Belt Publishing

Name: Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA
Brand: Patty Heyda
SKU: 9781953368751
Price: 25.5 USD
Availability: InStock

Founded in 2013, Belt promotes voices from the Rust Belt, smart narrative and serious nonfiction on any topic, as well as commercial fiction with a regional foothold.

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The Last Children of Mill Creek

Paperback

$18.95 $14.21 Save 25%

Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA

Paperback

$34.00 $25.50 Save 25%

Hannibal's Invisibles

Paperback

$28.00 $21.00 Save 25%

The St. Louis Anthology

Paperback

$20.00 $15.00 Save 25%

The Last Children of Mill Creek

9781948742641

$18.95 $14.21 Save 25%

A bestselling memoir of a vibrant childhood spent in a thriving St. Louis African American community before “urban renewal” changed everything.

Vivian Gibson grew up in Mill Creek Valley, a segregated working-class neighborhood in St. Louis that was razed in 1959 to build a highway, an act of racism disguised under urban renewal as “progress.” A moving memoir of family life at a time very different from the present, The Last Children of Mill Creek chronicles the everyday lived experiences of Gibson’s large family―her seven siblings, her crafty, college-educated mother, and her hard-working father―and the friends, shop owners, church ladies, teachers, and others who made Mill Creek into a warm, tight-knit African American community. In Gibson’s words, “This memoir is about survival, as told from the viewpoint of a watchful young girl―a collection of decidedly universal stories that chronicle the extraordinary lives of ordinary people.”

Winner of a Missouri Humanities award for literary achievement, The Last Children of Mill Creek is an important book for anyone interested in urban development, race, and community history―or for anyone who was once a child.

Praise for The Last Children of Mill Creek

2022 Missouri Author of the Year Winner

Missouri's “Great Reads from Great Places” Selection for the 2023 National Book Festival

“This is a story borne aloft by the sheer human joy of storytelling, of memory, of tender love for a mother and a father and for a vanished time and place. It is a book that, while steadfastly refusing the American fiction of color blindness, just as steadfastly refuses to portray Black life through the single warped lens of white-induced pain.” —TheLos Angeles Review of Books

Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA

9781953368751

$34.00 $25.50 Save 25%

Ferguson, Missouri, became the epicenter of America’s racial tensions after the 2014 murder of Michael Brown and the protests that followed in its wake.

Though this suburb just outside St. Louis might have seemed like an average midwestern town, the activism that exploded there after Brown’s killing laid bare how longstanding municipal planning policies had led to racial segregation, fragmentation, poverty, and police targeting.

In over one hundred maps, Patty Heyda charts the systemic forces that have defined Ferguson, and the first-ring suburb in America more broadly. Through an in-depth look at the contradictions undergirding city planning and design, it illuminates how tax incentives, housing codes, urban design, policing, philanthropy, and even landscaping often work against the betterment of residents’ lives. At its heart lies a key question: Just who are our cities being built for?

A profound rethinking of what maps can be, Radical Atlas of Ferguson USA will challenge city planners, designers, and everyday citizens to change their perspective of public space.

Foreword by Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman.

Hannibal's Invisibles

9781953368768

$28.00 $21.00 Save 25%

With over a hundred photos collected by G. Faye Dant, and with an introduction by renowned Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin.

When Mark Twain published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885, he turned Hannibal, Missouri, into one of the most famous towns in the American imagination. But like Twain’s novel, Hannibal’s idyllic façade often elided the darker racial violence that had marked its past, and it overlooked the history and humanity of the Black residents who have called Hannibal home for generations. Without them, there would be no “America’s hometown.”

In Hannibal’s Invisibles, G. Faye Dant, a Hannibal resident and the executive director of Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center, tells the incredible story of the Black community in this small Missouri town, giving voice to a history that has been marginalized far too long. Hear first-hand accounts from those who survived enslavement, faced racism after emancipation, endured Jim Crow, and contributed to the triumphs of the civil rights movement. These are the stories of Black doctors, entrepreneurs, and teachers who helped uplift the community, and remembrances of the countless individuals who gave richness and meaning to Hannibal’s everyday life. The vintage photographs and historical documents collected here are a celebration of these resilient people who built and sustained this corner of the Midwest, despite the immense obstacles they met at every turn.

The St. Louis Anthology

9781948742443

$20.00 $15.00 Save 25%

“A dazzling portrait of a Midwestern city whose relationships among socio-economics, religion, civil rights, and class are consistently complex” (Kirkus).

St. Louis is a fragmented place. It’s physically dissected by rivers, highways, walls, and fences, but it’s also a place where one’s race, class, religion, and zip code may as well be cards in a rigged poker game, where the losers face a dramatically shorter life expectancy. But despite these many divisions, St. Louis can also be a city of warmth, love, and beauty―especially in its contrasts.

This collection features nearly seventy essays penned by St. Louis writers, journalists, clerics, poets, and activists including Aisha Sultan, Galen Gritts, Vivian Gibson, Maja Sadikovic, Nartana Premachandra, Sophia Benoit, Robert Langellier, Samuel Autman, Umar Lee, and more. Here you’ll learn about:

The rent strike of 1969
Religious life in Pruitt-Igoe public housing
Protest art in Ferguson
Segregation in the Vandeventer neighborhood
A church closing in Kinloch
And much more.