BLACK PIONEERS

Anna-Lisa Cox is a non-resident fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Her work has underpinned two exhibits at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Cox’s latest book, The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality (Public Affairs, $28), chronicles how free African Americans helped settle the Northwest Territory in the early 1800s. She says mainstream historians cling to a myth that whites settled the Midwest when long before emancipation the frontier Northwest Territory states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin were home to tens of thousands of free African Americans flourishing