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.

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Rail Bridge
Sauk City, Wisconsin

By Kassie Jo Baron

Sauk City, Wisconsin, is best known as the home of the first Culver’s. Then probably the annual Cow Chip Throw, where residents spend Labor Day weekend seeing who can throw dried cow poop the farthest. Then, finally, for author August Derleth, who was born in Sauk City in 1909.

Growing up, I knew almost nothing about Derleth. We were told he was a kind of Mark Twain meets Henry David Thoreau of Wisconsin. We never read his work in public school, even though the locations were, quite literally, in our backyards; instead, we fell asleep on our assigned copies of A Sand County Almanac.

But what I do know of him was that as an 8-year-old, I would hold my bowl of orange slices in the back of my mom’s car as we crossed August Derleth Bridge over the Wisconsin River and passed Derleth’s state historical marker on my way to soccer games at August Derleth Park. On other days, we’d head to Leystra’s, a local restaurant, and pass the massive pie case to head into “Augie’s Room,” where we could enjoy our slices surrounded by Derleth memorabilia.  

About a half mile downstream from the August Derleth Bridge stood a disused pony truss railroad bridge that was built in the 1901. One of Derleth’s portraits shows him walking across this bridge, a part of his regular route sauntering around the town he dubbed Walden West. “It was a good place to be alone,” he wrote, “I could meditate on any subject I chose…. How many poems came into being in that place! How much my view of Sac Prairie was expanded there!”

By my own childhood, the brown trusses were out of place and certainly out of time. In 2002, much to the delight of certain pyromaniacal children (I will not say if I was among them), the center portion of the bridge was demolished. In 2018, the remainder of the bridge was taken down, but I wasn’t there to see if it exploded. The spot is now the trailhead for the Great Sauk Trail, a bike path that runs through town. A chain-link fence erected in the same rusted brown of the bridge is now all that prevents visitors from stepping out onto the remaining span, which juts precipitously over the rush of the river twenty-some feet below. Wisconsin & Southern Railroad’s “No Trespassing” sign stands in front of extra trusses strewn haphazardly—if such a thing is possible—across the sun-bleached wood of the tracks.

It wasn’t until I started my Ph.D. program at the University of Iowa that I discovered Derleth might not just be a hometown boy after all. During a standard ice breaker, a professor shocked me by saying “isn’t that where August Derleth, the Lovecraft guy, is from?” I promptly went home and fell down an eldritch rabbit hole. It never occurred to me that Derleth did anything more than write a book about a mystery on Mosquito Island (which you can see if you look upstream from August Derleth Bridge).

Outside of Sauk City, Derleth is best known as H.P. Lovecraft’s publisher and the founder of Arkham House, a publishing company specializing in weird fiction that is still located in Sauk City, but is now all but defunct. A minor scandal arose when Derleth published stories as a “posthumous collaborator” with Lovecraft, viewed by others as an inappropriate imposition into the mythos. And Derleth’s scandals didn’t end there. In 1951, he was engaged to 16-year-old Sandra Evelyn Winters. In 1953, Derleth told a reporter from the Rhinelander Daily News, “We hope to be married Easter Monday—that’s April 6.… I’ll be 44 on Feb. 24 and Sandy will be 18 on March 1.” Residents certainly raised eyebrows, but they weren’t scandalized enough for me to hear this vital piece of hometown gossip until 2021, four years after I’d left the state.

Leystra’s restaurant closed in 2017 after 30 years, marking the end of Augie’s Room. Two years later, Sauk City completed construction of a splash pad and playground in what used to be August Derleth Park. The park was creatively renamed Riverfront Park and the formerly rustic sign at the entrance replaced with a significantly larger sign featuring cartoon turtles and racoons with, I am convinced, murderous impulses in their fiberglass hearts. During construction, the state historical marker was taken down.

These signs now decorate the walls of the August Derleth Society, currently in the building where I used to take tap dancing lessons. I visited the society for the first time earlier this year. “The only thing left is the bridge,” I joked with Jon Caflisch, the society’s treasurer, a man so passionate about Derleth he convinced me to join even though, until then, I had never read any Derleth (it’s only $25/year, and I get the newsletter now). Jon pointed to the green “August Derleth Bridge” sign, hanging just over a bookshelf filled with Derleth hardcovers. The bridge, it seems, doesn’t have a name anymore.

