Left in the Midwest

St. Louis Progressive Activism in the 1960s and 1970s

Amanda L. Izzo, Benjamin Looker

484 pages

Published: December 2022

95 illus., 11 maps

ISBN: 9780826222688

Format:

Hardcover

Price: $50.00

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About This Book: The essays in this volume collectively demonstrate that despite St. Louis’s post–World War II reputation as a conservative and sleepy Midwestern metropolis, the 1960s and 1970s saw an efflorescence of progressive organizing in the city and its immediate region. To date, the best-remembered and most thoroughly studied of such efforts are racial-justice campaigns by Black freedom movement groups, such as the city’s trailblazing chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the young activists and artists associated with diverse entities including the Black Liberators, the Black Artists’ Group, the Black River Writers, and the Zulu 1200s. Less well known are the many grassroots social-movement initiatives in St. Louis, which ranged from women’s liberation, reproductive rights, and gay liberation to antimilitarism efforts, neighborhood empowerment, and environmental justice. Most activists who engaged in these movements generally imagined themselves on the left of the political spectrum but, nevertheless, pursued different goals and often found themselves in conflict. Taken together, they constituted a distinctive, spirited, if oft-forgotten element of the social and cultural geography of St. Louis during the 1960s and in the decade’s aftermath. The illuminating scholarly contributions of this volume explore the wide range of progressive activist movements that took root in a single Midwestern city during the long 1960s.
Authors and Editors: Amanda L. Izzo is an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Saint Louis University. A scholar of US women’s history, she received her PhD from the American Studies Program of Yale University. She is the author of Liberal Christianity and Women’s Global Activism: The YWCA of the USA and the Maryknoll Sisters.

Benjamin Looker is an associate professor of American Studies at Saint Louis University, with a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His most recent monograph is A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America, a recipient of “best-book” awards from the American Studies Association, Urban History Association, and other academic organizations.