The Charge of Public History: Interview with Charlene Fletcher.

Incoming editorial board member and the Francis Fessler Assistant Professor of History at Butler University, Charlene Fletcher PhD, sat down with Wesley Bishop in the summer of 2024 to discuss her research, public history, and the problems found in mainstream memory of the American Midwest. The following has been edited for clarity and length.

Wesley Bishop: Could you start by introducing yourself and your work?

Charlene Fletcher: Absolutely. I am the Francis Fessler Assistant Professor of History at Butler University. I’m also co-director of the Hub for Black Affairs and Community Engagement at Butler University. Prior to my arrival at Butler, I was the curatorial director at Conner Prairie Museum in Fishers, Indiana. [Before that] I was a postdoc at Brown University as adjunct faculty, and was also a Community Fellow for the Center for Africana Studies and Culture at Indiana University Indianapolis. Prior to that, I had a long history working in the criminal justice system in New York City, working specifically in prison reentry. I was the director of what was then the largest prison reentry initiative on the Eastern Seaboard. So, I’m a historian of crime, race, gender, and confinement. That’s me!

WB: Where are you from originally?

CF: I’m from Indianapolis.

WB: Also, congratulations on the endowed chair. That’s awesome!

CF: Thank you.

WB: Can you explain a little bit about how you came to study history and specifically public history and the history of race?

CF: I’ve always wanted to be a historian, even when I was a little girl and didn’t have a name for it. I remember watching Sesame Street, (“Don’t Eat the Pictures”) when Big Bird and Snuffy get stuck in the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art], and they meet this little ancient Egyptian boy and he wants to be a star. And I remember asking my grandmother, is that true? Did they believe that? And so, she told me she didn’t know, but we went and got books and found out. Ever since then, I’ve had a love for the past… I view it as detective work in many ways. And so, when it comes to being a historian of race and gender and justice the approach… [well] things change, life takes different courses. I ended up working in the criminal justice system [first], not just working in prisons, but teaching at City University of New York (CUNY). I had a desire to get a PhD, and at that time [I was thinking it would be] in criminal justice. But I quickly realized [I was] teaching criminal justice, yes, but [I was] more so teaching history because we didn’t wake up one day and have this prison system. It came from somewhere. But then also I had tons of students who would come in who either were currently on the NYPD or wanted to be on the NYPD or parole officers or things of that sort, and most of them had never read the Constitution, but you take an oath to uphold this document. And so, I found myself spending more time teaching history in the context of criminal justice. This brought me full circle. You can’t explore the history of race and crime, particularly in the United States… without exploring the history of race and the criminalization of Americans. The two go hand in hand, especially because in my experience in working in prisons, [you largely work] with people of color, [you work] with women who are often overlooked, overshadowed when [many talk] about incarceration. So, [my two interests] merged, [and over time] it fit [with my interest] in public history. [Often] when [we] think of public history we focus on museums and archives and libraries, but I see public history as much broader than that. And by that definition, I’ve always done public history, because the work I do as a historian relates to public policy concerns. My first book focuses on the incarceration of Black women in Kentucky and other ways—socially constructed ways—they’re confined, whether it’s [by] domestic violence in the home, economic inequalities, religious affiliations, or the challenges of motherhood. So, all these are concerns that we have in our contemporary moment [are informed by] the past can [and influence] how we move forward.

WB: That’s really well put. There’s this view of professors and what we do, and then there’s what we as teachers really do. Most of that is often much more than just in the classroom, it’s much more down to earth. I had a very similar experience where when I graduated with my BA. I went to be a community teacher, and I worked with recent immigrants and kids who were definitely at risk of a whole host of different issues. It was during that time that I really solidified that I wanted to be an academic. I had figured I wanted to do it, but I wanted to take two or three years off from school and figure some things out. I think in that time I really learned how we as academics need to be socially engaged, and that our classrooms and research impact the wider world. Was there something like that for you at that moment when you were working with people going into policing or who were in the prison system when you decided, yeah, I really want to commit to the path of an academic?

