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Ironically, central Missouri also has one of the 2 HBCU's in Missouri(Lincoln University in Jefferson City) and I knew that the current coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers, Tyronn Lue, is from Mexico MO. Those are a couple of things that put me onto the presence of a Black population in that part of the state.
I think Hannibal and St Joseph are really the only cities in the northern part of the state with enough Black people to notice. There may be a couple of other places though.
Central Missouri was actually the main region of the state which was slaveholding during the antebellum years. This rural black population slowly decreased over the past 150 years, but old slaveholding counties like Saline, Howard, and Randolph do retain slightly more blacks than the average for rural Missouri.
As I said, it's like the chameleon state. People in STL will say we're more like IL, but I'm sure that would vary depending on what region of the state you're in. MO is kind of its own thing with a schizophrenic identity.
Most of Missouri's population lives within 40-50 miles of the state border so it shares some features and culture of the neighboring states. Exceptions exist (Columbia - Jeff City, Springfield areas) but some of those spaces have a large non-native (not born there) populations. Missouri is hard to place because it has some of everything.
Missouri is where a few different regions collide and mix together. That said it is 95% Midwestern and a small fraction of the southern part of the state may be considered Southern. After the civil war a lot of ex confederates moved to the Ozarks region because the area was fairly lawless and they could live how they wanted. St Louis was always a pro Union city, KC was more divided, but that is from Southerners trying to influence Kansas in becoming a slave state. After the civil war a lot of southerners moved back south or to the Ozarks taking their culture with them. Most immigrants to Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska were from the Northeast, North, or Europe. My ancestors moved to eastern Kansas in the 1860s from Wisconsin. Missouri is a bit of an oddball, but it's still Midwestern.
The Great Plains are part of the Midwest, there is a lot of Western influence, but it's still Midwestern. The Great Plains are Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas and that's not debatable. Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Montana are not part of the Midwest or the Great Plains. The other subregions of the Midwest seem more vague. Upper Midwest, lower Midwest, etc...
Missouri is where a few different regions collide and mix together. That said it is 95% Midwestern and a small fraction of the southern part of the state may be considered Southern. After the civil war a lot of ex confederates moved to the Ozarks region because the area was fairly lawless and they could live how they wanted. St Louis was always a pro Union city, KC was more divided, but that is from Southerners trying to influence Kansas in becoming a slave state. After the civil war a lot of southerners moved back south or to the Ozarks taking their culture with them. Most immigrants to Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska were from the Northeast, North, or Europe. My ancestors moved to eastern Kansas in the 1860s from Wisconsin. Missouri is a bit of an oddball, but it's still Midwestern.
The Great Plains are part of the Midwest, there is a lot of Western influence, but it's still Midwestern. The Great Plains are Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas and that's not debatable. Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Montana are not part of the Midwest or the Great Plains. The other subregions of the Midwest seem more vague. Upper Midwest, lower Midwest, etc...
As I said, it's like the chameleon state. People in STL will say we're more like IL, but I'm sure that would vary depending on what region of the state you're in. MO is kind of its own thing with a schizophrenic identity.
Southern Missouri around Joplin, Springfield, and Poplar Bluff is Southern. The upper quarter of the southern half of the state is mixed. The northern half of Missouri, including St. Louis, Kansas City, Jefferson City, and Columbia, is Midwestern. So it's roughly 50% Midwestern, 25% mixed, and 25% southern.
This division is a little hard to be accurate because state boundaries don't mark stark cultural dividers. For example, S. WI and N. IL are pretty similar to one another. You could make a similar argument for S. MI and N. IN/OH. IA is very similar to NE on one end and IL on the other, so I'm not sure an Upper Midwest moniker is quite appropriate. I generally like the Great Lakes vs. Great Plains division, but then a few states are left in limbo.
I might argue for a division of the non Great Plains states into upper (Chicago, Mke, Detroit, all the way up to Mpls etc.), central (Columbus, Indianapolis, Peoria, Des Moines, etc.), and lower Midwest (Cincinnati, Evansville, maybe St. Louis).
Columbus and Indianapolis are not central Midwest. They have more in common with St. Louis and Cincinnati than they do with Des Moines and Chicago.
Does North Dakota feel like an extension of the Canadian Prairie provinces (or vice-versa, given that ND developed a little earlier)? I don't associate ND with corn, I associate it with wheat farms and Bakken oil, really cold winters etc.
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