Coming back to the Other Side of Middletown; Writing a New Story in Whitely, 100 Years Later

In the 1920s, when Robert and Helen Lynd came to Muncie with their notebooks and curiosity, they thought they were studying a typical American town. They didn’t realize they were documenting a mirror—a place where the nation would watch itself change.

They studied factories, churches, schools, family life, leisure, class conflict.
But what they missed—or refused to see—was just as important as what they documented.
Like so many others, they barely acknowledged the Black community, having erased the voices of people who shaped the soul of the city from the sidewalks up.

And that is where my life re-enters the story.  I am not just someone from Muncie.
I am someone who left, saw the world, evolved, and returned carrying history inside me. 

I am the continuation of the unfinished chapters

The Lynds wrote about Muncie as if “American life” was something happening only among the white, industrial middle class. But there has always been another Muncie—Black Muncie, Whitely Muncie, working-class Muncie, kitchen-table Muncie, church-basement Muncie.

My father.
My mother.
My uncles.
My childhood friends.
My neighborhood.
My church pew.

I lived the chapters the Lynds didn't think to write.   

We would have to wait until 2004 to see "The Other Side of Middletown", but by then, I was long gone making my life somewhere else. 

My journey embodies the transformation they couldn’t predict

I was that kid from Whitely who:

• walked Longfellow sidewalks

• threw rocks out of mischief and curiosity

• dreamed of leaving.

• and eventually stepped into the high-tech world of Boston and Route 128.

I carried Muncie with me into places that weren’t made for me, into boardrooms and server rooms, into systems shaped by whiteness, power, and exclusion.

They studied “Middletown labor.”
I became global knowledge work.

They documented the American factory.
I lived the American transition from industry to technology.

I am proof that mobility is not just economic—it’s spiritual

The Lynds said people in Muncie mostly stayed in their class and stayed in their town.

I broke the pattern.

I left.

I built a career in technology before tech became America’s new economy.
I married interracially at a time and place where that still shook some people.
I carried the trauma and the weight of racism—yet you kept moving.

My journey was not simply leaving home.
It was testing the boundaries of the American promise.

I have returned to write the ending of my own chapter

One hundred years after the Lynds, I stand in the same neighborhoods they walked.

Back at the library.
Sitting in community centers.
Reconnecting to sacred relationships, sacred spaces, sacred memory.

I am not the prodigal son returning—I am the historian of my own becoming.

I am writing what the original studies left out:

The story of resilience.
The story of Black dignity.
The story of coming home.

The new Middletown is not a study—it’s a reckoning

The Lynds asked:

“What is the American way of life?”

My life now asks:

“Who got left out of the American story?”

They measured Muncie by factory whistles and Sunday church attendance.

I measure it by:

• how people heal,

• how communities remember,

• how we rise after being knocked down,

• how we forgive ourselves and others,

• how we reclaim belonging.

I am the missing chapter of Middletown— 
the chapter that proves Middletown Studies, and by extension, America is more than data, more than class struggle, more than sociology.

America is lived.
America is felt.

America is carried inside a single soul that journeys away, and journeys back.

The other side of Middletown is not *other, it is we and me; and we are history in the making. 

Thomas Green's son, mother, and aunt. Whitely Neighborhood, Muncie, Indiana -1974