CF: Yes. The short answer is yes. And there are so many instances of that where I have witnessed injustices with my own eyes or have had to blatantly or belligerently defend the rights of formerly incarcerated people from law enforcement. So, I think it’s the culmination of those events when I was an adjunct at CUNY standing in the classroom and saying to myself, they’re going to go into the police academy, the corrections academy, they’re going to go to law school. If I can reach them in this and just plant a seed, even if it’s super small, that might change the trajectory of our system. It’s not going to overhaul it. It’s not going to change things overnight. But if I’m standing in front of this classroom and I can reach one or two of them, that may shape someone else’s experience with the system down the line, I felt like this was the best place to do it. Because specifically in New York, the sad part is this isn’t the case everywhere. If this is the career you want, you had to come into the classroom. 

WB: And that made you want to be an academic even more, right? To research it and study these phenomena? I get that. For me, it was very similar where I was interested in how people would have the same idea and how dialogue and discourse would replicate these ideas in our society. I didn’t even have a name for it until I got to graduate school, and my advisor was like, ‘oh, you’re interested in the public sphere, you’re interested in public studies.’ On that note, could you talk a little bit more about your research—specifically your current work as an endowed chair, your first book, and the book you’re working on now?

CF: Absolutely. My first book is currently titled Confined Femininity: Race, Gender, and Incarceration in Kentucky, 1865–1920. It is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press, and it is sitting with my editor after I’ve made revisions. The book focuses on the incarceration of Black women in Kentucky during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. I chose Kentucky because when we talk about the South, Kentucky is often omitted, even though it is certainly the South. And because Kentucky did not secede from the Union, it was not subject to Reconstruction in the ways that places like Alabama or Mississippi were. So it’s a very different dynamic in Kentucky, specifically in central Kentucky. I explore the incarceration of these women, and I argue that Black women were able to negotiate the parameters of their own confinement.

So, freedom doesn’t show up for everyone. Every story doesn’t have a happy ending. I’m interested in the conditions of what I call socially constructed forms of confinement—the home, motherhood, religious affiliations, economic uncertainties, and how those decisions in those confining spaces led those women to confinement in state-sanctioned facilities. So that’s the first project.

The new project, while the first one sits with the editor, focuses on relationships in the Mississippi Delta between Italian immigrants and African Americans. It focuses on Italian immigration between 1880 and 1940, so the same period, but still looking at this through the lens of confinement, where you have sharecropping with African American farmers… in the South, and Italian immigrants coming to the United States through what we know as the Petroni system. They both are similar in structure, [since both] are coerced labor. But what happens is Italians and Sicilians find themselves in the Mississippi Delta, not only sharecropping but [also] living and sharing and working in close proximity to African Americans. And so, I’m interested in those relationships and how they evolve over time as the proximity to whiteness for Italians grows.

WB: Could you clarify bit when whiteness begins to take hold for Italians? When does that pathway open, and is it similar to how other ethnic groups and religious groups coming in from eastern Europe, like Jewish people, etc., who initially are seen as outside whiteness, but over time are folded in, even imperfectly?

CF: You see [the process] earlier with the Irish, because of course they’re arriving much earlier than Italians or other southern or eastern Europeans. But there’s a shift that happens, of course, after World War II, but it’s really around the time of the Civil Rights movement, the 1950s and 1960s. One of the things that I found interesting in these conversations that we had in Italy [during my research] was that this discrimination is ever present. When mass immigration begins in the 1880s, you have Benito Mussolini showing up in the 1920s and then the rise of fascism. But of course, Italians are seen as the enemy in World War II for obvious reasons historically. It’s obvious why that correlation is made, but it’s not until the 1950s as people are coming even more into contact with whiteness and having the ability to have the upward mobility in terms of buying homes and having access to political power and such that people of color don’t necessarily have access to.

And so, to me, it was surprising that it was so late in the game but understanding that history behind it with World War I, World War II, but also understanding that Italy is also a new nation. When America is fighting the Civil War in 1861, Italy is unifying in 1861. And so that has its own shifts and ups and downs and curves to it because it’s still forming political agendas and alliances and things of that sort. So, it’s fascinating, but it’s not until later in the twentieth century.