Derleth’s legacy was a fixture in the Sauk City of my childhood, even though no one I knew could tell you a single thing about him. Piece by piece that legacy evaporated, replaced with Culver’s relics and those Lovecraftian wildlife statues. I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy to erase Derleth from the region he wrote so fondly about, but I’m not not saying that either. If you’re passing near Sauk City, make some time to visit the August Derleth Society because, as Jon told me, “We might not be here much longer.”

Kassie Baron is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Iowa. She specializes in nineteenth-century American literature with particular interest in the literary representations of white, female New England mill operatives’ bodies during the first US industrial revolution. She is a native of the Sauk Prairie area, a newly minted member of the August Derleth Society, and has never competed in the Cow Chip Throw.

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Angelou Memorial
Stamps, Arkansas

By Greer Veon

Despite living in southwest Arkansas most of my life, my first visit to Stamps was with my parents in August 2018. We made the trip on a Sunday afternoon before my flight back north the following morning, my parents joking that Stamps was the kind of place that kept to itself. I sat in the backseat picturing the red clay that Maya Angelou once walked across and imagined feeling the breeze she once breathed.

In September 2017, a local newspaper reported that a memorial sign dedicated to Angelou disappeared from the grounds of Lake June days after Stamps elected Brenda Davis, their first Black mayor. “It makes you wonder,” Mayor Davis told reporters. “But I wouldn’t speculate.” All the same, the mayor’s suspicions resonated, coming as they did in the Southern town that served as the backdrop for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou’s painful 1969 memoir about coming of age during the Jim Crow era. Over time I searched for updates, but the suspects’ names were never printed, and the story went cold.

In a way, Angelou’s memoir prefigures Mayor Davis’s wariness:

What sets one Southern town apart from another, or from a Northern town or hamlet, or city high rise? The answer must be in the experiences shared between the unknowing majority (it) and the knowing minority (you). All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment.

In the early 20th century, Stamps served as a flag stop for the railroads that stretched across Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana. I grew up forty-five minutes away on the state line between the twin cities of Texarkana, one of the bigger stops on that same line, the Cotton Belt Route. Many of my childhood memories are set in the backseat of our family car as we took weekend drives on local roads through one-stoplight towns filled with forgotten gas stations and churches. Most of the newer highways bypassed Stamps. So did most people. When my ninth-grade English class read Angelou’s memoir, our teacher spoke less about how close we lived to the town and more about parents’ letters asking that my classmates be excused from the reading.

I didn’t revisit that memory until shortly after I moved away and read a piece on the Celebrate Maya Project, which was holding a 2018 celebration for the author’s 90th birthday. Angelou’s admirers gathered in Stamps to honor her and witness her childhood landscape. Still, I couldn’t shake the missing sign. I wondered what remained, and I longed to visit Maya’s hometown the next time I returned home.

On the way to Stamps that afternoon, we stopped at Burge’s, a retro dairy barn in nearby Lewisville, where we ordered from the front window. Minutes after stuffing ourselves with brisket and chocolate pies, we entered Stamps’ historic downtown, marked by a post office and outdoor storefronts. Paint cans and a ladder leaned against a half-completed mural. As we crossed over the train tracks, I looked for Annie Henderson’s merchandise store, the center of Angelou’s life in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, but it’s gone.

We found Lake June on the edge of town, the water drained enough to expose its bottom brush. Despite reports that the state would replace the missing sign, there, almost a year after it was stolen, stood a wooden skeleton of the memorial. There’s something sobering to see that as the same place where a young Angelou spent her alone time. Even Maya Angelou, a voice of her generation, still faces these attempts at erasure, even in the town that played such a vital role in her legacy. Angelou’s memoir addresses a childhood filled with love and pain that stayed with her no matter where she moved. What “heroes and bogeymen” have other children first encountered here and other towns alike?  I feared who decides what parts of our homes will be made forgotten. Will they make space or blot out the experiences, the identities of their neighbors? I inhaled the damp air and left without answers.

Greer Veon is a writer who works for the Office of Residence Life at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. In 2019, she earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her most recent work has been featured in ELLE. Find her at greerveon.com.

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Paradise Valley
Detroit, Michigan

By Ayesha K. Hardison

Robert Hayden’s poems are artifacts from a long-gone yet storied neighborhood in Detroit. He grew up in Paradise Valley, the near east side commercial district adjacent to the more residential community called Black Bottom (named originally for its rich soil). Similarly, Hayden’s biography is a palimpsest for the lost and resistive. Born Asa Bundy Sheffey in 1913, he discovered, at 40 years old, his parents William and Sue Ellen Hayden neither adopted him nor legally changed his name when they committed to foster him. In the poem “Names,” he writes, “You don’t exist—” a problem his narrator struggles to resolve: “As ghost, double, alter ego then?” Hayden’s old neighborhood, like his representation of it, has an analogous complicated history.

