Despite the city's many serious and, sometimes seemingly permanent social flaws, I love St. Louis, Missouri. I was born, grew up,
graduated high school, and intend to die within 20 miles of home plate at Busch Stadium. Though I have visited many times, I haven't actually lived in St. Louis or it's environs for over 40 years, since I left home to attend university. But we have bought a home there in a historic preservation neighborhood, are rehabbing and renovating it, and will be living there full time by this time next year.
To inaugurate the new St. Louis Kossacks Group, let's begin with a discussion of what is and always has been and will always remain the elephant in the room in any discussion of St. Louis - Racism.
Step into the tall grass for a look at that beast.
St. Louis was self-evidently a racist city when I was growing up in the area in the 50's and 60's. As late as 1971 when I worked in St. Louis briefly while awaiting military induction, the union manufacturing plant where I worked rigidly segregated jobs, using African-Americans only as unskilled labor. Metal fabrication, paint shop, tool and dye, assembly and all office work were exclusively for White folks. This was years after Equal Employment Opportunity became the law of the land in 1964.
When I was growing up in and around St. Louis, every adult I knew would lock the car doors (they didn't lock automatically in those days, kids) when driving through neighborhoods where Black people were on sidewalks. In my family's White Christian social circle, no Black faces ever appeared. Some of the adults were openly and unabashedly racist. One uncle was certain that The Rev.Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Communist and that Southern racial discord in the 1960's was caused by outside agitators. My mother was the only adult I knew who set a different example.
Until about the time I was born, where one lived in and around St. Louis was was rigidly controlled by White people using a legal gimmick called "restrictive covenants" which branded, onto the official government land records, limits on the race of people who would be permitted to own or occupy the premises. When the Supreme Court struck down the use and enforcement of such restrictive covenants, on 14th Amendment grounds, the usual suspects in St. Louis area real estate, including banks, realtors, developers and local functionaries, saw to it that the spirit of the racially restrictive covenants lived on during the years I was growing up there. The everlasting economic divide between Black and White residents helped perpetuate residential segregation, helped along by steering, redlining and other invidious discriminatory practice.
My experience informs me that the main dynamic between White folks and Black folks in the St. Louis area has be White fear vs. Black distrust. A local architectural historian in St. Louis explained it like this to Al-Jazeera America:
There are two reasons St. Louis looks the way it does today, noted Michael Allen, director of the Preservation Research Office. “There’s been this perpetual, successive flight of white and middle-class people from the core of the city, and the same relationships tended to reconstitute themselves across a wide swath of geography. The city’s tensions very quickly re-emerged in North County, and the trajectory suggests that they will re-emerge in St. Charles County,” the next stopover on the flight path. “The flashpoint keeps moving further from the center of the city, but it’s still the same flashpoint.”
Blacks and whites are also separated psychologically, Allen added. Starting in the days of slave ownership, “there was always this white fear of franchise and agency. What would happen if the slaves revolted? If they got the right to vote? If thousands came and took our jobs? If they lived next door? If they came to the suburbs we built to get away from them? Or the suburbs we built to get away from those suburbs?”
In reaction, St. Louis “has spent enormous sums of public money to spatially reinforce human segregation patterns,” Allen said. “We tore out the core of the city around downtown, just north and south and west, and fortified downtown as an island, by removing so-called slum neighborhoods. Then we demolished vacant housing in the Ville [where rocker Chuck Berry and opera singer Grace Bumbry grew up] and other historic black neighborhoods. These were not accidents. These were inflicted wounds.”
So the question some must ask, is why would I want to move back to a place that, on balance, has resisted racial justice most of my lifetime, and forever, before that? Why do I and how can I still love St. Louis?
Because in at least one part of St. Louis, a widely diverse and largely progressive minded community has taken root and appears to be growing in size and strength. The nearby International Institute is one of the country's most important institutions for resettlement, often in the local neighborhoods, of refugees fleeing political oppression around the World. The surrounding historic neighborhoods, from the streetcar suburb era, provide fertile ground for retail politicking and the revival of this part of the city is helping provide a model for a new kind of St. Louis, in terms of tolerance, diversity and passion for social justice.
St. Louis and its environs are a place where a few good Kossacks could find ways to make differences. So, if you live within 20 miles of home plate at Busch Stadium, say so in the comments or send me or the group a private message. Hell, even if you live in St. Charles, or Belleville, or anywhere, if you have knowledge about, interest in or insight regarding St. Louis, come on board. Join the group; share your experiences and ideas; get local; get social.
Gotta go, the Cardinal game is starting.