WB: And you think there is also this aspect of what is occurring on the Italian peninsula, as a nation-state, correct? Italy is a nation-state by that point. So, what’s happening in Italy will influence how Americans, other white Americans, will view Italians.

CF: You mean in terms of the peninsula itself?

WB: Or the acceptance of Italian immigrants and their descendants?

CF: Okay. One of the things I would say that I did learn, we shouldn’t refer to Italy as a peninsula because when we do, we extract Sardinia and Sicily from that conversation. So Italy is more than a peninsula.

WB: Thank you for telling me that! I’ve never heard that.

CF: No worries. I learned that too. But in terms of the proximity to whiteness and what’s happening, you do have mass immigration that’s taking place, and of course there’s an earthquake in the late nineteenth century. But there’s also economic strife. There are economic woes. Poverty is rampant, particularly in the south because there are taxes that are being levied by folks in the north against lands in the south. Lands are being taken and redistributed. Many things are happening in southern Italy at the time. And so that’s one of the things that really pushes this mass immigration from the country into not just the United States but to other spaces as well, specifically including Argentina and Brazil. A large population of Italians goes to Argentina, and you can see Italian culture present even today.
And then you also have Italians that migrate to places like Australia. This Italian diaspora is not limited to the United States, but you do have folks who are coming here to engage in labor, but to also potentially help those at home or to seek new lives for themselves here in the United States. So it’s still related to the narrative that we would expect it to be, but it’s far more complicated than that because there is this desire for folks to come to the United States, but then the politics, especially of the period, with the Red Scare, anti-Catholic sentiment—especially in the 1920s, of course, with the Ku Klux Klan. So many other factors keep immigrants from southern Europe and eastern Europe in these boxes in the United States. And then of course, you have immigration policy that the U.S. government passes that puts quotas or limits on the number of people that can come into the country right around the time of World War I. So, it’s complex topic, and it’s one I’m still learning. It’s a brand new project for me. There are portions of this that I’m going to have to decipher and then see how they connect or influence what’s happening in the Mississippi Delta.

WB: Thank you for explaining that. Look forward to reading the research when you publish it. Switching gears a bit, can you discuss your work at Conner Prairie?

CF: Sure. I was hired by Conner Prairie in 2021 as their curatorial director. And my chief task was to curate an exhibit titled “Promised Land Is Proving Ground.” As far as I know this has yet to open. I was the first historian that the institution had in, I think, twenty years. And while I was there, I established a curatorial department where genuine historical research could take place that would inform not only the new exhibit but also just the daily experience within the living history museum. It would be wise to have historians engaging in research to fully inform the interpretation of said history. So, I was there until 2023, completing the research for the exhibit right before I left for Butler University.

WB: Could you explain a bit more about the exhibit?

CF: The exhibit was initially conceived in 2020. The institution was awarded a grant from the Lilly Foundation for, I think, half a million dollars to curate this experience. It was Conner Prairie’s first true attempt at respectfully telling the history of African Americans in Indiana. When I arrived, the exhibit plan was to focus on the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in Indiana. And that’s fine, but you can’t really talk about the AME church if you don’t understand why there was a need for the AME church, particularly in Indiana. So I expanded the concept. It was supposed to be an exhibit that was in one particular space, an isolated dedicated space, but I stretched those parameters and told this story throughout the museum grounds. You can’t isolate Black history. Black history is American history. You’re either going to tell the [whole] story or you’re not going to tell the story at all.

I envisioned an exhibit that gave this history of the African American experience in three phases:

·       The period of arrival (Northwest Territory. How did Indiana become Indiana? Where do black folks fit into that?)

·       The nineteenth century.

·       And then the twentieth century to the present day, because, again, Black people are still here.

We’re still doing our thing in the state of Indiana, the exhibit was to be really rooted in community. There were several community organizations that I turned to and relied on to curate this experience, including the Asante Art Institute, which is a think tank at IU Indianapolis, and the Center for Africana Studies at IUPUI. 

