The protests that ensued after police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown on August 9th had a ring of familiarity. Since it was first annexed during America’s expansion westward in 1804, St. Louis’ political structures have reinforced racial difference.
When African American communities attempted to effect change in the courts and on the streets starting in the 1850s, state and popular reactions were swift, and at times vicious. Like many cities in the United States, St. Louis was designed to create places like Ferguson, and the tensions current residents feel have a deep-rooted history.
1700s
April 1763
The French colony of St. Louis
St. Louis was founded as a trading post below the convergence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, but above the hub of New Orleans. Nominally governed by French Imperial laws controlling race and slavery, the colony’s distance from the crown and a need for any able-bodied worker gave early St. Louis its frontier, egalitarian feel.
Spain acquired St. Louis from 1770–1800, and although Spanish administration was light, the governor was obligated to ban Indian slavery from St. Louis. He formed an agreement to phase out Indian slavery in favor of African slavery, which benefited the French slave traders of New Orleans.
1800s
March 10, 1804
Louisiana Purchase & “Black Code” law
St. Louis was annexed as part of the 828,000 square mile Louisiana Purchase, making it the easternmost city added to the fledgling United States. The new American government quickly enacted a “Black Code” based on Virginia law that forbade slaves of African descent from unlawful assembly or seditious speech.
August 10, 1821
Henry Clay strikes Missouri Compromise
Missouri territory, which included St. Louis, was a fraught addition to the United States. In order to balance slavery-tolerant Missouri’s statehood in the Senate, Maine also became a (free) state.
The “Missouri Compromise” struck by US Senator and master mediator Henry Clay was supposed to ban slavery north of the 36’30 parallel, except for Missouri. The Compromise eventually became toothless and was destroyed by the Dred Scott decision. White Missourians attempted to exclude “free negroes and mulattoes” from the state, but such language was held to be unconstitutional.
1840s – 1850s
The Ellis Island on the Mississippi
Irish fleeing the potato famine and Germans escaping the European revolutions of 1848 found a home in the bustling port city. The influx of cheap labor made urban slavery bad business, and many slaves bought their freedom before the Civil War.
New immigrants could form social clubs and “pass” as white, but blacks were precluded from joining white society, and instead set up parallel social institutions.
1857
Dred Scott and the “Freedom Cases”
Dred Scott was brought by his owner through Missouri into Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was illegal. Scott sued for his freedom, but the US Supreme Court ruled against him, saying slaves were not citizens and were therefore ineligible to benefit from the legal rights afforded Americans. Slaves, including Scott, had no rights in pre-Civil War St. Louis.
“No rights which the white man was bound to respect”
– Justice Taney, in his opinion on Dred Scott vs. Sanford.
1858
The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis
Cyprian Clamorgan published The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, a socialite cosmology of St. Louis’ “Colored” community before the Civil War that dished gossip, describing the gradations of skin color, access to wealth and gender dynamics of the city’s upper-class African American community.
When compared to Dred Scott and those like him, Clamorgan’s book demonstrated how fractious the African American community was in the 1800s. Scott was chattel while others who looked like him lived in glamorous mansions. The intersections of class and race, and not race alone, created rule of law in St. Louis during the 1800s.
“Black”, “African American”, and “Colored”? Identity and community
Clamorgan’s use of the term “Colored” to describe himself and his community may strike today’s readers as odd. Terms used to describe the community of Americans with African ancestry are complicated by tone and context.
A Los Angeles Times journalist asked about self-identification to varied responses in August 2014, and a 1967 essay by the Senior Editor of Ebony in 1967 was just as complicated. It’s a question best handled delicately.
1861–65
The Civil War and its aftermath
Although it was a slave state, politicians kept Missouri within the Union fighting alongside the non-slaveholding states.
In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and freed slaves in rebellious states. But in Missouri, Kentucky and Maryland slaves were not given their freedom until after the war, when the US Constitution was amended to ban slavery.
When the slaveholding states surrendered at Appomattox, Va. in 1865, they were subject to military rule. Missouri was not, and as a consequence, its cities saw an influx of former slaves looking to begin a new life.
