CONFLUENCE AND CONTESTATION
On the fifteenth of February AD seventeen hundred and Sixty four, they landed at a place which they thought convenient for the purposes of the Company, and immediately proceeded to Cut down Trees, draw the lines of a Town, and build the house where this Deponent [Auguste Chouteau] at present resides—Mr. Laclede on his arrival named the Town Saint Louis, in Honour of the King of France. . . . The Illinois [Inoca] Indians claimed the land where S’Louis now stands when this Deponent first came here.
—Auguste Chouteau, April 18, 1825, as recorded by Thomas Hunt
The cultural politics of race and space in the St. Louis metropolitan area today are embedded in legacies of fragmented governance and a fierce drive for local autonomy. The physical and political landscapes of this area are shaped by global contestations over territory, slavery, and trade, and the region has a long history of using the local courts and municipal law to police and reorganize racial, political, and economic hierarchies. The genealogies highlighted in this chapter follow the threads that run through these histories with a particular focus on early constructions of race and identity and later formations of spatial imaginaries and racialized policy. Also emphasized are narratives of development in North St. Louis County and the histories of demographic transition in this area. This chapter is not intended as a comprehensive history of the region or of North St. Louis County. Rather, it illuminates what I argue are important specificities and peculiarities that shape the physical, political, and cultural landscape of the region. These specificities and peculiarities are helpful for understanding contemporary practices and phenomena taken up in subsequent chapters, especially for readers who are unfamiliar with St. Louis.1
Colonization
French fur traders founded the original settlement of St. Louis in 1764 on the land of the Illinois (Inoca) tribes and adjacent to the ancient mounds of what has been described as the advanced pre-Columbian civilization of the Mississippian people.2 Naming it in honor of King Louis IX, Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau chose a location on the western bank of the Mississippi River just below the confluences of the Missouri and Illinois Rivers. Although they believed they had established the settlement for France, it was in fact added to the colonial possessions of Spain—as France had secretly ceded the Louisiana Territory to Spain at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763.3 It took four years for residents of St. Louis to learn they were subjects of Spain and six years before the Spanish showed up to govern the region. The Spanish, who governed the Louisiana Territory from New Orleans, initially planned to remove settlements on the upper Mississippi and install a series of forts; however, they reassessed their plans after observing the geography, size, and culture of St. Louis, choosing instead to build a fort near the settlement.4
By 1773, roughly four hundred French-speaking people and two hundred people noted as enslaved Africans and Indians lived in St. Louis.5 Although the Spanish outlawed indigenous slavery in the Louisiana Territory in 1769, there was an apparent Spanish ambivalence regarding people already held in captivity, and French settlers and traders living in the territory were not prone to following Spanish law. Lieutenant Governor Pedro Piernas reported a backlash to the ban on slavery, and Spanish authorities allowed residents of St. Louis and surrounding towns to retain, as well as to take, both African and indigenous peoples into slavery, presumably to maintain relative peace in the Upper Louisiana Territory and obtain the cooperation of prominent French businessmen and slaveholders in the St. Louis community.6
According to written accounts, St. Louisans and residents in the Upper Louisiana Territory had a reputation for being especially cruel to Africans held as slaves. Amos Stoddard, who later became a commandant of the territory, observed that, from its inception, St. Louis developed a culture of particularly extreme brutality toward people of African heritage and stated that those enslaved in Upper Louisiana had it much worse than those in Lower Louisiana.7 Stoddard noted that St. Louisans justified brutality by invoking culture and claiming that Africans were especially lazy and, unlike “Indians,” required punishment to work. Stoddard attributed the particular brutality he witnessed in St. Louis to the settlers and traders who were drawn to the area and the necessary alliances traders made with indigenous tribes who routinely took slaves as a form of domination over rival tribes.8 Representations of the “noble savage” versus the “subhuman African” are common colonial tropes. In colonial St. Louis, specific representations that utilized these tropes reflect the trading and logistical dependence of white fur traders on indigenous peoples and the relative degree of autonomy tribes maintained at that time. Enslaved African people, on the other hand, were viewed as disposable labor and treated as subhuman commodities with little agency and no rights. Writing about the state of enslaved African people in St. Louis, Stoddard states, “Good God! Why sleeps thy vengeance! Why permit those, who call themselves Christians, to trample on all the rights of humanity, to enslave and to degrade the sons and daughters of Africa!”9 Stoddard goes on to argue that incompetence on the part of the Spanish and the constant turnover in leadership created a brutal environment that promoted the accumulation of personal wealth at all costs, rather than civic goals and governance. In his view, “the evils of the slave system in Upper Louisiana may, in a great measure, be attributed either to the want of energy or intelligence among the governors of that province. As their appointments were limited to short periods, seldom extending beyond five years, the accumulation of wealth was the predominant motive of their actions, and some of them did not hesitate at the means.”10 Stoddard, however, like many Americans who would be placed in leadership roles after 1805, viewed the Spanish government with contempt, and other records suggest that French-speaking founding families, rather than Spanish emissaries, dictated the political, social, and legal culture of Spanish colonial St. Louis.
The Spanish in fact found it difficult to govern the French-now-Spanish subjects who had no interest in living off the land and no desire to conform to the Spanish colonial model of planned self-sufficiency. Rather, pursuing the chase, trade, speculation, and the accumulation of property were at the center of civic life and shaped social and political relationships in the first several decades of the settlement’s existence.11 According to early French and Spanish documents, the small Spanish contingents sent from New Orleans to govern St. Louis were relegated to record keeping and resolving internal disputes—usually over the collection of debts or the ownership of land and people.12 Legal scholars argue that while the legal system under Spanish rule performed the tasks of resolving disputes, allocating property, and providing structure for transactions, it did so with little formality, “with barely any reference to written law and with almost no resort to any authority beyond the unarticulated norms of the [French Creole] community.”13 Although lawyers working on behalf of the US government would later use Spanish code in attempts to sort out land claims and resolve disputes, Spanish code is rarely mentioned in existing legal documents of this period, and the granting of land generally did not follow processes identified by Spanish code.14 This ambiguity of law led to much litigation contesting land and property claims in the century after the United States took control of St. Louis.15 It also set the stage for a significant emphasis on local autonomy in the region and established a precedent by which the local courts were viewed as instruments of those in power, using local customs rather than the laws of the ruling nation-state as the basis for legal standing.
Between 1769 and 1800, St. Louis grew as a strategic trading post with direct access to the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois Rivers and as an important supply stop for people traveling from the eastern states and territories to points west of the Mississippi River. Fur trading remained at the center of commerce and, as J. Frederick Fausz’s research shows, fur traders based in St. Louis built a trading conglomerate with Native American tribes, which reached across the middle of North America. Trade remained in the control of founding French families, including those of Auguste Chouteau and Pierre Laclede, who supplied furs to Europe and relied on Native American participation. The extended Chouteau and Laclede families developed elaborate financial systems through which trade licenses were issued and shares were calculated for each tribe.16 Discipline was imposed on and by tribes through trade embargoes, enslaving captives of non-compliant tribes, and raping and marrying Native American women. Tribes that produced the most pelts and protected white fur traders by turning on other tribes were rewarded with substantial trading privileges. The Osage tribe, whose territory encompassed much of what would become the state of Missouri, developed a strong alliance with white traders in the Upper Louisiana Territory and, while they initially profited greatly in terms of favor and accumulation, the tribe ultimately suffered the greatest losses from disease, retaliation from other tribes, and division of their own tribe into two branches. Ultimately, the US government disregarded these alliances, and the Osage tribe lost what was left of their territory after losing much of their population.17
In 1800, France secretly took back control of the Louisiana Territory. Napoléon Bonaparte, having lost control and trade routes in what was considered the West Indies through slave revolts, believed that the vast territory would be more valuable as a tool of negotiation than as a part of the French Empire. As both the prize and the pawn of conflict in Europe for over a century, the Louisiana Territory was increasingly difficult to control from Europe in the face of US independence, westward expansion, and new forces impacting global trade policy—particularly the transatlantic slave trade that was building the southern cotton empire and greatly benefitting the US government.18 As president, Thomas Jefferson believed American settlers pushing westward would gradually acquire the Louisiana Territory through nonmilitary means. When French troops arrived in New Orleans in 1801 to take possession and secure the city, however, panic set in among residents of the southern states and territories. Southerners in the United States feared reverberations of the Haitian Revolution and believed slave uprisings would follow across the southern US states if France abolished slavery in the Louisiana Territory. The Federalists, as the opposition to Jefferson, capitalized on the threat to slavery by demanding military intervention against France and calling for policies designed to secure slavery as an institution on the entire North American continent. Jefferson responded by setting his sights on acquiring the complete territory through negotiation in order to nullify Federalist demands and maintain political power. In 1801, Jefferson sent Robert Livingston to Paris and John Baptiste Charles Lucas to New Orleans and St. Louis on fact-finding missions intended to facilitate covert negotiations with France over the Louisiana Territory.19 In what was again a secretly negotiated deal, the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803. Shortly thereafter, St. Louis was designated as the seat of the Upper Louisiana Territory.