[This all was a] first [for the institution], because Conner Prairie had never had a strong relationship with the African American community. There was no community engagement whatsoever. And so in addition to traditional exhibit components, the exhibit was interactive. It was to not include first-person interpretation. So, there’d be no one dressed in costume talking to you. It would all be third-person interpretation. That means docent interactions, interactive exhibit components, and a community garden, because Conner Prairie is a working farm. Everything that was grown in that garden was to be taken to Marion County, to the city of Indianapolis, to be distributed to food deserts and local food banks, because again, Conner Prairie, it has to be a reciprocal relationship when you’re working with community. So that’s the gist of the exhibit. It was wildly new territory for Conner Prairie. The level of interactive exhibitions is something fairly new to the organization. The lack of first-person interpretation for this particular exhibition was new to the organization, but then also having a curatorial department to ensure that the information that was [still] disseminated in first-person was accurate, was also new to the organization.

WB: For readers who aren’t familiar, can you explain a little bit about Conner Prairie and how it leans heavily on first-person interpretation?

CF: Conner Prairie is similar to areas of Colonial Williamsburg, where, as a visitor, you are walking “back in time” and you are engaging in [re-created] villages… For Conner Prairie it’s Prairie Town, and then the other one was dated to be around the Civil War. In these spaces are costumed interpreters who play various characters. And when you engage with them or ask them questions, they are going to engage with you as if it is 1836 or 1864. The information they give you will be rooted in that period. So, if you say, ‘Hey, look at my cell phone,’ they’re going to portray as if they don’t know what it is. And this type of interpretation, first-person interpretation, is entertaining for some, but it can also be wildly problematic because typically you have actors who are playing these roles. If there is this strict adherence to the role, it’s difficult to come out of character. It might be prohibited to come out of character depending upon who’s using this tactic. But it doesn’t really allow for genuine conversations and conversations with historical context. That’s what’s key. You lack the context when it comes to first-person interpretation because it’s like you’re having one-on-one conversations in the moment with someone. And if a guest doesn’t know what to ask, they’re not going to get the context. And so, it can be problematic.

WB: And these are not historians, they are actors, they’re volunteers. Often, how do I say this…  I mean they’re amateur actors in the sense that they’re not… this isn’t the people winning Oscar awards, right? These are community members who like to act.

CF: Yes, this is not a Broadway production by any stretch of the imagination… I can only speak to Conner Prairie specifically. I haven’t worked in another institution that deploys this method. We did have some staff members that had undergraduate degrees in history, or there were those who wanted to pursue a master’s degree in history. But by and large, we had interpreters who had very strong theater backgrounds and maybe an interest in history, but they were not trained as historians.

WB: In your opinion as a historian, what do you think of first-person interpretation?

CF: I don’t like it just to be very blunt. I see it as problematic because again, you take away the opportunity to provide the guest with that context that they need. And granted, you want people to come to public history institutions and question and walk away with more questions and encourage them to research and encourage their curiosity. But I think that it really misses an opportunity to give them a bit of a deeper dive into some of these questions or these periods that they may have no idea about, or they’ve gotten some sort of cursory overview from twenty years before when they were in school, or something to that effect. And it’s detrimental when you deploy that method with very sensitive or traumatic topics, things like enslavement, things like genocide. And so, it limits your ability to be able to not only convey the information, but to convey it properly. It does a disservice, in my opinion, not just to history, but to the visitor.

WB: I think that is well said. Historians often criticize, rightfully so, first-person interpretation because how do you depict the horrors of slavery with actors then who are dressed up and walking around a family park? What does that even look like in terms of re-creating the brutality of forced labor plantations? I mean, it is the same criticism of Civil War reenactments or war reenactments in general. How much are you actually getting to understand this event by pretending that you’re a historical person because you wore a costume? War is not some bygone forgotten relic of human civilizations. War is something that still happens today. It’s not a fantasy, or something you ‘understand’ because you went to field for a couple hours on a Saturday. So how much of the accuracy of the event are you actually portraying for the audience? Because that’s the thing, the patrons become an audience at that point.

CF: Absolutely. Especially when it comes to the Civil War. We had the Civil War 150 plus years ago, but it is still the most relevant thing to our contemporary moment. And we have so many of us Americans who tend to overlook the war, or you just see it as this North versus South conflict, but it’s such a complex period. And so, when [re-enactors] focus on what kind of musket was fired at Gettysburg, [but ignore the causes of] the sectional crisis [you don’t learn about the importance of the war]…[The cause of the Civil War and issue of slavery] is more important to know about in my opinion, a bit more important than to know about, than what kind of musket was fired at a battle.