1874
The hub city of a new America
The construction of the Eads Bridge, which spanned the Mississippi River, allowed St. Louis to serve as a funnel from the industrious East into the Great Plains. As African American cowboys became part of a new American economy, predominantly black towns were founded along the railroad routes veining westward from St. Louis.
1876
A divisive legacy
The city’s position as a hub for east-west travel and commerce made it wealthy and its politicians felt that small farms in the surrounding county were a drain on city taxes, and engineered a split separating the city from St. Louis County that would come to be called the “Great Divorce.”
The move may have made sense for St. Louis at the time, but as the city lost its wealth over the next century to both white and black flight to the suburbs, the legacy of the “Great Divorce” became apparent: commuting suburbanites were politically and fiscally unaccountable for the wellbeing of the city.
1900s
1890–1930
The Great Migration: rags to ragtime
The city’s industrial boom brought in thousands of African Americans. St. Louis’s black population more than doubled from 1910–1930, and famous artists such as Scott Joplin and Josephine Baker gave the city a style distinct from the German and Anglo communities that dominated other metropolises during the Jazz Age.
https://archive.org/download/ScottJoplin-TheEntertainer1902/ScottJoplin-TheEntertainer1902.mp3
May 1917
The East St. Louis Riot
Labor unions in St. Louis excluded African Americans (particularly those migrating from farther south), and fears of black men “fraternizing” with white women at a labor meeting led to thousands of whites marching on the predominantly black neighborhoods of East St. Louis, across the Mississippi River in Illinois.
The Illinois governor called in the National Guard, many of whom joined in the lynching and destruction. The riot targeting the African American community was one of a series across the country, and the loss of black-owned banks in particular devastated generations of accumulated wealth.
“Black skin was a death warrant.”
– Carlos Hurd, a journalist covering the riots for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
1937
Missouri’s Black towns, destroyed in a deliberate disaster
African Americans formed communities in St. Louis County after the Civil War as a way to escape the oppressive Jim Crow segregation laws of the city itself. In 1937, the African American town of Pinhook was deliberately flooded and destroyed when the Army Corps of Engineers demolished levees to better control floodplains in the marshy Mississippi River Basin. Another African American town, Kinloch, was razed to expand St. Louis’ Lambert Airfield.
Jim Crow Laws: Freedom in name only
Changes to the US Constitution after the Civil War made discrimination against African Americans illegal, but whites held onto power throughout the South, including Missouri. State and local laws passed in the name of preventing voter fraud in fact made it more difficult for African Americans to register to vote. Other laws made it impossible for African Americans to run businesses or obtain loans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ughAVo2ZAag
Southern trees bear a strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees
– “Strange Fruit” written by Abel Meeropol, as sung by Nina Simone
1947
White flight, black fright
Harland Bartholomew imagined a St. Louis divided into work, housing and commercial areas dependent on roads and cars for transportation. The wide avenues of his plan and the low-density single-family housing that proliferated in St. Louis County made suburban homeownership a middle-class possibility.
Redlining and restrictive covenants: Enforcing divide through economics
The period after World War II is often seen as the blossoming of the middle class in America, as men returned from war to attend university and purchase houses. But thousands of African American veterans were not admitted to universities or allowed to purchase homes.
Restrictive covenants and “redlined” districts, where home financing is tough to find, excluded the African American community from this chapter of the American Dream, transforming the center of St. Louis into a segregated zone, facilitated by Bartholomew’s plan.
1948
Fighting for their dream and their house: Shelley v. Kraemer
The African-American Shelly family bought a house in a white St. Louis neighborhood with a restrictive covenant preventing “people of the Negro or Asian Race” from living there. The family eventually won a Supreme Court case that held such covenants illegal.
The Shelley victory gave many African Americans faith in the federal system as a means to defeat local prejudice in the early years of the Civil Rights movement.
Equal protection of the laws is not achieved through indiscriminate imposition of inequalities.
– Chief Justice Vinson, in the court’s opinion in Shelly v. Kraemer.