When J. B. C. Lucas visited St. Louis in 1801, he found a town of about 2,500 people and noted that it had a remarkably advantageous geographical location but lacked any civic or political organization.20 As Eric Sandweiss observes in his highly researched account of early St. Louis, “by the time that formal Spanish rule [in St. Louis] came to an end in 1800, a widening gap had opened between the clearly delimited social and physical order that the government struggled to maintain, and the centrifugal force of diversified personal interests among the townspeople.”21 Composed of individual actors seeking opportunity, fortune, and property, the city embodied the values of westward expansion grounded in private enterprise, the accumulation of private property, and all forms of speculation. These values were overseen, however, by a few elite French Creole families that had direct ties to the original founders of St. Louis. Furthermore, forty years of distant and ambiguous Spanish colonial rule manifested as a localized legal system that privileged unwritten local norms over the rule of law. As a result, a culture that walks a paradoxical line between staunch economic individualism, entrenched hierarchies of bourgeois society based on familial ties, and a fierce desire for local autonomy became deeply rooted in the region and is still evident today.
By the time Amos Stoddard oversaw the transfer of the Upper Louisiana Territory in 1804 for the United States, there were 2,780 mostly French-speaking residents in the St. Louis region and approximately 500 people held in slavery.22 The French flag symbolically replaced the Spanish flag for a few minutes at the transfer of power ceremony in St. Louis before the US flag was permanently installed, which must have been difficult for the French ruling elite. In his speech, Stoddard invoked a rhetoric of US civil liberties, exceptionalism, and civic duty while assuring St. Louisans that their customs would be respected, stating, “You are divested of the character of Subjects, and clothed with that of citizen—You now form an integral part of a great community,” a distinction that, as Stoddard reminded them, came with many responsibilities.23 Slavery was formally expanded at the time of the transfer by nullifying all Spanish restrictions that had been placed on the institution. As a result, the benefits of citizenship Stoddard spoke of were even more out of reach to the many mixed-race residents of the territory, who were clearly outside the strictly white male community Stoddard spoke of. The Osage tribe, which had invested greatly in the promises of their white trading partners and alliances with the United States, also found that they were expendable and now “in the way.” As Peter S. Onuf observes, “the history of Jeffersonian statecraft was one of ruthlessly exploiting regional power imbalances based on the convenient self-delusion that republicans operated on a higher moral plane than their corrupt European counterparts.”24
Citizenship, Property, and Identity
Upon transfer to US authorities, property claims in St. Louis were in disarray, according to lawyers representing the United States, who had a positivist view of law and were charged with implementing the North/South, East/West grid of western expansion and distributing forty-acre parcels to white landowners. President Jefferson quickly appointed the French- and English-speaking J. B. C. Lucas as commissioner of land claims and territorial judge in 1805, with the hope of denying Spanish land claims and returning most of the land to US government control, from which new claims could be made according to the expansionist grid. Opposing these changes were the ruling junto of St. Louis—the elite French Creole landowners with power who had gradually acquired and developed the settlement footprint and held claims to large tracts of land inside and outside the city proper.
Officials from the Indiana Territory, where slavery had been abolished by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, were placed in leadership roles in the newly acquired Upper Louisiana Territory, prompting rumors that slavery would soon be outlawed in St. Louis as well. As a result, wealthy junto landowners in St. Louis pressured Stoddard to formally follow federal slave codes, which, unlike most state and territorial laws, were vague and left much room for interpretation regarding which persons could be considered slaves. Soon after, US administrators officially adopted federal slave codes, resulting in much ambiguity regarding how circumstances of slavery, prior laws, and the timing of enslavement would be interpreted. Questions regarding racial mixing, unknown parentage, and physical appearance also had to be individually decided on a case-by-case basis.
The thirty-one-year fight of the Scypion women to gain their freedom from Joseph Tayon and the Chouteau family (the self-proclaimed and celebrated “first family” of St. Louis) is a cogent example of how these questions played out. When the judges J. B. C. Lucas and Rufus Easton, both of whom held African people in slavery, granted freedom in 1805 to two of the daughters of Marie Jean Scypion (a half-Natchez, half-African woman whose Natchez mother was held illegally in slavery during Spanish rule), they were acting on the precedent of Spanish slave code that people from native tribes could not be held as slaves and that slavery was passed through maternal routes. Testimony in that trial focused on the physical features of the deceased Marie Jean, who, by the accounts of several white women who had testified years earlier in Spanish court, “looked Indian.”25 When their sister sought a writ of habeas corpus to gain her freedom from a different Chouteau family member, her “owner” argued that the physical appearance of the sisters (who reportedly “looked Negro”), not the heritage of their mother, should be the determining factor regarding their African identity. He also cited limitations of gender, arguing that the testimony of the white women in Spanish court should be dismissed since US law did not permit women to testify in a case brought by a man. Lucas and Easton again ruled in favor of the enslaved women on the basis of new and old testimony that their mother had received consistent benefits throughout her life because of her known Indian heritage, as opposed to her appearance.26
Foreshadowing local politics in St. Louis today, members of the Chouteau family used their standing and the animosity between neighboring jurisdictions to secure warrants from county authorities for the arrest of the entire Scypion family after the St. Louis court granted freedom to the women and their children. Relying on the disregard nearby rural officials had for St. Louis governance, the Chouteau family convinced police in the county to arrest the Scypion family on the grounds that they were escaped African slaves once they left the jurisdiction of St. Louis. Pressured to revisit the case, Lucas and Easton acquiesced but required that a four-thousand-dollar bond (which Pierre Chouteau supplied) be pledged until the family’s legal status could be sorted out again. The Tayon and Chouteau families were given a month to file suit establishing their legal rights, and they immediately filed petitions demanding a jury trial and custody of all three sisters and all their children.27
J. B. C. Lucas presided over the trial in 1806, and testimony relied solely on white male members of the community since, unlike in a Spanish court, non-white people and women could not testify against a white male citizen in US court. When Pierre Chouteau’s brother-in-law was elected as jury foreman, there was little chance the jury of all white men would rule in favor of the enslaved women. On the basis of the jury’s findings, Lucas denied all further motions for freedom and placed the women and all their children back into bondage. The debate that played out in court centered on whether or not the illegal enslavement of the original family matriarch, Marie Jean, superseded the plaintiff’s property rights (the property being people). The court’s finding—that the rights of property always supersede any rights of nonwhite persons—would become a central argument in local courts in the St. Louis region throughout its history. This argument continues today in the courts and in public discourse in response to the equally persistent question, Do the uncertain rights of Black residents in North St. Louis County outweigh the rights of cities to protect public and private property from the risk attached to abstracted Black bodies? Discursive responses to this question often center on concerns similar to those in the 1806 case, such as the authenticity and rights of local citizenship, and appeals to cultural norms. In the case of North St. Louis County, these norms are viewed through a white spatial imaginary of suburban citizenship.28
Twenty years after Lucas and Easton gave their final ruling, the Missouri General Assembly enacted a statute by which people held as slaves could sue for their freedom. The surviving members of the Scypion family again brought legal action. After ten years of appeals, the Missouri Supreme Court eventually upheld a lower court ruling to free them in 1836, on the basis of the original argument that Marie Jean Scypion’s Native American mother was illegally enslaved under Spanish law.29 Among many other things, this case illustrates how judges ruled inconsistently as they struggled to navigate confluences of law, cultural politics, and local practices within the local courts; how race was a fluid signifier across jurisdictional boundaries and cultural practices; and how constructed and imagined identities—such as “noble savage” and “subhuman African”—held the power to constitute legal rights. Today in St. Louis County, these legacies continue, as local judges oversee a racialized system that conflates law and cultural politics, race continues to be a fluid signifier, depending upon the work it performs, and constructed and imagined identities such as “urban” and “suburban” are conferred on people and space, resulting in disparate experiences of rights across the metropolitan geography.
The formation of the Missouri Territory in 1812 brought another shift in power in St. Louis when junto leaders were elected onto the new territorial council, which reversed the prohibitions and policies on prior land claims and put a large portion of the region back into the hands of the French Creole elite. Immediately following this change, a mad rush for land claims by both French Creole and St. Louis businessmen from the East Coast of the United States commenced in the wake of the New Madrid earthquake of 1812—the largest earthquake recorded in US history, which changed the course of the Mississippi River and damaged or flooded undeveloped land. Under the first disaster response act enacted by US Congress, the New Madrid Relief Act of 1815, all landowners who had suffered damage were granted the option to land in St. Louis County. Corruption regarding land deeds was already rampant in St. Louis culture, and three-quarters of the new claims utilizing this act were granted to people residing in St. Louis rather than to residents in areas affected by the earthquake. Investors in St. Louis bought up the damaged land immediately after the act was passed and before rural landowners learned of the opportunity afforded them. As a result, land claims stemming from the New Madrid Relief Act would shape the boundaries of tiny municipalities in North St. Louis County more than a century later (figure 2.1).