Once a mixed-race community with Jewish, German, and Italian households alongside African American families, Paradise Valley was one of few areas where southern migrants could move to in Detroit, and in the 1920s it became a Black enclave. With over 300 Black-owned businesses, including medical offices, retail shops, hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs, the district was the center of Black economic fortitude in the ensuing decades. Throughout the 1930s, the Haydens lived on St. Antoine, Beacon, and Napoleon Streets as well as East Vernor Highway. While these streets still exist, waves of urban development have altered their geography.

By the late 1940s, Detroit initiated its urban renewal by demolishing old, dilapidated housing and, later, constructing the Chrysler Freeway, the northbound section of I-75 and I-375, to accommodate autoworkers who followed manufacturing to the suburbs. The interstate was completed in 1964, destroying Hastings Street, a major Black Bottom and Paradise Valley thoroughfare, and sounding the neighborhoods’ death knell. Since the early 2000s, Ford Field and its parking lots have supplanted some of this landscape, including the corner of Beacon and St. Antoine where the Haydens once lived.

Other landmarks mapping Hayden’s career are distinguished by historic property, new construction, and the space in-between. Falcon Press, which published his inaugural collection Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940), was located at 268 Eliot Street, the home of Louis E. Martin. Editor of the Michigan Chronicle, Martin founded the Black weekly newspaper in a one-room office on St. Antoine in 1936 and hired Hayden to join the newsroom stationed in his dining room. Presently, a 5,663 square foot vacant lot sits there, flanked by a Georgian Colonial built in 1900 and contemporary brick condos. The empty space marks the publisher’s absence in the neighborhood now called Brush Park.

Hayden’s poems about the city, then, are artistic signs outlining historic negative space. Paradise Valley is source material for his Depression-era poems, such as “Sunflowers: Beaubien Street” and “Bacchanal.” In the latter, published in Negro Caravan (1941), Hayden’s blues-infused narrator laments his lost factory job and bemoans his lover seduced by “one of these Hasting studs.” Finally, in the fifth poem from “Elegies for Paradise Valley,” published in his last collection American Journal (1978), Hayden invokes the neighborhood’s disappeared:

      Where’s Nora, with her laugh, her comic flair,

      stagestruck Nora waiting for her chance?

Where’s fast Iola, who so loved to dance

she left her sickbed one last time to whirl

in silver at The Palace till she fell?

Hayden also inquires about the “mad,” “snuffdipping,” “defeated,” “shell-shocked,” “taunted,” and those who passed for white, “who cursing crossed the color line.” He concludes with the repeated line, “Let vanished rooms, let dead streets tell.”

Old street names memorialize such corporeal absence but obscure it with their new orientations. As Hayden elucidates in a 1978 documentary, “I had Beacon Street in mind when I wrote the poem, ‘Dead Streets’ because there are no people there now.” Hayden’s Heart-Shape in the Dust is an elegy for the neighborhood, too, as it eponymously documents Falcon Press’s ephemerality. Paradise Valley is a metonym for the people celebrated in Hayden’s poems, like Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Bessie Smith, and Malik El-Shabazz. In turn, Detroit’s ongoing transition — from suburban expansion and deindustrialization to corporate returns and economic recovery — give added meaning to his compositions. “How clearly you / materialize,” he promises in the fourth elegy to Paradise Valley, “before the eye / of memory—”

* Except where noted, all poems cited from Robert Hayden: Collected Poems (1996), edited by Frederick Glaysher. This essay’s literary and cultural history draws on the work of Melba Joyce Boyd, Frank Rashid, Ronald Walcott, and the Detroit Historical Society.

Ayesha K. Hardison is a literary and cultural critic of African American writing and representation. An Associate Professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas, she explores questions of race, gender, genre, social politics, and historical memory in her research and teaching. She is the author of Writing through Jane Crow and editor of the journal Women, Gender, and Families of Color. In 2021, she will co-direct a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Zora Neale Hurston. Find her on Twitter at @aykiha.

* Except where noted, all poems cited from Robert Hayden: Collected Poems (1996), edited by Frederick Glaysher. This essay’s literary and cultural history draws on the work of Melba Joyce Boyd, Frank Rashid, Ronald Walcott, and the Detroit Historical Society.

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