[Another concern that gets lost in re-enactment is] how were everyday people impacted by these events? [You need to be] able to hear a multitude of [accurate, actual] voices, and you can only do that with primary sources… But I think that these short interactions in first person with a guest, is too short, too few and far in between, to really be able to get to the meat of some of these historical topics. Even if you’re just giving broad overviews, that context is missed. And it also serves to romanticize certain periods, especially when it comes to Civil War reenactments.

WB: Could you expand a bit on the topic of reenactment? I know we’ve talked many times about this, but the North Star program?

CF: For Conner Prairie, one of its key claims to fame was the “Follow the North Star program,” which ran for about 20 years, and it ended in 2019. It was a reenactment of the Underground Railroad. And for readers who are not familiar, again, Conner Prairie is a working farm. It’s about a thousand acres, if I remember correctly. And so, it is definitely an outdoor museum. This village, there’s historic structures, there’s composite structures, and you go into these buildings of Potter’s house, various homes, a schoolhouse, a blacksmith shop, these types of things. Follow the North Star took place at night, and you had groups that were led, and they played the role as freedom seekers, enslaved people who were coming through Indiana, who were sold illegally in Indiana and seeking freedom. And the interpreters played quite a few different roles.

Those who were participating in the illegal sale, they were slavery sympathizers. There were so-called Abolitionists or Quakers who didn’t like slavery, but didn’t want Black folks around either. And then there were slave catchers. The groups would go through the woods at night and they would be chased through the woods. They had to run from the so-called Slave Catcher. Racial epithets were used in this experience. If the experience became too overwhelming, they gave you a piece of white fabric and you tied it onto you somewhere. And that told the interpreters, don’t engage with this person. It’s too much. At the end of the night, you find out what happened to the characters that you were supposed to be portraying. And then there was this very shallow debrief about ‘how do we see slavery happening today?’ Oh, there’s human trafficking. [But] nothing about mass incarceration, nothing about police brutality or redlining or all the systematic forms of oppression that were birthed from slavery and Jim Crow. The whole thing was so wildly insensitive. No context was given, no true connections made between systemic racism in this country and its roots in the past. And so this was a program that, again, for 20 years, and Conner Prairie won awards for it, which is problematic in and of itself, but that was program.

WB: By the time you were employed there, it was already ended, correct?

CF: Oh, I wouldn’t have taken the job if they still did that.

WB: What was the reason behind ending the program? Was it something that was like, this is just no longer something we can afford to do? Was there an awakening of some sort where they realized, ‘ah, this is a bad idea’? Do you know what led to the termination of it?

CF: They had a partnership with the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience (ICSC), and the Follow the North Star program went under a review of some sort. The ICSC decided that it was best to suspend it, and Conner Prairie agreed. [I don’t think there] was a formal statement. One was drafted. I don’t know if it went out publicly though.

That was a part of the conversation around the new exhibit I was planning, we wanted to be able to address the history of Follow the North Star before opening the new exhibit.

WB: We have been talking a lot about Conner Prairie. Could you explain a little bit about who the space is named after?

CF: Sure. William Conner was, he was a land prospector. He was a statesman, actually. He spent maybe two or three times in the Indiana General Assembly, if I remember correctly. My memories are fuzzy here with this, but he’s also one of the founding members of the Indiana Historical Society. He was born in Pennsylvania, and he and his brother, John is the person for whom Connersville, Indiana, is named. But they were land prospectors. They were fur traders, and they were interpreters. William Conner lived in the area that is now Noblesville and Fishers north of Indianapolis. He owned property there. And when he came here, he married a young Lenape girl by the name of Mekinges. She was anywhere between 12 and 14 at the time that he married her. And he was in his thirties. They had several children together. In 1818, William Conner helped draft the Treaty of St. Mary’s which forcibly removed the Lenape from their land here in the state of Indiana. And with the signing of that treaty, she and their children had to move west to Oklahoma.