FIGURE 2.1 Land claims circa 1850 in an area of N. St. Louis County. The boundaries of Bel-Nor, Normandy, and Greendale are marked. Parcels marked with “Sur” (shaded area) are original Spanish land grants. Parcels marked with “M” were taken in exchange for property damaged in the New Madrid earthquake.
Harker August, Greendale: History and Historical Atlas (Greendale, MO: City of Greendale, 1996). Missouri Historical Society Library. Reproduced by permission from Alice August.
Sixteen years after St. Louis was transferred to US control and eight years after Missouri became a territory, the Missouri Compromise was signed as a precursor for Missouri to enter the Union in 1820. The compromise made slavery illegal in the larger Louisiana Territory; however, in a congressional compromise to maintain the delicate balance in the federal government between free and slave states, it was agreed that Missouri would be admitted to the Union as a slave state while Maine would enter as a free state. The fight in Congress over the slave status of the territory versus the new state of Missouri prefigured the impending threat to the integrity of the Union and the eventual secession of the Southern states. Writing specifically in response to the debate that resulted in the Missouri Compromise, Jefferson lamented, “This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment, but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.”30 Although Jefferson is speaking of a literal geographical line dividing the nation, these words haunt the physical geographical lines that divide white and Black spaces today.
Prior to Missouri statehood, landowners of French heritage (including the families of Auguste Chouteau and Jefferson’s appointed land commissioner, J. B. C. Lucas) claimed large tracts of originally tribal land outside the settlement in what would become North St. Louis County. J. B. C. Lucas and his oldest son, Charles, allegedly gained many of these tracts by falsifying dates of claims under the New Madrid Relief Act. J. B. C. Lucas acquired 640 acres in North St. Louis County near the mouth of the Missouri River. The property comprised densely wooded rolling hills with many spring-fed streams running through prairielike valleys, which were said to have been traditional hunting grounds for several Native American tribes in the area. Lucas allegedly named the property Normandy because it reminded him of the province in France from which he came. There were several cities already established in the nearby area, including Florissant, which was founded in the late 1700s.31
North St. Louis County was shaped by another well-known figure in US history. When William Clark returned to St. Louis from his expedition with Meriwether Lewis, he was appointed superintendent of Indian affairs in 1807. Clark settled in St. Louis and would later be named governor of the Missouri Territory in 1812, but his primary duty prior to that was negotiating treaties with native tribes and “relocating” them from their land in the Louisiana Territory to reservations throughout the United States. To this end, Clark needed camping and hunting grounds for “Indian delegations” numbering in the hundreds in order to “make them comfortable and open to negotiation.”32 He purchased 1,231 acres from Auguste Chouteau just south of Lucas’s Normandy in North St. Louis County, which was said to include springs, groves, and ponds with excellent hunting.33 When Clark acquired the land, the middle of which is present-day Pine Lawn, he is said to have called the area Minoma—the name given by local tribes because of its many sweet water streams and springs.34 Clark built a colonial-style farmhouse on the site for his family, and it was on the hilltop called Counsel Grove, a name still used in the area, that many tribes ceded their land to the United States government. Upon his death in 1838, William Clark’s land passed to his son Meriwether Lewis Clark, who later subdivided the property for private development, golf courses, and country clubs. William Clark, like many prominent St. Louisans, had at least one documented child with a Native American woman. His son, Tzi-kal-tza, was not recognized by Clark, nor was Tzi-kal-tza’s mother, and neither benefited from Clark’s estate.
Violence as Spectacle
As Jefferson had predicted, compromise would be brief, and Missouri would again figure largely in the debate over slavery and the events precipitating the American Civil War. When Dred Scott, an enslaved person residing in St. Louis, sued for his freedom in a case eventually heard by the US Supreme Court in 1847, the court ruled that slaves and their descendants were not protected by the US Constitution and could never be granted citizenship.35 The decision essentially prohibited free states from granting privileges of citizenship to all Black people and added fuel to the fire in the US Congress, which was divided on the issue of slavery. The Dred Scott decision influenced the court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that legalized racial segregation, the legacy of which is still starkly evident today.36 Located at the geographical and cultural intersections between North/South and East/West, St. Louis walked the line on the issue of slavery for over a century, navigating between the self-interest of local slaveholding residents and an abolitionist rhetoric aimed at strengthening ties with leadership in Washington, DC, and maintaining business opportunities with entities in the North and the East Coast.
The years between Missouri’s entrance into the Union and the Supreme Court decision on the Dred Scott case saw the expansion of the slavocracy in the South, which grew the economy of the entire Mississippi Valley. Sitting at another important crossroads of industrialization, transportation, and commerce up and down the Mississippi River, St. Louis played an important role in western development (particularly after the discovery of gold in California in 1848) and was an important market for all things, including enslaved Black bodies. More than two dozen slave dealers operated out of St. Louis, and people held as slaves brought a high price to work the fields in north-central and western Missouri. The New York Tribune remarked in 1855, “In no part of the Union is slavery more profitable than in Missouri and in no part of the Union do slaves bring more in the market, either to sell or hire.”37 Many prominent as well as average St. Louis families owned slaves and “hired” them out to companies and individuals who then paid wages back to the families. This included many of the men working in bondage on the riverboats up and down the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. During the Civil War, St. Louis unsurprisingly continued to walk a line as a military post for the North and a home to many slaveholders and residents with Southern sympathies.
Prior to emancipation, countless people passed across the auction block on the steps of the St. Louis courthouse and were sent down the Mississippi River, and thousands more worked the fields of rural Missouri. The experience of urban slavery in St. Louis was varied, and the mixing of unfree and free persons occurred in public spaces as well as in church and other settings. A small but established Black aristocracy lived among white slaveholding society in St. Louis, albeit with significantly limited opportunities. A few were said to be among the wealthiest people in St. Louis because of business success and through inheritance, and many had known familial ties to elite white St. Louis families. In 1848, Cyprian Clamorgan, who was of mixed race, published a small book called The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, in which he used culture to argue that all people with African blood are not alike. As part of his argument, Clamorgan asserts that in St. Louis in particular, the long history of mixing along multiple transit routes amounts to the possibility that any St. Louisan might be traced back to Africa. He writes:
The free colored people of St. Louis are surrounded by peculiar circumstances. Many of them are separated from the white race by a line of division so faint that it can be traced only by the keen eye of prejudice—a line so dim indeed that, in many instances that might be named, the stream of African blood has been so diluted by mixture with Caucasian, that the most critical observer cannot detect it. We, who know the history of all the old families of St. Louis, might readily point to the scions of some of our “first families,” and trace their genealogy back to the swarthy tribes of Congo or Guinea. Such, however, is not our present purpose. Our business is with those who have the mark unmistakably fixed upon their brows.38
Clamorgan goes on to address the findings of the US Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case just one year prior to the time of his writing:
According to the decision of Chief Justice Taney, a colored man is not a citizen of the United States, and consequently has no political rights under the Constitution. . . . We shall not, in this place, call in question the judgment of the learned Chief Justice, who has in this State kindred of a darker hue than himself; but we may be permitted to show in what manner the political influence of the colored man is felt, and how in every important election, his interest is exerted on behalf of his favorite candidate.39
Clamorgan uses the rest of the text to describe in detail the success and influence that various members of the Black community had within the social, economic, and political structure of St. Louis because of their wealth and social standing. While clearly not a fan of slavery, Clamorgan, and the people he highlights, did not generally view the “Negro race” as equally deserving of rights or status. Physical appearance, social etiquette and cultural norms, and the ability to amass large amounts of money were the chief factors that determined who was worthy of equality. This theme of “Negro uplift” persisted and continues to play out today through a cultural politics that Black leaders in North St. Louis County use to determine which Black residents have access to the full rights of suburban citizenship.
Exemplifying a very different experience, William W. Brown was held in slavery in St. Louis during the same period of which Clamorgan writes. Brown was owned by a St. Louis businessman and hired out to a slave trader who amassed “gangs” of enslaved Blacks, transporting and selling them up and down the Mississippi River between New Orleans and St. Louis.40 In Narrative of William W. Brown, Brown’s accounts of slavery in St. Louis match Stoddard’s earlier observations that life under slaveholders in St. Louis was just as brutal as the southern plantation experience. Brown places particular emphasis on, and describes in detail, the extreme brutality directed toward Black women and the denigration of their bodies, including that of his mother. Brown also foregrounds how enslaved and free Black people lived in close proximity to white residents in the city. He explains how white St. Louisans prided themselves on allowing their slaves to belong to the same church they themselves attended, offering them tea in the parlor one minute and viciously beating them in the kitchen the next. Regarding the “raising of slave stock” like livestock from Black women and the use of religion to ensure compliance, Brown writes:
Who is it, I ask, that supplies them with the human beings that they are tearing asunder? I answer, as far as I have any knowledge of the State where I came from, that those who raise slaves for the market are to be found among all classes, from Thomas H. Benton [a US Senator who lived in St. Louis] down to the lowest political demagogue, who may be able to purchase a woman for the purpose of raising stock, and from the Doctor of Divinity down to the most humble lay member in the church.
