Hosts Stefene Russell and Liz Wolfson visit in this special episode with Rev. Hubert Schwartzentruber and Mary Rittenhouse Schwartzentruber. Rev. Schwartzentruber was one of the three co-founders of the community organization JeffVanderLou Inc, which sought to retake the neighborhood from the clutches of blight and work through grassroots efforts and rehabilitation, block by block. Schwarztentruber shares his story of moving to St. Louis in the late 1950s from a rural upbringing in Zurich, Ontario, and starting a Mennonite Mission in the midst of Pruitt Igoe. Topics include Schwartzentruber's embrace of a social justice ministry not simply in St. Louis but across his career which would take him from St. Louis to Germantown PA, where he oversaw a shocking schism which pitted a diverse, LGBTQ friendly congregation versus a socially conservative Mennonite Church. Integral however in the development of Schwartzentruber's impassionned embrace for social justice issues was his work in St. Louis, which stretched from 1957 to 1972 and involved his participation not simply in mission building but community building with the help of legendary neighborhood organizers like Florence Aritha Spotts and Macler Shepard, co-founders with Schwartzentruber of the JeffVanderLou community organization. Guiding the conversation between Stef, Liz and the Schwartzentrubers is a memoir published by Rev. Schwartzentruber, "Jesus in Back Alleys," which is available for purchase from amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Back-Alleys-Hubert-Schwartzentruber/dp/1931038074

In today’s episode we will hear from Rebecca Rivas. Rivas is a video producer and reporter for the St. Louis American Newspaper. She speaks on her experiences reporting on the Ferguson uprising in 2014, as well as her current work covering the fight for black lives amidst a global pandemic.

Links:
http://www.stlamerican.com/
Article on the Stockley Protests: http://www.stlamerican.com/news/local_news/123-arrests-made-sunday-night-stockley-verdict-protests-continue/article_ee7699f8-9cf0-11e7-a9fc-7fd39f6f9b5e.html

Music from Pixabay

In this episode we will hear from Mariah Stewart. Stewart is a St. Louis-based journalist who currently covers diversity and inclusion in higher education for INSIGHT Into Diversity, the oldest and largest national diversity magazine and website.
In 2014, Stewart plunged into the journalism industry following a crowdfunded campaign for her continued coverage of Ferguson, Mo and the St. Louis region where she covered social justice for The Huffington Post and community news for The St. Louis American.
Stewart's work has been published in multiple outlets including, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Crisis Magazine, St. Louis Public Radio, and The Guardian. Her stories on protests, the justice system, and local courts have been nominated for the ArchCity Defenders 2017 Excellence in Poverty Journalism Awards and the National Association of Black Journalists 2016 Salute to Excellence Awards.
Her reporting has led her to speak at the 2017 SXSW interactive panel and keynote at the 2014 Online News Association conference.
You can contact Stewart via email at [email protected] or [email protected]

Links:
https://www.clippings.me/mariahstewart

Music from Pixabay

In today’s episode of the Ferguson Project we will hear from Mallory Rukhsana Nezam. Nezam is a cross-sector culture-maker who loves cities and believes that we have the tools to make them more just and joyful. She specializes in creative placemaking/keeping/knowing, systems change and the public domain. Through her cross-sector practice, Justice + Joy, she engages government, artists, advocacy groups, elected officials, community members and urban planners to de-silo the way we run cities and build new models of interdisciplinary collaboration. She has helped build inaugural arts & culture teams in non-arts organizations at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council of Boston, Transportation for America and PolicyLink. Raised in St. Louis, MO, she is the founder of St. Louis Improv Anywhere, and collaborating founder of the St. Louis Artivists. Through her art practice she disarms and disrupts public space norms using play and participatory performance. She holds a Master of Design from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and her research focuses on the racial equity impacts of artists residencies in local government. She’s currently a 2020 Monument Lab Transnational Fellow and a 2019-2020 inaugural Practices for Change Fellow at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute of Design & the Arts.

Links:
https://mirrorcasket.com/
https://www.mallorynezam.com/

Music from Pixabay

In this episode of the Ferguson Project we will hear from De Nichols, a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, a Transnational Fellow at Monument Lab, and Principal of Design & Social Practice at Civic Creatives. She speaks on her participation in the 2014 Ferguson uprising and her role as an activist and artist in the movement.

