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2 episodes with chad montrie
The Context of White Supremacy welcomes Dr. Kellen Hoxworth. Classified as a White Man, Dr. Hoxworth is an “Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University of Buffalo, State University of New York. His academic interests focus on the intersections between performance, race, and coloniality, particularly in African and Black diasporic performance.” During our recent discussing with Dr. Chad Montrie, he told us that while researching Racially Restricted Regions of Minnesota he was inundated with blackface and minstrel show images. Dr. Montrie said, “They were everywhere.” At the schools, in the libraries, at the political meetings. All areas of people activity. The ubiquitous nature of these images motivated him to write a book on the subject and spurred Gus research other material on these racial performances. I soon located, Dr. Hoxworth's Transoceanic Blackface: Empire, Race, Performance. This 2024 publication asserts that minstrels shows are not a uniquely “american” form of entertainment. Rather, blackface and minstrel show performances where a crucial component of a global White Culture. People classified as White in every region of the globe partook in the humor and domination of the minstrel show. They are a massive component of what it means to be classified as White. #WhatDoesItMeanToBeWhite #TheCOWS16Years INVEST in The COWS – http://paypal.me/TheCOWS Cash App: https://cash.app/$TheCOWS CALL IN NUMBER: 720.716.7300 CODE 564943#
The Context of White Supremacy welcomes Chad Montrie. A historian at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Montrie is classified as a White Man and his research interests include: “'Blackface' Minstrelsy, Racial Exclusion, and Labor Environmentalism.” Gus is slowly learning a great deal about the history and import of Racially Restricted Regions (so-called “sundown towns”). Locations where White people deliberately prohibit black people from residing or even visiting illustrate what it means to be racially classified as White and the intentional White labor necessary to maintain a global system of domination. We'll discuss Montrie's 2022 publication, Whiteness in Plain View: A History of Racial Exclusion in Minnesota. This text examines how generations of Whites in this region functioned to make sure very few black people made it that for north. This text contains a great deal about minstrel shows and caging black people in insane asylums. We even connect this history to the current Racist attacks against Somali immigrants and remember that a number of those White Terrorists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021traveled from Minnesota. Many Welsing moments throughout this broadcast. Please, share this podcast and Dr. Montrie's book with Timberwolves' guard Anthony Edwards. #NoSomalis #TheCOWS16Years INVEST in The COWS – http://paypal.me/TheCOWS Cash App: https://cash.app/$TheCOWS CALL IN NUMBER: 720.716.7300 CODE 564943#
Isaac and Rudy join Chad Montrie, author of numerous books on the intersection of workers' movements and the environment for a discussion on the often ignored facets of working class environmentalism. We begin by discussing Chad's earlier work To Save the Land and People, on the worker and farmer opposition to strip mining in Appalachia in the 1970s, and how that movement interfaced with the United Mine Workers of America and the Sierra Club. We continue by reflecting on what the definition of environmentalism should be, and how the workers' changing relationship to nature has been reflected in workers' movements from the Lowell Mill Girls to the United Auto Workers' outdoor camps that led to Earth Day. We also discuss Wilbur Thomas's organizing of black workers for drinking water and the Civilian Conservation Corps before finishing with a reflection on the false jobs vs nature dichotomy.