It was not uncommon in St. Louis to pass by an auction-stand, and behold a woman upon the auction-block, and hear the seller crying out, “How much is offered for this woman? She is a good cook, good washer, a good obedient servant. She has got religion!” Why should this man tell the purchasers that she has religion? I answer, because in Missouri, and as far as I have any knowledge of slavery in the other States, the religious teaching consists in teaching the slave that he must never strike a white man; that God made him for a slave; and that, when whipped, he must not find fault,—for the Bible says, “He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes!” And slaveholders find such religion very profitable to them.41
The campaign to publish slave narratives such as Brown’s was part of efforts, mostly by northern white and free Black people, to abolish slavery in the United States by naming and revealing the degrees of inhumanity practiced and accepted by white Americans. Again similar to Amos Stoddard’s observations regarding particularly brutal forms of violence practiced by settlers in the St. Louis region against enslaved peoples, Elijah Lovejoy, a white journalist originally from the East Coast, reported on the inhumanities regularly visited on free and enslaved Black people in St. Louis. He also published his opinions regarding the dangers of mob justice to civil society. Lovejoy’s reporting in the St. Louis Observer, a Presbyterian paper, would ultimately lead to his death through the same violence. In April of 1836, Lovejoy and many others around the country were taken aback by the vicious lynching of Francis McIntosh, described as a free mulatto from Pittsburg. McIntosh was in St. Louis as a riverboat worker and had interfered while drunk in the arrest of other sailors who subsequently got away. When authorities attempted to take McIntosh into custody, he allegedly drew a knife, killing one man and wounding another. A mob quickly removed McIntosh from jail, tied him to a tree, and burned him alive. The diary of one purported witness stated that “the lower part of his legs were burnt partly off and when the flames had burnt him so as to let out his bowels, some asked him if he felt any pain, he said yes, great pain. It was 18 minutes after the fire was kindled before he died.”42 Similar to events following the death of Michael Brown, there were differing accounts regarding the details and justification (or lack thereof) of McIntosh’s death, and a grand jury was called to investigate whether anyone should be brought to justice for the death. In the cases of McIntosh and Brown, nobody would be charged, and in both cases the victims were determined to be deserving of and responsible for what happened to them. Lovejoy was subsequently run out of town for his condemnation of the lynching and moved across the river to Alton, Illinois, where in 1837 his offices were burned down and he was killed by a similar mob. The particular brutality of mob activity in St. Louis was cited by the young Abraham Lincoln in 1838 in his address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, stating that outrages committed by mobs
in the State of Mississippi, and at St. Louis, are, perhaps, the most dangerous in example and revolting to humanity. . . . Turn then, to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single victim was only sacrificed there. His story is very short; and is, perhaps, the most highly tragic, of anything of its length, that has ever been witnessed in real life. A mulatto man, by the name of McIntosh, was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman, attending to his own business, and at peace with the world.43
White mobs would continue to terrorize the region well into the next century and, in 1917, East St. Louis, Illinois, was the site of one of the worst “race riots,” otherwise described as the mass lynching of hundreds of Black residents by white mobs, in US history.44
Three years after Lovejoy was murdered for speaking out against lynching, the spectacle of killing “Negroes” in the St. Louis region continued as a spectator attraction, and those willing to pay could do so in style. As one advertisement from 1841 boasts, a steamboat was specially renovated and chartered for an exclusive all-day cruise to Duncan’s Island in the Mississippi River, where, for the cost of one dollar and fifty cents, passengers could “see without difficulty” the execution of “Four Negroes” (three free and one enslaved) while enjoying the comfort of “every attention paid” (see figure 2.2). Some reports of the number attending the execution reached as high as twenty thousand in a city with thirty thousand people. After the hanging, the heads of the four men were cut off and displayed in the window of a drugstore in downtown St. Louis, presumably for the ten thousand who missed the gruesome event. The drugstore owner made plaster casts of the heads as part of the then-popular theory of phrenology, which attributes character and mental deficiencies to the shape of the skull.45 The spectacle of the hanging, the description of the crowds and morbid details of death in the media afterward, and the display of the severed heads illustrate how “white self-reflection is produced from and instantiated through the staging of black bodily suffering,” not unlike the spectacle of Michael Brown’s body, left on hot asphalt for an entire afternoon.46
By 1870, St. Louis was the eighth-largest city in the United States.47 Contentious politics continued around Black citizenship, immigration, transportation,and labor, and divisions between St. Louis city and the more rural county and state were heightened throughout the short-lived Reconstruction period. Leaders of St. Louis city felt unduly governed by what they considered a backward state legislature and rural county administrators, with particular resentment toward “the authority of an antiquated and irresponsible power called a county court.”48 The politically driven takeover of St. Louis city police by the state prior to the Civil War was a significant point of contention that foreshadowed contestations over municipal autonomy which relied on policing in the years that followed. Furthermore, the largely antiurban and rural-leaning attitudes within St. Louis County fueled animosity toward city residents, who were viewed as sucking resources from state taxpayers. The relatively new and large population of Irish and German immigrants that settled in St. Louis city in the mid-nineteenth century initially opposed slavery and supported Union efforts throughout the Civil War. Upon emancipation, however, immigrant labor interests began to view large numbers of free Black workers moving northward as a threat to wages and the terms of employment. Fueled by management, which encouraged racial animosity, European immigrants changed course and became a significant force in state politics against Reconstruction policies and the rights of Black citizens in order to bolster their own claims to “white citizenship.” These sentiments were invigorated by those opposed to labor rights and efforts to organize, who consistently tried to pit white and Black workers against one another.
FIGURE 2.2 Broadside for a steamboat excursion to view the execution of four “Negroes,” 1841.
Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society Library.
The odd institution of the Veiled Prophet Ball and the secret society that sponsors it, for example, were conceived in 1878 as a way to reestablish the hierarchy of elite St. Louis families and business owners in the face of Reconstruction and after significant labor strikes took place in the 1870s (see figure 2.3).49 By reinforcing class distinctions, white colonial heritage, and heteropatriarchy in St. Louis, the ball was intended to further the rift between white and Black workers and discourage efforts to organize the labor force. The Veiled Prophet Ball might not be surprising in 1870s America; however, it continues in St. Louis to this day and uses blatantly racist and misogynistic imagery, illustrating racialized practices that are deeply ingrained in the parochial culture of St. Louis (see figure 2.4). As part of the ball, invited members of the St. Louis elite present their daughters to a secretly chosen “veiled prophet,” loosely based on the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan.50 The prophet, whose identity remains unknown, chooses the “queen of love and beauty,” reportedly on the basis of her father’s influence in the community.51 The list of queens from 1878 to today reads as a who’s who of elite families in St. Louis. In recent history, the ball has been the focus of protests against racial and sexual oppression, most notably in the 1960s and 1970s (see figure 2.5). In 1972, white members of the Action Council to Improve Opportunities for Negroes posed as attendees and publicly unveiled the prophet.52 As Clarence Lang writes:
The unmasking sparked outrage among the city’s civic leaders, and most media maintained their deference to the corporate elite by withholding the exposed official’s name. Breaking ranks, the St. Louis Journalism Review disclosed his identity as Tom K. Smith, a Monsanto Corporation executive vice president and Civic Progress alumnus. Although entirely symbolic, the caper stripped a seemingly omnipotent icon of white capitalist hegemony of its mystique, and [temporarily] subverted the public rituals of power the gala had embodied since the nineteenth century.53
FIGURE 2.3 A poster for the Veiled Prophet Ball, October 6, 1878.
Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society Library.
FIGURE 2.4 “Merrill Clark Hermann (center), the crowned Queen of Love and Beauty at the 130th annual Veiled Prophet Ball, rides in her float during the VP Parade as part of the Fair St. Louis festivities on Saturday, July 4, 2015 at Forest Park in St. Louis.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 22, 2016. Photo by Huy Mach, 2015.
The ball was later the target of Ferguson protesters and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, which launched an Unveil the Prophet campaign in 2015, aimed at exposing how powerful corporations and institutions in St. Louis support the oppression of African Americans, women, and queer individuals and directly profit from the prison industrial complex.54
FIGURE 2.5 “Percy Green of ACTION (Action Council to Improve Opportunities for Negroes) heralds the arrival on Oct. 3, 1969, of the ‘black veiled prophet’ and his queen at Kiel Auditorium, where the annual Veiled Prophet Ball was taking place inside. ACTION frequently picketed the Veiled Prophet organization as racially exclusive and elitist. In 1972 in the same building, it engineered an unmasking of the man playing the role of the veiled prophet.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 23, 2018. Photo by Gene Pospeshil, 1969.