Links:
Design as Protest: https://www.dapcollective.com/ and https://www.instagram.com/designasprotest/
www.denichols.co
https://loebfellowship.gsd.harvard.edu
https://monumentlab.com/bulletin/announcing-the-2020-monument-lab-transnational-fellows https://www.civiccreatives.com
https://www.facebook.com/denichols.co/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/deandrean/
https://twitter.com/de_nichols
https://www.instagram.com/de_nichols/
https://www.youtube.com/user/befreeknowthyself
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pA6at4WqxPj7ctKjwWiS7itGyBVPkED7

Music: Music from Pixabay

Hello and Welcome to The Ferguson Project on The Informal History Podcast. I’m Chelsea Offiaeli, a rising junior at Harvard University, studying Women, Gender, and Sexuality and African American Studies. I’ve created a series of interviews called “The Ferguson Project” in which I take a look into the 2014 Ferguson uprising after Michael Brown Jr., an 18-year old unarmed black teen, was murdered by officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014. I will be interviewing reporters that covered the uprising as well as protesters, organizers, artists, and local residents to hear their stories, with a main focus on the black and brown women involved in the movement. In the upcoming episodes you will hear from various members of the movement as they reflect on their participation. I thank you ahead of time, for giving their stories the attention they deserve.

Music: Music from Pixabay

Vivian Gibson was raised on Bernard Street in Mill Creek Valley—454 acres in the heart of downtown St. Louis that comprised the nation's largest urban-renewal project beginning in 1959. She started writing short stories about her childhood memories of the dying community after retiring at age 66. Her memoir, "The Last Children of Mill Creek," was published by Belt in the spring of 2020. Miranda Rechtenwald talks to her about her new book, St. Louis history, and more.

Vivian's website
https://www.vivian-gibson.com

BELT Publishing Author's Page
https://beltpublishing.com/products/the-last-children-of-mill-creek

St. Louis on the Air interview
https://news.stlpublicradio.org/show/st-louis-on-the-air/2020-04-15/in-the-last-children-of-mill-creek-vivian-gibson-portrays-a-vanished-st-louis-neighborhood

St. Louis American on "The Last Children of Mill Creek"
http://www.stlamerican.com/entertainment/living_it/author-and-st-louis-native-vivian-gibson-to-discuss-new-memoir-on-left-bank-books/article_1081609a-951a-11ea-a28e-37b09b39b132.html

St. Louis Magazine review of "The Last Children of Mill Creek"
https://www.stlmag.com/history/vivian-gibson-the-last-children-of-mill-creek/

Co-editor Liz Wolfson speaks with local St. Louis artist and educator, Clayvon Welsey Ambrose for this special episode of Informal History's Podcast. A child of Mill Creek Valley, Ambrose has been everywhere from Vietnam to St. Louis in Senegal where he leads the sister city program with St. Louis, Missouri. The topic at the center of this chat is Ambrose' "The Artists' Journey," a three panel exhibition that is also the topic of a photographic essay shared with us for Volume I of the Informal History Zine (anthology).

In this episode, we talk to Brittany Breeden of Project Augustine, a nonprofit restoring the former St Augustine Catholic Church in the St. Louis Place Neighborhood. For the next three years, the goal is to stabilize and restore the building, eventually opening it as a community center offering arts and educational programs, a community garden, a wellness center, and administrative/entrepreneurial spaces.

Project Augustine
https://www.projectaugustine.org

Video tour of St. Augustine
https://youtu.be/ODE12XPZUoM

Fox 2 News/News 11 feature on Project Augustine
https://www.projectaugustine.org/post/fox-2-news-news-11-dive-deeper-into-project-augustine-s-goal-to-repurpose-st-augustine

Chris Naffziger's St. Louis Magazine story on Project Augustine
https://www.stlmag.com/history/architecture/project-augustine/

Chris Naffziger on the history of St. Augustine Catholic Church
https://www.stlmag.com/history/architecture/tragic-decline-gothic-revival-church-non-an-anomaly-st-louis/

Informal History editor and podcast cohost Liz Wolfson interviews University of California, Santa Barbara professor George Lipsitz about a range of topics including his scholarship in Black Studies as well as his time spent in St. Louis as both a community organizer and a young academic. The conversation touches topics including spatial and racial politics here in St. Louis and nationally.