwest.

Photo by Chris Machian.

The post Malcolm X – Omaha, Nebraska appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Pavelka Farmstead
Red Cloud, Nebraska

By Christine Pivovar

Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) contains the first written use of the word “kolaches” in English, according to the OED. It comes in at the end of the novel, when the narrator, Jim, visits his childhood friend Ántonia at her “wide farm-house, with a red barn and an ash grove,” and meets her brood of boisterous children. The sweet, fruit-filled Czech pastries they serve him are still commonplace in bakeries throughout Nebraska today, but I’d never expected to find such a small, prosaic piece of our culture appear in one of the twentieth century’s great American novels. I’ve made kolaches myself, using my grandma’s recipe, which can’t be much different from the one Ántonia’s daughters used. Reading that scene, I had a powerful sense of seeing myself in a novel in a different way than I ever had before. Ántonia could have been my own great-grandmother.

Part of why I could picture that scene so vividly is because I have been to the “wide farm-house” Cather describes. A few miles north of Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, it was the home of her friend Annie Pavelka, who became the inspiration for the character of Ántonia.

Situated near the geographical center of the continental U.S., Red Cloud is a town of brick streets, charming Victorian houses and a wide-open sky. It’s the kind of town where cowboys in full gear stroll into the Subway and two of the town’s three restaurants close for the weekend because of a family wedding. It was founded in 1871, and when the railroad came through in 1879 it brought settlers from all over Europe and the eastern United States. Born in Virginia, Cather moved to Nebraska with her family in 1883. She lived in and around Red Cloud until she left for college in Lincoln. Her memories of this place, in particular the hard but vibrant lives of the pioneer farmers, inspired many of her novels and stories.

Today the Pavelka Farmstead is one of the sites maintained by the Willa Cather Foundation, which provides guided tours of significant places in the author’s life and work. The tour guides can tell you which of Cather’s friends were the models for which characters, what living room a particular scene takes place in. Although their close reading can feel restrictive at times — the books are fiction, after all — there seems to be a kind of pragmatic Nebraskan mindset that looks for these concrete connections. Readers and tourists are used to hunting down literary settings in New York and Boston. Why shouldn’t they also do so in Red Cloud?

This year, the Foundation is restoring the farmhouse: upgrading the foundation, installing electricity, and returning it to its “period of significance.” As works of preservation, the farmhouse restoration and Cather’s books both allow the visitor to step into a world that’s passed out of firsthand memory. Taken together, the physical space can cement the fictional scenes in real experience. When I visited the Pavelka house, it was empty and gutted, but even from the building’s bones, from its sloping yard surrounded by head-high rows of corn, I could picture the lives lived there. I could imagine myself as one of Ántonia’s daughters, kneading the dough for kolaches.

Christine Pivovar is originally from Omaha and today lives near an old pioneer cemetery in Kansas City. She was a Durwood Fellow at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she earned her MFA in creative writing and media arts. She has reviewed books for The Millions, The Rumpus and The Kansas City Star, and her fiction has been published in The Southeast Review and Hot Metal Bridge. She also works as a product designer at a software company.

Photo by Barb Kurdna, courtesy of the National Willa Cather Center.

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory

The post Willa Cather – Red Cloud, Nebraska appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.