5

POLITICS AND POLICING IN PAGEDALE

It’s who you’re bringing in and what they’re accustomed to. They come with what they’re used to. Where they come from, they were doing what they want and nobody is teaching them another way to do it. We have a better chance in the county with our little municipality of enforcing the laws that teach people how to live. It’s the teaching that we have.

—Alderperson, City of Pagedale

The City of Pagedale represents an extreme example of how discourses of race and space are deployed in North St. Louis County, yet its history also represents a complicated intersection of race, generation, and gender in suburban space. City officials in Pagedale pass and enforce ordinances that promote “suburban aesthetics” and white cultural norms, as well as targeting circumstances of poverty and Black culture. They do so using a consistent rhetoric of public safety and property rights, which began soon after the first developments began to appear in this area. Whereas traffic violations make up the vast majority of policing-for-revenue practices in North St. Louis County, Pagedale has historically policed space and property, in addition to writing traffic tickets. Page-dale also sits at the far end of the spectrum in terms of the rate of demographic change that occurred between 1960 and 1990 and the demographics of people elected to office after 1970. For example, in 1970, Pagedale was 23 percent Black, and by 1972, Black women had begun running, albeit unsuccessfully, for elected office. Ten years later, Pagedale received national attention when it became the first city in the United States to elect an all-Black, all-female leadership in 1982. By 1990, Pagedale was 93 percent Black, and the city has continued to elect all-Black and majority-female leaders. At the other end of the spectrum in North St. Louis County, Ferguson, as a much larger and older city with a long history of segregating itself from the neighboring historically Black city of Kinloch, was 1 percent Black in 1970. In 2014, Ferguson was 67 percent Black and maintained an all-white, majority-male leadership.

In 2010, the City of Pagedale had a population of 3,304 and was 94 percent African American, with a per capita income of $11,005. Although the city covers just 1.19 square miles, it is one of the larger municipalities in North St. Louis County (see maps in chapter 2). Most of the small bungalow homes were built in the 1940s, and during that time, many working-class families of German and Polish descent moved to Pagedale from St. Louis City. A large Lutheran church was built next to the public park in the center of the city and directly across from the city hall. Page Avenue, for which the city was named, ran through this area prior to development, as did the old fur trading route of St. Charles Rock Road. Several houses also dotted the agricultural landscape prior to 1940, including the home of Nicholas Craig, a formerly enslaved African American who moved to Whitney Avenue around 1900.1 Probably because of the Craig family’s residence, Whitney Avenue was developed in the 1940s as one of the few African American streets in St. Louis County, and adjacent streets that connected to Whitney Avenue were gated off to prevent access from the block of Black families.2

Pagedale was incorporated as a fourth-class city in 1950, after the neighboring city of Wellston threatened to annex most of the developed unincorporated area. Across the small geography, there are roughly 1,400 small homes, two commercial districts, an industrial zone along a railroad that bisects the city, several churches, and a large Lutheran cemetery. Several large factories, distribution centers, and headquarters were located in midcentury Pagedale, including the Lever soap factory, the Production Engineering Company (a gun manufacturer), the Stix, Baer, Fuller department store service warehouse, and Hill-Behan Lumber national headquarters, which together provided several hundred jobs in the area. In keeping with the suburban imaginary, advertisements for new homes in one development in Pagedale, which targeted white working-class families, touted “clean neighborhoods, quiet streets and a fruit tree planted in every yard.”3 Almost immediately after incorporation, the City of Pagedale began to experience demographic change.

In 1962, the first of several factories in the city moved to an outlying area that offered attractive tax and infrastructure benefits.4 Concurrent with the relocation of major employers throughout the 1960s was the momentum of the civil rights legislation and overcrowding in Black communities in the city of St. Louis, which exerted new forces on suburban municipalities to open their boundaries to Black homebuyers, as discussed in chapter 2. As was the case in cities across the United States, the push of Black families beyond the central city and into the suburban context was met by much resistance from white residents, politicians, and real estate agents in Pagedale. Violence and threats toward individuals and families, veiled exclusionary policies, and blatantly racialized real estate and lending practices were common and aimed at keeping Black people “at bay.” Many incidences of vandalism and threats (including death threats) aimed at Black families moving in and whites “selling out” were documented in Pagedale and relayed by former and current residents.5 Realtors were mandated to sell the right property to the right people or risk losing their licenses.6 Neighborhood and municipal meetings were routinely called by white homeowners to discuss what could be done to thwart the “Negro invasion” discussed in chapter 2.7 While some of the resistance was unapologetically racist, most arguments in Pagedale steered the debate toward economic factors and the right to protect the value of property that was perceived as threatened by “undesirable” people and lifestyles.8 In 1970, the Legal Aid Society became involved in complaints against the City of Pagedale regarding occupancy permits. Several Black families, specifically Black women, alleged they had been harassed by the city for having more than four children, allowing visiting relatives to temporarily stay at their homes, and having babysitters occasionally spend the night when a parent was working nights.9 At the time, the leadership in Pagedale was all white men, and the Legal Aid Society threatened racial charges against the city. One of the women involved in the complaint, who was the first Black homeowner on her block, said her white neighbors constantly called the city to harass her, stating, “It has been the most miserable year of my life . . . because of my white neighbors.”10 Although reports of animosity toward Black families were not uncommon, records indicate that Black mothers were most often the ones making claims regarding harassment by neighbors and by municipalities over ordinance violations.11

