St. Louis History in Black and White

St. Louis has the dubious distinction of being one of the most racially polarized cities in the nation. However, it would be unfair not to acknowledge that many other cities also have had, and still have, problems with race relations.Three black African Americans of separate generations sat down together at the St. Louis History Museum to talk about their experiences growing up black in St. Louis, and their impressions of how the black experience changed for them here over the years. Mariah Richardson is a playwright, actress and teacher. She attended desegregated schools in St. Louis. Donn Johnson is a retired broadcast journalist who grew up on both sides of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Percy Green is a lifelong civil rights activist. He was in the vanguard of the civil rights movement in the late fifties through the early sixties, and ever since, primarily as a civil disobedience strategist.

Ethnic cleansing is not something that is peculiar to Nazi Germany, Rwanda or Bosnia. American history shows that many communities here are guilty of it too. These communities banished their black citizensoften violently. Many of these communities remain virtually all white to this day. Brothers Charles and James Brown traced their family tree to Pierce City, Missouri, and learned their ancestors had been forced out at gunpoint. Marco Williams produced a documentary titled Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks out of Town in America.

The bloodiest and ugliest of the numerous race riots in many of the cities in the industrial North took place in East St. Louis on July 2, 1917. Historian-journalist Harper Barnes detailed the incident in his book Never Been A Time.

World renowned singer-dancer-actress Josephine Baker was born in St. Louis in 1906.For the next 69 years of her life, she knew the despair of poverty, fame on the stage, heroism in war, the sting of discrimination and the power of inclusion. On the occasion of her centennial, we talked about Baker with Professor of African American Studies at USC-San Diego Benetta Jules-Rosette, the author of Two LovesJosephine Baker in Art and Life; Mary Strauss, owner of the Fox Theater; Olivia Lahs-Gonzalez, Curator of the Josephine Baker Centennial Exhibit at the Sheldon Art Gallery.

St. Louis attorney David M. Grant found ways to break barriers to equal rights. His daughter, Gail Milissa Grant, wrote about his life and her own in St. Louis in her book At the Elbows of my EldersOne Familys Journey Toward Civil Rights.

Much has been written about black military units in this country dating back to the days of the Buffalo Soldiers after the Civil War through the Tuskegee Airmen of World War Two. Less has been written about the experience of individual black soldiers who played a significant role in Europe and the Pacific in World War Two before the Armed Services were integrated in 1948. University of Iowa Professor Jeffrey Copeland has written about one such soldier, Inman Perkins, a teacher at Sumner High when he was drafted at the start of the war. Copeland recounts Perkins experiences, which mirrored those of many black servicemen, in his book, Inmans War: A Soldiers Story of Life in a Colored Battalion in World War Two.

The Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis was built in 1954 and hailed as the prototype of what public housing should be. The nine high rise apartment buildings were to be used to house both black and white St. Louisans who were displaced by urban renewal. However, within a few years, Pruitt-Igoe was proving to be a major failure. A perfect storm of poor design, poor management, bad timing, overcrowding, and crime led to its demise. Within two decades it was leveled, its rubble testimony to the utter failure of the social experiment. Early in 2011 a documentary film was released which traced Pruitt-Igoes history. Titled The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, the film shows what happened and why, while reminding viewers that Pruitt-Igoe was home to thousands of (by 1972 primarily African American residents) who loved living there, who still carry found memories of their childhood there, but who concede that while its demise was probably warranted, represents a sad chapter for black St. Louisans and the city itself. The films director, Chad Freidrichs, joins us along with journalist Sylvester Brown--a former Pruitt-Igoe resident--and Jody Sowell, Public Historian at the Missouri History Museum. This segment also includes clips from the film.

For two decades before she was born, Gail Milissa Grants father and mother had been actively involved in fighting the barriers of segregation and discrimination in St. Louis. David Grant had been closely associated with national leaders in the movement and was close to numerous celebrities who also played a role. He and they fought successfully on many fronts, but progress was slow. A de facto racial isolation was part of their everyday life. His decision to move his family to South St. Louis, which was virtually all white, was based on economics, not the need to break that particular geographical barrier. But, it put his two young children into a potentially hostile environment. This period is reflected in Gail Milissa Grants personal account of the period At the Elbows of my EldersOne Familys Journey Toward Civil Rights.

One of the most important chapters in St. Louis civil rights history was written in the late summer of 1963 when African Americans launched a series of protest demonstrations against the Jefferson Bank. It was largely a community effort by black political, religious and activist leaders in protest against not only the lack of black employees at the bank, but for the widespread practice against employing Black Americans by many of the major companies in the city. One of the key players in the demonstrations was a city Alderman, William Clay, who later was elected to Congress. He and hundreds of others went to jail for their role in the demonstrations, the legal ramifications of which went on for three and a half years. Clay documented the confrontation in his book The Jefferson Bank ConfrontationThe Struggle for Civil Rights in St. Louis. He talked about it with his son Congressman William (Lacy) Clay.

One of the great athletes of the second half of the 20th century was Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals. He was a Hall of Fame pitcher known for his aggressive approach to the game. He is still revered as one of the greatest Cardinals players ever. His career took him from the late '50s, through the '60s, and into the following decade. He pitched through the important years in black Americas struggle to win equal rights. These were the days of Martin Luther King, Kings assassination, bloody clashes between blacks and whites in the South, and violence directed at black, and white, youth involved in attempts to integrate. Black Americans were becoming more militant. Gibson was not blind to any of it, nor to his own role. He talked about it in the fall of 2009, after a raucous summer of Tea Party political demonstrations, criticism of our first black president, and social reform legislation--which some saw as evidence of overt racism.