Divorce and Divergence
The rift between the city and the county and the legacy of political autonomy culminated when the Missouri electorate responded to requests from the City of St. Louis by ratifying a new state constitution in August 1875 that included provisions for the city to adopt a charter and establish the first example of constitutional municipal home rule in the United States.55 The following year, a board of freeholders was elected to draft a city charter and develop a scheme for separation from St. Louis County. Although the 1875 constitution limited home rule charters to cities with over one hundred thousand residents, a precedent for formal municipal autonomy was set in Missouri when the charter and separation scheme narrowly passed. Later, the constitution of 1945 further liberalized provisions for gaining municipal autonomy, opening the door for even more tiny neighborhoods to incorporate.56 In the years after 1875, St. Louis County would be carved up into as many as ninety-nine municipalities (as of the time of this writing, there are eighty-eight).
St. Louis County emerged from the “great divorce” from St. Louis city debt-free and with seemingly endless space to grow. The city, which had assumed the county’s debt as part of the scheme of separation, was now contained by a permanent city limit with no possibility for future annexation, an agreement the city would soon come to regret.57 Commuter development in the county began in earnest for wealthy St. Louisans when a rail line between St. Louis city and the outlying towns of Ferguson (established 1855) and Florissant was built two years after separation from the city. The Suburban and Electric streetcar line was also built into North St. Louis County soon after the rail line and development expanded to include elite planned neighborhoods in the Garden City tradition—with large lots, curvilinear streets, and restrictive covenants (see figure 2.6). Describing the developing North St. Louis County suburbs, Annie Orff’s 1893 essay in the Chaperone Magazine (later the American Women’s Review) describes the prevailing distinction between city and county and how the historical exclusivity of the area was translated into different suburban environments:
The pleasure of leaving the chaos of the city on the Suburb and Electric car line comes to your mind as you are carried twelve miles through charming environments. . . . Having left the dirty, noisy city, this entrancing glimpse of arcadian splendor, is refreshing indeed. . . . The heart of the city dweller yearns for an abode of cleanliness, health, and repose such as is offered by these peerless suburbs. Its residents have the highest social standing, and include the most influential and wealthiest business men. Of course all objectionable features such as factories, dairies or any nuisance are excluded and objectionable people cannot be found here. Future immunity is secured by the requisite restrictions in all deeds to property, which ensure the most noble of neighbors. . . . This region is not one individual suburb, but a cluster of suburbs that appeal to different tastes and nobilities. This beautiful spot, which was chosen as a home by the illustrious William Clark, is now conspicuous because of a splendid residence of Governor E.R. Francis. That men of such unerring judgment, high standing, and moral fortitude should have chosen this, of all regions for a home, is significant.58
In keeping with representations of the city and suburbs at the time, the eight pages of Orff’s article portrays the city as a chaotic place occupied by objectionable people with questionable cultural values and moral fortitude, whereas the untainted suburbs are home to only the most upstanding citizens. Nature and civilization are joint signifiers for suburban culture and space, with depictions of urban and uncivilized work as a racialized and moralized counterpoint. As described later in this book, the same cultural politics is used today in North St. Louis County to “discipline” people moving from the city, on the basis of so-called moral arguments linking bodies to space.
FIGURE 2.6 Plat map for Normandy Hills and Normandy Heights subdivisions (1893), examples of Garden City design in North St. Louis County.
Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society Library.
The accumulation of unusually large tracts of land by single owners in North St. Louis County, much of which was held by the Lucas, Hunt, and Clark families, in close proximity to developed rail lines and roads drew investors looking for large open spaces with nearby transportation—for things such as cemeteries, golf courses, and country clubs. As a result, the development of the area worked in opposition to planning models that promote contiguous arrangements of rationally organized patterns or grids (see figure 2.6). It was, however, very conducive to establishing small, insulated communities with minimal connections to surrounding neighborhoods.
Throughout the nineteenth century, a few towns and neighborhoods in North St. Louis County were formally and informally developed by and for African Americans who were excluded from other developments—except when they were held as slaves prior to the Civil War and as domestic and agricultural workers thereafter. Several of these communities existed in the early 1800s, when free Black people claimed small farming plots and others gradually settled around them, although this history has largely been lost. At least one Black community grew up around the slave quarters of a plantation in Ferguson following the Civil War. Most of the Black neighborhoods in North St. Louis County were eventually erased by newer development when the area became more desirable to white families and was shaped by corresponding government infrastructure projects. A few neighborhoods and blocks have maintained a continuous Black presence in St. Louis County, such as Whitney Street in Pagedale, areas of Rock Hill and Webster Groves, and the city of Meacham Park (annexed by Kirkwood). Kinloch, however, is the only historically Black city in North St. Louis County remaining today—albeit as a shell of its former self.59
The developer of the Kinloch Park subdivision in North St. Louis County in the late 1880s could not sell lots to Black families in proximity to whites because of white backlash against Reconstruction-era policies, although there were no formal laws restricting such sales. Capitalizing on the migration of Black people seeking jobs in St. Louis and the subsequent crowding in Black areas of the city, the company laid out a segregated subdivision exclusively for Black homeowners called South Kinloch Park in 1890. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Black families bought readily, but difficulty was encountered when banks refused to accept “Negro” notes as collateral for loans.60 To get around the banks, the developer sold lots, or groups of lots, to whites who made small down payments and gave notes to cover deferred payments. The notes were accepted by the banks, discounted by the companies, and resold to Black buyers at double the price, with profits going to white investors.61 Ads ran in Black and white newspapers promoting lots in Kinloch Park to Black buyers and white investors. One that ran after the turn of the century stated:
The good colored people of South Kinloch are building themselves a little city of which they have a right to be proud. . . . We have been able to induce a number of white people of good standing to come in with us and cooperate with us to help with their money, influence, and good will to make South Kinloch Park a better place for the self-respecting Negro to live and make his home. We have given these good people a big share of our profits in order to get their help and reward their good will toward the Negro.62
Although framed differently, the tropes of the self-respecting Negro and the celebrated goodwill of those willing to invest in Black communities continue to be perpetuated in contemporary narratives and practices in North St. Louis County today.
Fifty years later, fearing a rise in Black access to suburban areas, white Kinloch Park split from Black South Kinloch Park and became the city of Berkeley in 1938, when a second Black member was elected to the board of the segregated school district. In turn, South Kinloch incorporated as just Kinloch and was one of the first incorporated all-Black towns in the United States.63 The new city of Berkeley surrounded Kinloch on three sides with physical barriers between the two cities. The existing city of Ferguson bordered Kinloch to the east. After losing its entire commercial tax base to Berkeley in the split, Kinloch suffered continued disinvestment after World War II and was eventually devastated by the expansion of St. Louis Lambert International Airport. Today, fewer than three hundred people live in Kinloch, down from 6,501 in 1960.64
Mapping Race and Risk
St. Louis entered the twentieth century as the fourth-largest city in the United States, hosting both the World’s Fair and Summer Olympic Games in 1904. The city enjoyed international status and entertained hopes of winning a fierce competition with Chicago as the industrial and commodities hub of the Midwest. Although St. Louis ultimately lost its bid, largely because of transportation politics, a significant number of factories and other industrial facilities were built, including those involved in automotive and aviation development and manufacturing. Much of the industrial growth was located along the commercial rail line running through North St. Louis County to points north and west, which brought new residential developments selling small lots to middle- and working-class families finding jobs in the manufacturing industries.
As industrialization increased along with the in-migration of Black residents from the South, the protection of white neighborhoods became a primary concern in St. Louis city and county. In 1915 a petition for an ordinance to prevent “further invasion of white resident neighborhoods by Negroes and vice versa” was pushed by the United Welfare Association, which was organized around this issue and modeled the ordinance on a similar law in Baltimore upheld by the Maryland Court of Appeals. Letters and pamphlets passed out by proponents conflated race, class, and culture and likened the ordinance to fire insurance, asking, “DO YOU REALIZE that at any time you are liable to suffer an irreparable loss, due to the coming of NEGROES into the block in which you live or in which you own property? . . . While perhaps you have not yet been affected by this class of people coming into your neighborhood, you surely want protection against this growing danger which is more menacing than fire or the elements.”65 Spatial segregation was legalized when the ordinance passed in 1916 by voter referendum, making it illegal to move to a block whose population was more than 75 percent of a race other than one’s own. The ordinance, however, was quickly struck down when the US Supreme Court ruled against a similar law in Louisville in 1917.66 This spurred even more emphasis on local zoning and other means of excluding Black families, such as real estate practices and racially restrictive covenants, which remained legal until 1948.67 Under the direction of Harland Bartholomew, who introduced and oversaw formal zoning and city planning in St. Louis from 1916 to 1953, an emphasis was placed on “protecting” white neighborhoods of single-family homes from people and activities of “vice.” As Colin Gordon has meticulously detailed in his book, Mapping Decline, the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange maintained a particularly strong hold over the development and reach of restrictive covenants in the region and actively engaged in racial steering and blockbusting practices throughout the twentieth century.68 When racially restrictive covenants were struck down in 1948, the Real Estate Exchange persisted in enforcing rules restricting members from selling homes to Black homebuyers in white neighborhoods. Real estate practices continued to reflect the claims that Black citizens were the ultimate threat to property values and framed antiblack actions as economically rational behavior. Although different language is often employed, I personally witnessed veiled steering practices when buying a home in St. Louis in 2003 and 2013, as real estate agents would refer to majority-Black neighborhoods as “transitioning,” “bad,” or “unsafe.”