In this latest selection from the MPR News North Star Journey series, editor Brandt Williams interviews Chad Montrie, who recently published a book about racial exclusion in Minnesota. You'll also hear a report from Mark Zdechlik about efforts to expand financial literacy education, and a story from Kirsti Marohn about efforts to bridge the homeownership gap in St. Cloud. These stories are made possible in part by the Minnesota Legacy Amendment's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
In this latest selection from the MPR News North Star Journey series, editor Brandt Williams interviews Chad Montrie, who recently published a book about racial exclusion in Minnesota. You'll also hear a report from Mark Zdechlik about efforts to expand financial literacy education, and a story from Kirsti Marohn about efforts to bridge the homeownership gap in St. Cloud. These stories are made possible in part by the Minnesota Legacy Amendment's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
For "Whiteness in Plain View: A History of Racial Exclusion in Minnesota," Chad Montrie, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, researched how white Minnesotans used legal and illegal means to prevent people of color from coming to the state, to drive them out or segregate them. Montrie spoke with MPR News editor Brandt Williams. The interview has been edited. Montrie: Whiteness, the way that I'm describing, is what is achieved from racial exclusion. And so I don't mean it in an abstract conceptual or philosophical sense, but the actual result or consequence of white people excluding African Americans, or at least keeping them contained in an area in a town or particular place in a city. Is whiteness the same as white supremacy? No, I don't think it's the same as white supremacy. But people's ideas about themselves as a race, I think, in the case of white people thinking of themselves as at the top of some kind of racial hierarchy is what motivates them or what's prompting them to practice racial exclusion. How do you go from the history of exclusion in Minnesota, to the current disparities that we see today? What that [exclusion] means for white people oftentimes is that they have certain privileges that come with it. They have access to better-funded schools, they maybe are more connected in terms of social networks that allow them to have some kind of social economic mobility. And they also can buy houses, which over a course of several generations means they're building up home equity, which is federally subsidized, and they're gaining economic mobility that way. And that means that they're going to have more wealth after that many generations in comparison to African Americans who are the people denied that kind of access to homeownership. With segregated neighborhoods, you have segregated schools, how did that impact the current disparities that we see in education? Well, I guess maybe my way of connecting racial exclusion to disparities in education now is more like in terms of where people live and what kind of funding the schools get in the places where they live. And also what kind of wealth does a family have and what does that wealth mean in terms of enabling them to provide a better education for their kids or to survive or to get through hardships? So if somebody has a serious medical issue or health problem in a family, does that bankrupt the family? Or does the family make it through because they can draw on that wealth that they've acquired through time in terms of having a history in the generations preceding, of homeownership? What's an example of how racial restrictive covenants were used to exclude Black people? The Minneapolis suburb of Edina was originally an interracial farming village, sort of a rare example of African Americans and whites living together and not only just living adjacent to one another, but being actually integrated. Black people were involved in the Grange (an early farmer's union); involved in schools, involved in governments, people socializing together. But as people sold off their farmland for suburbs, the Thorpe brothers who developed the Country Club district put racial restrictive covenants on all of their houses, which said that that property couldn't be sold to someone who was not Caucasian. The only African American residents allowed were domestic workers for those households. Courtesy of Edina Historical Society A blackface minstrel show held at Edina High School in the 1950s. In the beginning of the book, you describe how violence determined where people of color could live. There are different examples where whites used violence to either remove African Americans who were there, and then also having used violence, having a reputation in that community that this is what could happen if anyone tries to violate the color line again. So in Austin, for instance, there's a railroad workers strike in the 1920s. White strikebreakers were there and white people didn't run the strikebreakers out of town until the Black strikebreakers showed up. The newspaper in Austin reports that people were saying to the crowd, “Do you want your town to be a Negro town?” And so that is as much about removing African Americans than it is trying to support the strike. Are there other names of people that you came across that you feel like, 'more people should know about this person?' Courtesy Photo from Carter family Matthew Carter (right) and his family, Tony (left) Bill, Kai, and Helen in a family portrait. Carter faced discrimination as he tried to buy property and build a house along the lakeshore in Duluth. Matthew Carter in Duluth. And people will know more about him because he and his wife were part of an effort to desegregate an area along the lakeshore in Duluth. Carter, who moved to Chicago from Georgia, married his wife, and then they moved to Duluth. He was working on a lake boat. They decided that they wanted to move from the apartment they originally moved to but they can't get anything to rent. [White people] would just tell him, ‘No, I'm not renting my apartment to you.' Or they would just not answer