The demographic transition from majority white to majority Black throughout North St. Louis County was swift, but demographic transitions in municipal leadership occurred much more slowly. In areas like Pagedale, which had become majority Black by 1975, elections in which Black candidates sought to unseat white leadership were still highly contested. Politics among white leaders in Pagedale was notoriously contentious, and backroom deals, outbursts at city council meetings, violence outside city halls, arrests, and restraining orders were routinely reported on.12 Black candidates began running unsuccessfully for office in 1970. In 1972, the city was reported as 70 percent Black and an all-Black slate for mayor and three aldermanic positions was on the April 4 ballot, which included Mary Louise Carter, the current mayor of Pagedale.13 The Black mayoral candidate, Roosevelt Clossum, stated he was running to halt white flight from Pagedale by restoring confidence in the city government. He stated that there were seventy to eighty vacant homes in Pagedale because of white flight and that four white families on his own block had moved in the span of a week.14 All the Black candidates were defeated and Black candidates would continue to run and be defeated until 1977, when two Black women were voted into aldermanic positions. William Speiser, the white male mayor of Pagedale during the 1970s, was arrested several times and involved in numerous physical altercations in and around city hall throughout his time in office. Fraud, fixing tickets, outbursts at meetings, and routinely firing anyone that disagreed with him were also common allegations against Speiser; however, he served as mayor for thirteen consecutive years.15

In 1982, Pagedale made national news by electing the first all-Black and all-woman city administration in the United States, which included the mayor, who ousted Speiser, and five alderpersons.16 The positive notoriety did not last long, however. Two months later, the Detroit Free Press reported, “The meetings of the Board of Alderpersons sometimes resemble Latin American soccer matches with competing factions in the audience shouting loud approval or displeasure at the parliamentary play. Talk of impeachment is common and allegations of threats of physical violence against board members have been made at meetings (figure 5.1).”17 What the report failed to mention was that this type of behavior was commonplace at city council meetings in Pagedale long before Black women were voted into office. Although Speiser had been engaging in fistfights during council meetings for years and was routinely antagonistic toward alderpersons, the media that began following Pagedale after it made national history with its all-Black and all-woman leadership assumed that political chaos in the city was due to an administration of “fighting Black women” who could not agree with each other on anything.18

The St. Louis media, which has a history of portraying the minutiae of local politics in North County municipalities as “a circus,” had material to work with, since shortly after the election, Pagedale hired three contested police chiefs at one time due to infighting between the council and the mayor. The mayor and her appointed police chief were also arrested by one of the two additional police chiefs for assault, a charge they both disputed. The mayor accused the arresting police chief of fraud and holding her in a shoe store for five hours against her will, during which time she said he fired shots at her.19 In comparison with previous white administrations, such events could be considered normal in Pagedale; however, white administrations had never been covered with the same scrutiny and certainly not with national attention. Three months after Black women took over leadership, a white man was elected to the one open seat on the council. Expressing her frustration with the constant focus on Black women in Pagedale, Darline Crawley, one of the first Black women elected in 1977 and a harsh critic of the mayor, dismissed race and gender as having any relevance, stating, “I hope to rectify this all female and all Black image. I’m supporting a white male in the election Tuesday. . . . Maybe if we break it up a little, some of the attention will go away and we can get back to running the city.”20 As of 2019, Darline Crawley continues to hold elected office in Pagedale and local media continues to cover controversies surrounding elected officials in the city.21

FIGURE 5.1 Front page of the Detroit Free Press, July 11, 1982. In spite of the fact Pagedale politics had long been a “hot show” under white male leadership, newspapers around the country featured local politics in Pagedale after it became the first city in the United States to elect all-Black, all-female leadership.

Detroit Free Press. Photo by Jim Balmer.

Pagedale has consistently elected all-Black and majority-women leadership since 1985, and many of the leaders across North St. Louis County identify as Black women. Throughout this time, Black women who hold elected office have continued to face much scrutiny in the press, and all the leaders I spoke with in Pagedale reported receiving threats against them or their families at one time or another. In the early 1990s, Mayor Mary Louise Carter and other elected officials in Pagedale were the targets of a series of car and fire bombings carried out in the city between 1989 and 1993. Although no one was seriously hurt and the people and motives behind the attacks were never definitively determined, several leaders stated they believed the attacks to be acts of intimidation against Black leadership.