Pause.

CF: William Conner was not a good guy. He was not an all-American hero. He’s wildly problematic. But the land where Conner Prairie sits, that space is in fact named for him.

WB: Do you think that Conner Prairie has ever really grappled with Conner’s legacy? Because like you said, deeply problematic person. Unfortunately, his background is one that is not that atypical for white colonial settlers. He comes to the territory as a kid, and his family began this process of making relationships with Native American people. I think his mother or brother was kidnapped at one point, which was common practice where individuals from different groups would spend time with the enemy group so that they would get to learn from the enemy group and then go back to their family. The idea was it would eventually lead to peace between the two groups. So, Conner was somebody who was deeply tied into the Native American societies at that time. As you said, even married into the Lenape. But then Conner went on to use that knowledge to pretty devastating effects. He was part of William Henry Harris’s campaign to kill Tecumseh. And, like you pointed out, he basically carts off his first wife and children after he helps draft a treaty saying Native American people can’t stay on their land. After all of that he waits just a few months to get remarried.

CF: I think it’s three months. He marries Elizabeth, a white woman, an older white woman, if I’m not mistaken, who had her own wealth.

WB: So, marries into more wealth. Has the site ever dealt with that? And if so, how?

CF: I don’t know what the site is currently in the process of doing. I have not been there in a year. I do know that when I was there, I raised these questions regularly. There was this common line that Mekinges just left by her own choice. But the truth is she made that choice under duress. She was forced to make it. [As a public history site, we should] talk about this “choice,” and the full scope of Conner’s relationship with Mekinges and just  in general the impact on indigenous people. So, I don’t know. I don’t know what Conner Prairie’s plans are now. It was definitely one of the areas, had I stayed there, that I hoped to revamp. Conner Prairie has worked for years with a Lenape Elder, and I don’t know if he’s still there, Mike Pace, he’s wonderful, absolutely wonderful. But I don’t know about the future plans. I really can’t answer that question.

WB: In your opinion, what would a good, and just presentation be of Conner and his estate? And I imagine most people who go up there have no idea who he is, right? Or why it’s called Conner. What would be a good way to actually deal with this history in a public setting like Conner Prairie?

CF: The first thing that needs to happen, and it’s the only way that this can happen, is for the institution to have—and really this is any institution—to genuinely want to develop reciprocal relationships with Indigenous communities. Full stop. Because it’s not your story to tell. I think that when that happens, or if that happens, it gives you a better footing to actually tell a story in its full context and appropriately, because again, it’s not your story to tell. [You have to ask] whose story are you attempting to tell? Why do you want to tell it? That’s an even better question. But that’s the first step. And then the partnership or the relationship that you develop with that community informs how you tell the story, and that is public history.

WB: That leads to my next series of questions. When you try to create that reciprocal relationship, and you step into a very complex history with different ideas on what happened and who is right and wrong, you can quickly run afoul for simply talking to people. For example, here in Alabama, you have the Muskogee people. Within the Muskogee nation in Oklahoma there are divisions, and within the Muskogee people as a larger national identity, you have Native American groups who remained in Alabama and those who were forced to leave. So, the Poarch Creek Band that are still here, and the Creek nation in Oklahoma, sometimes working with either group will sometimes lead to alienating the other. And so as an institution and as a program in public history, we’ve gone back and forth on this, and as researchers, we just kind of move back and forth and are very diplomatic about it. But when it comes to actually telling stories in public history, it’s one of those issues where you are sometimes at a loss.

This also comes up with different local groups, too, when they do not want the full story or some aspect of history shared. When that happens, what should we do as public historians?

CF: That’s a good question. I don’t think we should engage in flawed interpretations, especially when we are fully aware of them. And you’re right, it gets wildly tricky when you’re talking about different communities. And there may be politics that we aren’t aware of. But again, I think that if there’s genuine engagement there, I think that there are conversations that can take place and perhaps programming, and it may not necessarily be your original vision of the exhibit or whatever you set out to do, but I think that that initial connection and that genuine connection should be there because that will then determine—is this something we can do or should do, or is there another direction that we could go to still share this history? But if we know that it’s flawed or if we know that it’s problematic, we shouldn’t share those interpretations.