the door. Carter decided to buy some land that he liked. The guy that was selling the land, who was white, would not sell it to him. So then he got a straw purchaser, a local white minister to buy [the property] on London Road. Then he tried to get the permit to build a house on the land. The neighbor organized to stop him by saying it would cause ‘traffic problems.' He persisted. People stole the plywood. That slowed him down a little bit. They finally built the house. And there were a couple of cases during the night in the next couple of years where whites came and spray-painted racist graffiti on his house. Are there people who pushed back to change laws or policies? Courtesy of University of MN Archives Josie Johnson as a member of the University of Minnesota Board of Regents during a meeting in 1972. Well, the most important is Josie Johnson, who really is the reason why there was a fair housing law in 1961. There were people who had been organizing to get fair housing legislation in Minneapolis, as well as St. Paul, to have local municipal legislation. And that wasn't really going anywhere, mostly because the city attorneys were coming back with reports saying that if you said that someone couldn't discriminate on the basis of race or sell their property to whoever they wanted, then you are taking away their property rights. And Johnson had allies in the state government. And she intervened and got the governor to also intervene with the Senate committee that's holding the [fair housing] bill. They moved the bill out and the state legislature passed it. In researching the book, did you come across something that astounded you? I was doing my research in Edina. The archivist brought out an envelope and said, ‘you're gonna want to look at these.' It was a set of black and white glossy photographs of blackface minstrel shows being performed at the Edina High School in the 1950s. Just seeing these pictures, there's something really shocking about it. There's a way in which I can get wrapped up in the storytelling I'm trying to do and I began to maybe think of it as an abstract thing. And those pictures made what was going on in Edina very real.
Author and history professor Chad Montrie joins Sheletta Brundidge for a discussion about racism in Minnesota and the history of exclusionary practices.
Sheletta opens the hour speaking with author Chad Montrie about his new book examining the history or racism and exclusion in Minnesota. Later, Sheletta has a conversation about birthdays and how we celebrate for our kids before a conversation with Al Cornish of MSP Equity Fund about a chance for female and BIPOC business owners to earn a big financial boost.
For today’s podcast, I interviewed Chad Montrie, from the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, on his 2018 book The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism. This is a brief and highly accessible book that places the origins of American environmentalism not with Rachel Carson, but rather with the everyday people who have fought […]
Uncle Tom’s Cabin didn’t start the Civil War and Silent Spring didn’t start the environmental movement. In The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (University of California Press, 2018), historian Chad Montrie insists that environmental consciousness has been present in the United States since its founding, and that it could be found in places and among people overlooked by Rachel Carson and legions of journalists, historians, and activists in her time and our own. In this, his fourth book working to push the perspectives of social and labor history to the foreground in the grand narrative of American’s relationship with the natural world, Montrie draws on his own research and synthesizes a generation of scholarship to show how a diverse cast of characters—from Lowell mill girls to United Auto Workers executive Olga Madar, from migrant farm laborers in California to Slovenian immigrants in Minnesota, from coal miners fighting black lung to urban residents fighting lead poisoning, and others—perceived industrialization as a threat to their health and quality of life. This inclusive, revisionist history challenges us to rethink the causes, geography, chronology, and content of American environmentalism. Chad Montrie is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and the author of The Myth of Silent Spring, A People’s History of Environmentalism in the United States, Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States, and To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Uncle Tom’s Cabin didn’t start the Civil War and Silent Spring didn’t start the environmental movement. In The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (University of California Press, 2018), historian Chad Montrie insists that environmental consciousness has been present in the United States since its founding, and that it could be found in places and among people overlooked by Rachel Carson and legions of journalists, historians, and activists in her time and our own. In this, his fourth book working to push the perspectives of social and labor history to the foreground in the grand narrative of American’s relationship with the natural world, Montrie draws on his own research and synthesizes a generation of scholarship to show how a diverse cast of characters—from Lowell mill girls to United Auto Workers executive Olga Madar, from migrant farm laborers in California to Slovenian immigrants in Minnesota, from coal miners fighting black lung to urban residents fighting lead poisoning, and others—perceived industrialization as a threat to their health and quality of life. This inclusive, revisionist history challenges us to rethink the causes, geography, chronology, and content of American environmentalism. Chad Montrie is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and the author of The Myth of Silent Spring, A People’s History of Environmentalism in the United States, Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States, and To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Uncle Tom’s Cabin didn’t start the