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An intimate history that puts the Black church at the heart of New England’s struggle with race, power, and belonging

On the eve of Barack Obama’s historic election in 2008, the Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield, Massachusetts—a church built by historian Todd E. Robinson’s family—was set ablaze in an act of racial terror. This devastating event echoes a long history of attacks on Black churches, institutions that have served as vital centers of faith, civic life, and community organization.

In Faith in the Fire, Robinson charts the evolution of Springfield’s Black community from its seventeenth-century beginnings through the Great Migration and into the twenty-first century. Centering the Black church, he demonstrates how African Americans shaped the city’s industrial, cultural, and civic landscape, building social networks and organizations that became enduring anchors of community life. From the League of Gileadites, an all-Black armed anti-slavery militia, to twentieth-century initiatives like the Springfield Plan—a pioneering but short-lived experiment in interracial education—Robinson uncovers the city’s deep history of Black resistance to white supremacy. In doing so, he exposes the limits of New England’s mythic racial tolerance. Racial violence, police brutality, economic inequality, educational disparities, and housing segregation, Robinson argues, are not aberrations of the South but also enduring features of Northern life and culture.

Drawing on extensive archival research and his own family’s experience, Robinson offers a powerful and deeply personal narrative that links past and present. Through the intertwined story of Springfield’s Black community and the destruction of one of its most cherished institutions, he illuminates how the long struggle for freedom, justice, and belonging continues to shape the life of Black Americans and the nation as a whole.

From Buddy Holly and the Crickets to the Flatlanders, Terry Allen, and Natalie Maines, Lubbock, Texas, has produced songwriters, musicians, and artists as prolifically as cotton, conservatives, and windstorms. While nobody questions where the conservatives come from in a city that a recent nonpartisan study ranked as America's second most conservative, many people wonder why Lubbock is such fertile ground for creative spirits who want to expand the boundaries of thought in music and art. Is it just that "there's nothing else to do," as some have suggested, or is there something in the character of Lubbock that encourages creativity as much as conservatism?

In this book, Christopher Oglesby interviews twenty-five musicians and artists with ties to Lubbock to discover what it is about this community and West Texas in general that feeds the creative spirit. Their answers are revealing. Some speak of the need to rebel against conventional attitudes that threaten to limit their horizons. Others, such as Joe Ely, praise the freedom of mind they find on the wide open plains. "There is this empty desolation that I could fill if I picked up a pen and wrote, or picked up a guitar and played," he says. Still others express skepticism about how much Lubbock as a place contributes to the success of its musicians. Jimmie Dale Gilmore says, "I think there is a large measure of this Lubbock phenomenon that is just luck, and that is the part that you cannot explain."

As a whole, the interviews create a portrait not only of Lubbock's musicians and artists, but also of the musical community that has sustained them, including venues such as the legendary Cotton Club and the original Stubb's Barbecue. This kaleidoscopic portrait of the West Texas music scene gets to the heart of what it takes to create art in an isolated, often inhospitable environment. As Oglesby says, "Necessity is the mother of creation. Lubbock needed beauty, poetry, humor, and it needed to get up and shake its communal ass a bit or go mad from loneliness and boredom; so Lubbock created the amazing likes of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, Terry Allen, and Joe Ely."