Facilitating the work of real estate agents, Bartholomew mapped St. Louis into tiered zones with “first tier residential” representing white neighborhoods with single-family homes that must be protected. The 1919 Zone Plan foreshadowed the early Chicago school maps (discussed in chapter 1), and subsequent zoning maps produced by Bartholomew’s office reinforced the risk-assessment maps published by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation established in 1933. St. Louis is a particularly good example of how urban policies that produce and follow the mapping of risk historically attached to, and conflated with, blackness result in highly racialized geographies, even when race is not explicitly mentioned. In St. Louis County, many municipalities used zoning to effectively keep Black homebuyers out by requiring minimum lot and home sizes to keep the cost of land and building high. Advertisements for new gated developments continued to tout safety and were marketed to middle-class white families in St. Louis city (see figure 2.7).
FIGURE 2.7 Advertisement (circa 1930) for Bel-Nor subdivision, which was later incorporated as a village.
Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society Library.
Following World War II, undeveloped areas of North St. Louis County were filled in by homebuilders and commercial developers capitalizing on the GI Bill and federally subsidized financing for white homebuyers, as well as federal infrastructure projects that facilitated transportation out of the city center. The housing in these post–World War II developments is smaller than the older Garden City developments and follows a grid, although each development adheres to a different grid based on major streets radiating from the City of St. Louis or surrounding landmarks. The physical landscape of North St. Louis County therefore consists of a patchwork of infill housing between large tracts of land with older developments, towns, religious and institutional grounds, industrial land and corporate headquarters, the University of Missouri–St. Louis, and St. Louis Lambert International Airport. As a result, the built environment of North St. Louis County is especially disjointed and noncontiguous, laying a physically fragmented groundwork for political fragmentation to follow.
Like the developments that preceded them, newly settled neighborhoods in North St. Louis County in the 1940s and 1950s tended to be ethnically and religiously homogeneous. White working-class neighbors and religious and cultural networks in ethnically divided areas of St. Louis city relocated to St. Louis County in similar proximities to one another, and developers often appealed to specific white European ethnic groups when advertising new homes.69 Churches attended by ethnically homogeneous groups also followed congregants and relocated to the suburbs, prompting those left behind to follow suit. The suburbs were consciously and unconsciously viewed as means for ethnic minorities to claim or reinforce “whiteness” in contradistinction to “the dark races” left behind in urban space.70 Consequently, the expansion of suburban developments occurred at a dramatic rate. In North St. Louis County, for example, the population of the municipality of Bellefontaine Neighbors grew from 766 residents to 5,200 in eighteen months. Between 1950 and 1952, 1,330 buildings were completed in this small city.71 Expansion in North St. Louis County increased again after the University of Missouri established a campus on 128 acres within the boundaries of Bellerive, Bel-Nor, and Normandy, attracting thousands of students in addition to faculty and staff. Researchers at the university subsequently took particular interest in research issues in North St. Louis County. In keeping with a tradition of local independence and Missouri’s spirit of home rule, municipal autonomy and local identity are highly valued in the St. Louis region. Residents often identify with their neighborhoods before, or in lieu of, St. Louis as a whole.72 Prior to 1960, Missouri state law allowed existing local governments to easily annex adjacent land, but state laws also made it very easy for an area of any size to incorporate. As a result, a leapfrogging phenomenon of incorporation occurred in St. Louis County between 1940 and 1960, in which neighborhoods large and small incorporated as autonomous and semiautonomous first-, third-, and fourth-class cities and villages to avoid being joined with other communities that were viewed as a threat.73 Incorporation was driven by a fear of cultural contamination linked to race, ethnicity, and religion and was rooted in what was understood as a fundamental right of local autonomy and the concept of home rule within the political culture of the region. The 1948 Supreme Court ruling on Shelley v. Kramer, which emanated from St. Louis and made racially restrictive covenants unenforceable, added fuel to the fire of municipal incorporation sweeping St. Louis County. Many unincorporated developments in St. Louis County had restrictive covenants, and residents viewed municipal governance, particularly zoning championed by Bartholomew, as a means to maintain housing restrictions that discouraged demographic changes after 1948.
Neighborhoods in North St. Louis County tended to be smaller because of physical fragmentation, and so the area ended up with an exorbitant number of tiny cities that were essentially incorporated neighborhoods, some with fewer than one hundred homes. Formal and informal histories describe this patchwork of cities as tiny fiefdoms where fierce politics play out over very little power. Community pride and the desire to control one’s immediate environment with people perceived as like-minded meant that collaboration across municipal boundaries was not easily achieved (see figure 2.8). This resulted in a vast duplication of services, including police departments and municipal courts, across a relatively small geography.
FIGURE 2.8 Cartoon by George E. Coates, mayor of the city of Beverly Hills in North St. Louis County, 1981.
Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society Library.
“Negro Invasion”
Soon after the rash of incorporation and even before the Fair Housing Act of 1968 opened up previously walled-off areas to African Americans, Black residents were moving to neighborhoods in the county in proximity to Black areas in north St. Louis city. Many Black families faced intimidation tactics. For example, in 1963, David L. Thompson was the first Black man to move with his family to the city of Jennings. According to newspaper reports, several windows of their home were smashed with rocks within the first week, they received multiple death threats, and the Jennings police had to step in to protect the family.74 An emergency meeting was organized to encourage Jennings residents not to panic and sell their property to more Black buyers. Robert Dieckhaus, who lived on the same block as the Thompsons, told a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, “The only way to beat this is to forget that they’re there. Put up a fence and get a dog, but don’t throw rocks. If you try to run, the real estate people will make a profit at the expense of a lot of us who cannot afford to take a loss.”75 The editorial writer of the local newspaper, who used her column to encourage Jennings parents to instruct their teenage children not to engage in violence against the family, also received death threats and required protection from the Jennings police. The president of the NAACP, who spoke out on behalf of Thompson and lived in nearby Pagedale, received multiple bomb threats and was given protection by the Pagedale police department during the same period.76
A handwritten document in the archives of the Missouri Historical Society, titled “Normandy’s Black History,” describes another side of Black homeownership in North St. Louis County at this time, stating:
By 1964, Garfield and Lincoln schools had a significant number of Black children. The James Price family is typical of many Black families who moved into the Normandy area in the 1960’s. When James and Maggie and their two sons moved onto Dardenne Street in Pine Lawn, only two Black families lived on their block. Ten years later, in 1974, only one white family remained. Dr. Wright, the principal of Garfield school, recalls that nearly every house and yard improved in appearance after streets became Black. Mrs. Price said they felt like pioneers in those early days but that Pine Lawn and the Normandy area have made a good home.77
Civil rights legislation—specifically the Fair Housing Act of 1968—opened up more suburban areas to Black homebuyers by 1970. Because of continued racial steering by realtors and discriminating lending practices, many of the programs initiated through the Fair Housing Act perpetuated segregation.78 White suburbanites and institutions across the United States also resorted to new tactics to limit the potential for Black citizens to buy homes in historically white neighborhoods. As documented by multiple published studies between 1973 and 1976, St. Louis County policy makers, suburban municipal leaders, and grassroots organizations attempted to subdue public panic and slow the “inevitable social and physical decline” resulting from the influx of African American families from St. Louis city into the perceived all-white county.79 Task forces were assembled and meetings took place between residents, civic leaders, and academic researchers. The momentum of white residents out of North St. Louis County in the early 1970s was accelerated by media attention directed toward “racial tensions” at Normandy High School in 1970, when more than sixty Black students were suspended following an in-school protest after a Black female student was hit with an object in the lunch room.80 Well-documented blockbusting tactics by local real estate agents who routinely called residents and sent mailings intended to scare white homeowners into selling their homes added to the white exodus.