Civil War and Silent Spring didn’t start the environmental movement. In The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (University of California Press, 2018), historian Chad Montrie insists that environmental consciousness has been present in the United States since its founding, and that it could be found in places and among people overlooked by Rachel Carson and legions of journalists, historians, and activists in her time and our own. In this, his fourth book working to push the perspectives of social and labor history to the foreground in the grand narrative of American’s relationship with the natural world, Montrie draws on his own research and synthesizes a generation of scholarship to show how a diverse cast of characters—from Lowell mill girls to United Auto Workers executive Olga Madar, from migrant farm laborers in California to Slovenian immigrants in Minnesota, from coal miners fighting black lung to urban residents fighting lead poisoning, and others—perceived industrialization as a threat to their health and quality of life. This inclusive, revisionist history challenges us to rethink the causes, geography, chronology, and content of American environmentalism. Chad Montrie is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and the author of The Myth of Silent Spring, A People’s History of Environmentalism in the United States, Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States, and To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Uncle Tom’s Cabin didn’t start the Civil War and Silent Spring didn’t start the environmental movement. In The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (University of California Press, 2018), historian Chad Montrie insists that environmental consciousness has been present in the United States since its founding, and that it could be found in places and among people overlooked by Rachel Carson and legions of journalists, historians, and activists in her time and our own. In this, his fourth book working to push the perspectives of social and labor history to the foreground in the grand narrative of American’s relationship with the natural world, Montrie draws on his own research and synthesizes a generation of scholarship to show how a diverse cast of characters—from Lowell mill girls to United Auto Workers executive Olga Madar, from migrant farm laborers in California to Slovenian immigrants in Minnesota, from coal miners fighting black lung to urban residents fighting lead poisoning, and others—perceived industrialization as a threat to their health and quality of life. This inclusive, revisionist history challenges us to rethink the causes, geography, chronology, and content of American environmentalism. Chad Montrie is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and the author of The Myth of Silent Spring, A People’s History of Environmentalism in the United States, Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States, and To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Uncle Tom’s Cabin didn’t start the Civil War and Silent Spring didn’t start the environmental movement. In The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (University of California Press, 2018), historian Chad Montrie insists that environmental consciousness has been present in the United States since its founding, and that it could be found in places and among people overlooked by Rachel Carson and legions of journalists, historians, and activists in her time and our own. In this, his fourth book working to push the perspectives of social and labor history to the foreground in the grand narrative of American’s relationship with the natural world, Montrie draws on his own research and synthesizes a generation of scholarship to show how a diverse cast of characters—from Lowell mill girls to United Auto Workers executive Olga Madar, from migrant farm laborers in California to Slovenian immigrants in Minnesota, from coal miners fighting black lung to urban residents fighting lead poisoning, and others—perceived industrialization as a threat to their health and quality of life. This inclusive, revisionist history challenges us to rethink the causes, geography, chronology, and content of American environmentalism. Chad Montrie is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and the author of The Myth of Silent Spring, A People’s History of Environmentalism in the United States, Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States, and To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Uncle Tom’s Cabin didn’t start the Civil War and Silent Spring didn’t start the environmental movement. In The Myth of Silent Spring: Rethinking the Origins of American Environmentalism (University of California Press, 2018), historian Chad Montrie insists that environmental consciousness has been present in the United States since its founding, and that it could be found in places and among people overlooked by Rachel Carson and legions of journalists, historians, and activists in her time and our own. In this, his fourth book working to push the perspectives of social and labor history to the foreground in the grand narrative of American’s relationship with the natural world, Montrie draws on his own research and synthesizes a generation of scholarship to show how a diverse cast of characters—from Lowell mill girls to United Auto Workers executive Olga Madar, from migrant farm laborers in California to Slovenian immigrants in Minnesota, from coal miners fighting black lung to urban residents fighting lead poisoning, and others—perceived industrialization as a threat to their health and quality of life. This inclusive, revisionist history challenges us to rethink the causes, geography, chronology, and content of American environmentalism. Chad Montrie is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and the author of The Myth of Silent Spring, A People’s History of Environmentalism in the United States, Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States, and To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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