WB: Definitely. My last question for you is since both of us have connections to the South and Midwest, and given the renewed interest in how the Deep South portrays things like Confederate memorials, do you think a reckoning for how the Midwest portrays its history is coming? Because it often seems like the problematic monuments and memory in the Midwest are overlooked in the national conversation about public history.

CF: I agree with you. The Midwest is overlooked. It is overlooked and overshadowed, all of those things. And I think what’s important to note… speaking specifically about Indiana… we have this narrative or this myth that we’re given when you grow up here. Indiana was a free state, and Indiana fought for the Union, and Indiana supplied more volunteers than any other state in the Union, second to Delaware.

All of that may be true.

But we can’t overlook the Midwest, especially places like Indiana, and dismiss them as these “free spaces.” It is not accurate to say once you got across the Ohio River, everything was fine. That’s “freedom.” Or once you cross the Mason-Dixon line, that’s “freedom,” because that’s simply not what happened in Indiana history. Indiana is one of those spaces where there were enslaved people; you can find them on the 1840 census in and outside of Vincennes, there were indentured servants in the state of Indiana, African Americans who found themselves forced to register… and to pay a bond of $500, which is like $17,000 today, and this had to be vouched for by a white person. And if you didn’t have these— basically these passes to live in the state— you were criminalized and you faced the very real possibility of being incarcerated and then forced into indenture, which for white folks lasted about seven years but for African Americans could last anywhere from twenty to twenty-five. This notion that Indiana, or other parts of the Midwest, were uncontested free spaces is a fallacy when you think critically about what freedom and movement actually were.

I’m sure a lot of folks have read or seen 12 Years a Slave. Solomon Northrop is kidnapped, things like that took place right here in Indiana. And you had folks who had never been enslaved, taken into the South, taken into Kentucky, and sold. I think that that’s critical about the Midwest and the Civil War and Reconstruction and things of that sort [is to] understand that it’s not just the North vs. the South. It was wildly complex, and the laws that were being passed in Indiana were specific to Indiana. What Ohio is doing might be a bit different. It might not be better, but it might be a bit different. And so, you have to look at the complexities of the Midwest and not just pass over it, but you also can’t write off the North either. The North was just as complicit in this system of white supremacy as the South was.

WB: I agree. But I think that becomes difficult, in my experience, because being here in the South, when I taught in Indiana and being from Ohio, you would tell Midwesterners this. And honestly, I never got a huge amount of pushback from people in the North or people in the Midwest, or my students, I should say, when I’m like, ‘yeah, there is racism here, and this is all what happened.’ Most of the time they’d be like, ‘okay, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.’ But when I got to the South what I’ve found is that by admitting or discussing the issues of the North and Midwest in terms of anti-black racism, and also genocide against indigenous people, many of my southern students use it almost as an excuse to be like, ‘well, we don’t have that much to be responsible for,’ or ‘it wasn’t that bad here then,’ ‘everyone was doing it.’

So, my worry is, regionalism becomes a way to obfuscate historical responsibility. this kind of a pointing of a finger of like, well, you can’t tell me I was racist, right? Because you’re racist.

CF: Exactly, exactly. I think we’re always going to have, sadly, these conversations because we as a country don’t want to have these conversations. That’s one of the reasons we have our current state of political affairs because there are conversations we just simply refuse to have. And a lot of these conversations are rooted in the sectional crisis of the 1850s and in the Civil War.

WB: Closing statement? As public historians, what do you think we do to address that?

CF: We pray.

Both laugh.

CF: No, I’m joking… well… praying can’t hurt.

In all seriousness, despite the pushback that we get from politicians, some of these crazy bills that are passed… I think we keep pushing. I think we keep fighting. Just because you don’t like the truth, doesn’t change the fact that it’s the truth. And as historians, we’ve done the research, we’ve done the legwork, and we continuously do this to keep our finger on the pulse. How has society changed? How does this part of the past fit in? And so, we keep pushing. We don’t lie down because while you have groups that don’t want to us to share accurate history, I think that there’s an American public who does want it.