In 1973 six North County subdivisions complained to county authorities that white residents were continuously harassed by real estate agents pressuring them to sell, leading to unsuccessful efforts by county council members to pass legislation prohibiting blockbusting practices. Real estate interests defeated the legislation.81 This occurred at the same time demolition had begun to dismantle thirty-three eleven-story buildings at the Pruitt-Igoe public housing site, which put more pressure on areas open to Black residents and prompted middle-class Black families to leave the city. According to researchers, administrators, and leaders, many areas “fell quickly” to “negro invasion,” with some areas reaching 70 percent “Black occupation” by 1975.82 This was the same vocabulary of war used by realtors in St. Louis city just after the turn of the century and by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to establish risk ratings for home loans beginning in the late 1930s.
As other areas in St. Louis County opened to middle-class Black families, demand slowed in North County and many homes were sold without needed repairs by alarmed sellers to speculators and investors looking to turn homes around quickly for a profit. These homes were cosmetically improved literally overnight or on a weekend and sold or rented to unsuspecting Black buyers or tenants at the market rate.83 Because of hidden problems with many of these homes, new homeowners faced unexpected repairs and system replacements that some were not able to afford. In other instances, the interim owner would divide rooms without a building permit and sell the house as a five-bedroom house, for example, instead of a three-bedroom. New owners were subsequently charged with occupancy violations based on the number of rooms on record with the city.84 Many homes were purchased as rental properties, and absentee landlords tended not to maintain them, instead renting to lower-income Black residents when problems arose. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which had increased Federal Housing Administration lending to white homebuyers in this area between 1950 and 1970 (allowing lower requirements for white borrowers), also participated in this trend since repossession rates had also increased.85 Upon repossessing homes, the department sold off unimproved properties to investors at reduced prices, increasing the number of flipped properties and prevalence of slumlords. Nevertheless, the depreciation of the housing stock in this area was often attributed to the increase of Black residents, rather than discriminatory policies and predatory investment practices. The overnight sales occurring in many areas of North St. Louis County made it difficult for municipalities to oversee housing quality. This in turn led to more ordinances directed at property and Black homeowners—including occupancy permit ordinances aimed at excluding larger (Black) families.86 If people not listed on the occupancy permit of a residence were found to be spending nights, the owner was subject to fines. In order to receive an occupancy permit, the new occupant must remedy all “problems” found in the city’s property inspection. Without an occupancy permit, families could not move in and children were also not eligible to be enrolled in the public schools. Occupancy permit requirements continue across North St. Louis County today.
Documents show designations of high-risk lending areas in North County zip codes (redlining) by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, which further decreased conventional lending to qualified Black residents. This provided openings for mortgage investment companies to make high-interest loans to investors and Black buyers. These companies could provide Federal Housing Administration–certified loans, although the requirements they placed on borrowers and properties tended to be less strict than those imposed on conventional lenders. When foreclosures occurred, the companies collected their money and handed the property over to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which in turn started the process over again by selling the property quickly. Although saving and loan associations were generally not making conventional loans to residents in “transitioning neighborhoods,” they were making short-term interim loans to investors at high rates and buying Federal Housing Administration–insured loans on the secondary mortgage market—turning them back to the administration when foreclosures occurred.87 Most people, however, would not learn of very similar lending practices that bundled government-secured high-risk loans and sold them as safe investments until thirty years later, when a national foreclosure crisis immobilized the US economy. Predatory lending that led to foreclosures and disproportionately impacted North St. Louis County was occurring long before 2008, and once again, North St. Louis County foreshadowed trends that would eventually reach a critical mass in the larger region. Not surprisingly, this area was further devastated by the inordinate number of foreclosures during the crisis that hit in 2008.
As with the most recent foreclosure crisis, Black residents, rather than the institutions driving disinvestment and predatory lending, were blamed for the deterioration of physical property, loss of home values, and a declining tax base. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Black homeowners were targeted with ordinance violations for property and occupancy infractions that were initially aimed at curbing blight associated with new Black occupants. Eventually ordinances would be crafted to target not just property but also what could be designated “living while Black,” or practices associated with Black culture, in order to generate as much income as possible and make up budget deficits brought about by disinvestment and white panic fanned by the real estate market. These tactics are detailed in chapter 3. Adding to municipal shortfalls and policing-for-revenue practices, the county-wide sales tax shifted from a point-of-sale model to a distribution model in the late 1970s. This change penalized communities losing population and benefited the growing cities to which white residents were moving. Federal urban austerity policies throughout the 1970s, discussed in chapter 1, also meant fewer resources for areas facing disinvestment, and the federal government ended many municipal tax-sharing mandates throughout the Reagan era, leaving struggling cities in North St. Louis County further stranded. In spite of pushes for consolidation by academic researchers and regional policy makers, stressed cities generally feared consolidation and increasingly turned to policing and the courts in order to balance annual budgets and maintain municipal autonomy.88
Throughout the 1970s school districts in North St. Louis County lost students at a higher rate than neighborhoods were losing white residents because white families pulled their children from the public schools. By the early 1980s it was clear the Normandy School District, which serves much of North St. Louis County and was 85 percent Black in 1981, was on its way to becoming an all-Black district. The district had not received a tax increase since 1969, and two attempts to raise the school tax were voted down in the late 1970s. The defeat at the polls was attributed to the fact that the majority of white residents either did not have school-age children or did not send their children to Normandy schools.89 Private and parochial schools in the area saw vast increases in white students. The Reverend Robert A. Ottoline, pastor at St. Ann Catholic Church, whose school received many of the new white students, told a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter in 1981, “Let’s face it, there’s not going to be any white people moving here and sending their children to Normandy schools.”90 Ottoline saw his parish as a stabilizing force for surrounding neighborhoods, providing a public service for white families who would otherwise face the decision to either move or send their children to schools with high numbers of Black children. In response to a question regarding why St. Ann School was thriving when other Catholic schools were in decline, he said, “We have the numbers, we have the whites, and we have money. That’s the only way we make it.” Ottoline acknowledged, however, that the tendency for municipalities to resist cooperation and keep to themselves was not a Black/white issue. Regarding the tendency for municipalities to not work together, he said, “Forty or fifty years ago, when everybody out here was white, they had that same problem.”91 This statement suggests that, although Black leaders were later blamed for stubbornly holding on to political autonomy, to the detriment of their residents, the inward-looking trend of coveting municipal independence is rooted in the history of this region.
Poaching and Policing
One of the most influential pieces of Missouri legislation with regard to the experience of residents in North County today was passed in 1969. This legislation allowed cities in Missouri to levy a municipal sales tax (if passed through a city-wide vote) on top of the relatively low state sales tax. Although subsequent legislation replaced the 1969 version, the designations of cities under the new legislation depend on whether or not cities sought and won local sales tax initiatives under the initial law. Upon passage of the 1969 legislation, most cities in the St. Louis region almost immediately passed a local sales tax, and many approved lower property tax rates at the same time. The vast fragmentation of the region and tiny size of many cities promoted a cannibalistic approach to sales tax revenue, as cities poached businesses and shoppers from surrounding municipalities in order to tax point-of-sale dollars and pay for services in their own jurisdiction. Cities unable to attract commerce became part of a tax-sharing pool that is distributed to municipalities on the basis of population—which was also in decline in North County. Cities that can attract commerce have been able to drastically reduce property taxes, thus passing the cost of local government to shoppers who often live outside municipal boundaries. This has created vast disparities between the winners and losers of a continuous sales tax war in St. Louis County.92 In 2016, sixty-nine of the (then) ninety-two local governments in the county listed sales taxes as their primary source of revenue.93 Not surprisingly, the majority of the cities that do not rely on sales tax because of a hollowing out of their tiny commercial districts are located in North St. Louis County. Residents of these cities must travel to other communities—sometimes several miles away—to buy groceries and other necessities and pay a sales tax of between 7.5 and 10 percent for which they will receive no benefit. Meanwhile, their own property taxes remain the highest in the county and they experience the highest rate of policing for revenue, as discussed in chapter 3.94