1965
The Arch and the projects
The iconic Eero Saarinen-designed Gateway Arch, a St. Louis landmark, was erected in a park built on a condemned black neighborhood. During its construction, members of the Congress of Racial Equality climbed the structure to protest the dearth of jobs offered to African Americans.
Meanwhile, the 33 blocks of the Pruitt-Igoe Homes, completed in 1954, were crumbling due to a lack of investment. The flight of capital from the city forced Pruitt-Igoe’s managers into desperate cuts, and the raising of the silver arch nearby marked the stark contrast in the city’s priorities.
1972
The rail belt becomes the rust belt
St. Louis lost 30% of its population in the 1970s, and the subsequent depressed housing market made Pruitt-Igoe untenable. Many African American families that moved north to St. Louis a century earlier moved back south during the 1970s. As families (and their tax dollars) left the city, Pruitt-Igoe was demolished after 20 years of service.
1981–1993
Urban beautification in a divided St. Louis
Mayor Vincent Schoemehl focused on highly visible historic preservation, urban beautification and public safety campaigns rather than the city’s housing crisis.
Schoemehl’s emphasis on an urban employment core for suburban commuters displaced the African American businesses serving local communities. City investment in signature buildings instead of social services widened the inequality gap.
The city of St. Louis is self-contained as an island, exists in no country, is, in a way, a kind of territory, gerrymandered as Yugoslavia…”
– Stanley Elkin, novelist and English professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
1998
“War on Drugs” turns violent
Like many American cities in the early 1990s, St. Louis had an alarmingly high homicide rate and was scarred by the drug trade. By 1998, however, the city had halved its homicide rate from five years previous.
There are no universally-accepted reasons for this shift, but police attributed it to mandatory sentencing guidelines. Critics of St. Louis law enforcement pointed to a climate of fear stoked by the police. Whatever the reason, the decrease in crime preceded an increased militarization of the police in 2001.
2000s
2010
Exodus and blight: Bottoming out after the mortgage crisis
St. Louis city lost 8% of its population between 2000 and 2010, bottoming out at 319,000 from a high of 857,000 in 1950.
The 2008 mortgage crisis caused foreclosures throughout the city and wiped out wealth in the African American communities in particular. Families lost their savings and were forced to consolidate, usually in more affordable suburbs like Ferguson. Whole neighborhoods were “blighted” by the government and opened to investors rarely from the neighborhoods newly emptied of African Americans.
September 2012
The education crisis: local resentments
Normandy High School in north St. Louis, Michael Brown’s alma mater, lost its accreditation due to poor academic standards and financial health. Students in failing school districts were allowed to transfer to accredited schools, but parents at these better (and predominantly white) schools often saw these (predominantly African American) incoming students as threats to the safety and promise of their own children.
Predominantly white schools have better access to education, and we get the scraps.
–Diamond Latchison, a former St. Louis public school student as interviewed by Madeline O’Leary.
March 2014
Exclusion on St. Louis’ “Great Streets”
The Delmar Loop, a stretch of restaurants, shops, and bars near Washington University, straddled predominantly white Clayton and predominantly African American University City. A Nuisance Abatement Vehicle, strong police presence and cameras are felt to target only the latter and not the university students.
Meanwhile, the neighborhood surrounding the St. Louis Cardinals’ new ballpark was given city tax breaks, but a “post-9pm dress code” – under fire in nearby Kansas City for being racially discriminatory – was thought to purposefully alienate African Americans from the city’s most successful sports team.
August 9, 2014
“Stop Shooting!”: Michael Brown’s death
At 12:01 p.m. on August 9, police officer Darren Wilson drove up to teenagers Michael Brown and Dorian Johnson and told them to get onto the sidewalk from the street. There is still disagreement about what precisely happened afterwards, but Wilson shot at Michael Brown and hit him six times.
Dorian Johnson claims that Brown and him told Wilson they were almost home, and that Wilson then cut them off in his car and grabbed Brown, and when Brown broke free and fled, Wilson shot. Wilson did not call for an ambulance or write a report after the shooting, and Brown’s body was not picked up until hours later.