The dependence on municipal sales tax and measures established under Missouri state law that preclude the equitable collection and distribution of resources means that developing and maintaining thriving commercial districts is not just generally advantageous to cities, it is essential for the funding of municipal budgets. For this reason, competition for economic development is fierce, and vast incentives are offered to developers and retail businesses by municipal governments that are in a position to lure commerce away from weaker communities, thus increasing spatial disparities. Developers and businesses often call the shots and hold tiny cities hostage with the threat of leaving or not investing, in a manner similar to the way sports teams operate in larger cities. Tax increment financing (TIF) is frequently used throughout the United States to attract development, but because Missouri state law allows sales taxes in addition to property taxes to be captured by TIF, this mechanism is particularly attractive to both cities and developers in the St. Louis region.95 Furthermore, under Missouri law, the creation of a TIF area requires only municipal approval, whereas other states have a more rigorous regional approval process to ensure TIF is used in the manner it is intended—for public rather than private good. Consequently, it is common to find TIF areas in relatively affluent neighborhoods throughout the region. In a particularly notorious example in St. Louis County, an upscale area of the county seat, Clayton, was deemed blighted in order to secure a TIF district. According to the group Better Together, over two billion public tax dollars have been diverted to developers in the past twenty years using TIF to subsidize private developments in the St. Louis region.96 Although North St. Louis County covers more than one-third of the physical geography of the city and county area and many of its neighborhoods fit the conventional definition of blighted, of the 168 TIF projects carried out in St. Louis city and county, only 13 are located in North St. Louis County.97
There is a direct relationship between a loss of sales tax revenue through poaching and dis/investment practices and an increase in the amount of revenue generated through predatory policing and the courts.98 Not surprisingly, the same cities that have lost the sales tax war are at the top of the list when it comes to per capita predatory policing practices. As predatory policing practices were made public as a result of Ferguson protests, Black leaders were blamed for abusing the municipal courts. The questionable role and power of municipal courts in Missouri as laid out in the state constitution, however, including gray areas concerning whether municipal courts should act more as criminal or civil courts, impacted North St. Louis County long before Black leaders were elected to offices. T. E. Lauer described the problem of municipal court ambiguity in 1966 in his argument for municipal court reform in Missouri, which did not transpire at that time.99 Lauer identified inherent conflicts of interest, a clear lack of procedure and standards, little uniformity across municipalities, consistent duplication of laws, strangely particular ordinances across municipalities, and an alarming disinterest in the spirit of justice. In addition to observing “matters of peculiar local importance,” Lauer also revealed that abuses by the municipal courts have a long history. He states:
While our criminal law makes an increasing claim to adhere to the theory that rehabilitation of the offender is the proper end of criminal justice, municipal ordinance violators are dealt with almost as though the twentieth century had never happened: the offender is punished by the imposition of a fine or jail sentence. And failure to pay a fine will cause the offender to be remanded to jail, there to “lay it out.” But ordinance violations are trivial matters, we will say; they are only civil matters and surely the fine or imprisonment cannot amount to much. An examination of the statutes, however, discloses that in third and fourth class cities an offender may be punished by a fine of one hundred dollars and imprisonment in the “city prison or workhouse” for three months.100
Lauer also makes clear that predatory policing and abuses by local lawmakers in conjunction with municipal courts have existed in Missouri for more than fifty years. He notes that “the number and variety of municipal ordinances in force in Missouri municipalities is astonishing,” and “in many cases ordinances have been enacted which parallel or duplicate the state law.”101 Lauer further theorized that any reform would be met with significant resistance from cities because “not only would this reform diminish the importance of the municipal court, but more importantly it would cause a loss of revenue to municipalities.”102 More recent manifestations of predatory policing and court practices, however, have taken a racial turn both statistically and rhetorically.103 Since Lauer’s article was published in 1966, the most egregious municipal court practices, such as jail time for failure to pay and the funding of municipal budgets through the courts, were greatly reduced across the state, including in many majority-white areas of West and South St. Louis County through reform measures.104 These practices have increased, however, in North County at roughly the same rate as the increase in the Black population.105 From specific types of ordinances (e.g., against sagging pants and barbecuing in the front yard) to justifications for policies (e.g., statements such as “these people don’t know how to act in the suburbs”) to employing dehumanizing practices and tropes (e.g., leaving a body in the street for four and a half hours and labeling it demonic and animalistic), the criminalization and dehumanization of Black people and the spaces they inhabit conveniently justifies significant increases in court-generated revenues.106 These revenues make up for the substantial disinvestment and loss of sales tax revenues that result from the historical risk attached to blackness. This is the basis of the double bind Black residents find themselves in today.
In outlying and larger municipalities of North St. Louis County, such as Ferguson and Florissant, transition in the demographics of residents and leadership (from white to Black) lagged behind smaller communities that were closer to Black neighborhoods in St. Louis city. By the time the teenager Michael Brown Jr. was shot by a white Ferguson police officer in 2014 in Ferguson, the city was 67 percent African American as compared to over 90 percent in many of the surrounding cities, and it had maintained its majority white leadership. The demographic misalignment of the population and the leadership was often cited as contributing to the unrest witnessed after the shooting and subsequent data produced by the Department of Justice regarding extreme racialized policing practices in Ferguson.107 Although this misalignment did not help racialized tensions in Ferguson, the presumption that the policing of Black residents based on suburban norms was specifically carried out by white leadership is proven incorrect by the fact that even more extreme forms of racialized policing practices are carried out in multiple cities in North St. Louis County with all-Black leadership.108 Chapters 3 and 4 describe and document these practices as well as looking at many of the nuanced factors that impact the experiences and responses of residents and leaders in this area.
The Region Today
Today the St. Louis metropolitan area consists of fifteen counties in two states with approximately 2.8 million people.109 Encompassing over nine thousand square miles (map 2.1), the region includes over 300 local governments and 165 school districts with the highest number of taxing authorities in the nation, at 26.8 taxing units per 100,000 people.110 St. Louis County, at just under one million people, is by far the most populated county in the region although geographically one of the smallest, covering just 524 square miles. Established as a district in 1804, when the Upper Louisiana Territory was transferred to US control, and as a county in 1812 when the Missouri Territory was formed, St. Louis County is the oldest county in Missouri. The City of St. Louis, which separated from the county in 1876 because of differing political priorities discussed earlier in this chapter, spans 66.2 square miles and has a population today of roughly 315,000 residents, down from a high of 856,796 in 1950.111
MAP 2.1 St. Louis city and the fifteen counties that make up the St. Louis metropolitan area. Areas that are less than 50 percent white or Black are color-coded according to the majority of a single race reported in that census tract. US Census data, 2013–17 American Community Survey. (Note: the author recognizes that the use of color, rather than black and white, is preferable when representing demographic information but was limited by the requirements of publication.)
TIGER/Line shape files prepared by the US Census Bureau, 2018. Map by Alexis Sheehy.
There are eighty-eight municipalities in St. Louis County today (map 2.2), of which eighty-one maintain independent courts, sixty-one have independent police forces, and all provide some level of basic services. More than half (forty-six) of the eighty-eight municipalities are located in the northern fifth of the county footprint, to the north of Olive Boulevard in the area known as North County (map 2.3). This area covers roughly 50 of the 524 square miles in St. Louis County. Of the forty-six municipalities located in the area of North St. Louis County, twenty-five can be found within a twelve-square-mile area known as the Normandy suburbs, roughly defined by Page Avenue, Interstates 70 and 170, and St. Louis city limits. People driving on interstates or thoroughfares in this area may cross seven or eight city limits in a one-to-two-mile stretch.112
MAP 2.2 Municipalities of St. Louis County, Missouri as of 2018. The area known as North St. Louis County is outlined in bold. Source: US Census, 2013–17 American Community Survey.
TIGER/Line shape files prepared by the US Census Bureau, 2018. Map by Alexis Sheehy.
Black residents make up 24 percent of the population in St. Louis County—up from 2.7 percent in 1960. More than 80 percent of the Black population lives in North St. Louis County, which is majority Black, and many municipalities in North St. Louis County are over 90 percent Black.113 As discussed above, demographic shifts were rapid in this area following civil rights legislation, and several municipalities inverted within a twenty-year period—from over 90 percent white in 1960 to more than 90 percent Black by 1980—with the most dramatic shifts occurring in the mid-1970s.114 Today, demographic mapping of race, income, and poverty levels (maps 2.4, 2.5) as well as education, workforce, health, and amenities reveals a consistent line dividing North St. Louis County from the rest of the region.
MAP 2.3 The area known as North St. Louis County as of 2018. Forty-six of the eighty-eight cities in St. Louis County sit within this footprint. Source: US Census, 2013–17 American Community Survey.
TIGER/Line shape files prepared by the US Census Bureau, 2018. Map by Alexis Sheehy.
The genealogies outlined in this chapter reflect the interconnected global histories of chattel slavery, colonial and imperial expansion, and capitalist development. In keeping with these histories, Black residents in the suburbs of North St. Louis County are disciplined as less-than-human, profit-generating bodies by tiny cities that have been stripped of resources and struggle to provide basic services except for an ever-expanding police force. A fierce desire for self-governance and municipal autonomy, a persistent tradition of parochial hierarchies, a peculiar reliance on the local courts, and the perpetual conflation of blackness and risk are legacies that result in specific forms of cultural politics and racialized practices across a highly fragmented geography. The chapters that follow in this section describe and examine the double bind of blackness—as a signifier of risk and as a means of exploitation and profit—that has led to conditions such that “if you were to design a place whose sole purpose was to create and maintain a system of racialized poverty, it would look like this.”115
MAP 2.4 St. Louis County, percent Black. Source: US Census, 2013–17 American Community Survey. (See note, map 2.1)
TIGER/Line shape files prepared by the US Census Bureau, 2018. Map by Alexis Sheehy.
MAP 2.5 St. Louis County, poverty rate. Source: US Census, 2013–17 American Community Survey. (See note, map 2.1)
TIGER/Line shape files prepared by the US Census Bureau, 2018. Map by Alexis Sheehy.