Despite predictions made by researchers in the 1970s—that cities would embrace political mergers and approve tax increases and bond issues when Black leadership took over—cities that elected majority-Black officials did not become more open to consolidation measures, and Black leaders did not curb the trend toward funding municipal budgets through policing and the courts. Many Black women interviewed in the early 2000s regarding their experience of coming into municipal leadership in the 1980s and 1990s stated that they were very aware they would be scrutinized more than their white male predecessors and that nobody wanted to be at the helm of city leadership if, or when, it appeared that dissolution was the only option for their predominantly Black city. Most leaders who were interviewed defended the passing of ordinances aimed at property and behavior in their cities by stating they were continuing to run cities as they had been run previously and that the biggest challenges facing small cities were people who refused or did not know how to care for property—what they identified as essential for attracting investment and ensuring suburban success. Leaders generally framed their arguments by stating that Black suburban communities have the same rights as white suburbanites to expect a nice environment, stable home prices, and respectable behavior suitable for raising a family. Leaders in Pagedale (as well many leaders in other cities in North St. Louis County) routinely told me that people who do not care for their property or themselves do not belong in their cities and should go back to the projects in St. Louis city.22

It is clear from these interviews that actual class status does not necessarily determine residents’ outlooks regarding power, subjectivity, or identity in Pagedale. Leaders consistently point out that they are all Black and all poor.23 A middle-class identity does however shape many residents’ outlook, in addition to differing generational attitudes and differing experiences of coming to live in Pagedale, including whether they own or rent their homes. A Black woman who moved to Pagedale from the housing projects in the city in the 1970s and owns her home (and has also held elected office), explained how middle-class identity in what is supposed to be a suburban area shapes the response of some residents toward others moving in, regardless of class, stating, “When I came to Pagedale I didn’t know how to take care of property or how to act in the county. Someone had to tell me—you don’t be doing that here. I didn’t know it wasn’t permissible. When people know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it they start to say, ‘Well that’s not bad at all, I got my barbecue in the backyard, I got my privacy and everything. I don’t have to have all my kids in the street playing and be looking at my neighbor—all in their business.’”24 This resident uses economistic logics of property to justify the policing of so-called urban behavior and indicates that the role of government is to teach people how to conduct their everyday lives in certain places. In light of the way this statement is framed, it can be understood that a desire for privacy is a respectable trait associated with suburban (white) culture, whereas barbequing in public or being “all in [other peoples’] business” is a problematic tendency within Black urban culture that requires reeducation upon individuals’ moving to the suburbs. The attitudes expressed by this resident are shared by a number of people in Pagedale, including many in leadership, and municipal leaders maintain a moral polity of blackness defined and deployed paradoxically through the white suburban imaginary and an age-old politics of respectability.

Although many residents in Pagedale agree with these attitudes, many do not. The stories in chapter 3 told by Evelyn and Patrice echo the stories of Pagedale residents, especially those who identify as Black women. Interviews with residents as well as the available data regarding citations show that women in this area are more likely to be policed at home and for property violations, similar to those that Evelyn encountered, while men were more often policed in public space, although there are exceptions to the rule. Black men more often reported being pulled over for traffic violations when driving with other men in their car or stopped for “manner of walking,” what many of them referred to as “walking while Black,” which was the same infraction Michael Brown was initially stopped for in Ferguson. Individuals driving alone who were pulled over for traffic violations appeared to be more equally divided between Black men and women. Several women in Pagedale recounted that they had called the police to report incidences of domestic violence or fear of a domestic partner and ended up going to jail themselves when the police showed up and a warrant for outstanding property or traffic violations was discovered. In two of those instances, the domestic violence complaint was not investigated.

When interviewed, several municipal leaders in Pagedale spoke about gendered expectations they held, including their concern for teaching young women and girls about domestic skills, avoiding bad partners or baby daddies, learning good parenting, and dressing appropriately. Leaders complained that young men in their jurisdictions generally “passed through,” but they did not regard them as residents if they did not take responsibility for heading a household. One leader stated that occupancy permit requirements were intended to allow inspectors to stop by any house at random for the purpose of ensuring boyfriends were not taking advantage of free housing in their city. Complaints by leaders about young men often focused on a need to “pull up their pants,” “get a job,” and take responsibility for their women and children. In this context, whether viewed through respectability politics or suburban norms, Black men who do not oversee women and hold full-time jobs with their pants pulled up, and Black women who engage in expressions of their sexuality or parent as the head of a household, fall outside the bounds (and rights) of gendered suburban citizenship. While this is a simplified assessment, these basic tenets give rise to multiple forms of cultural policing based on the “out-of-place” designation of Black residents. The visibility of out-of-place bodies works to control and exploit residents; however, it was also the basis by which women leading Ferguson resistance created alternative spaces of visibility and appeared as political actors. Furthermore, the Black women who assumed municipal leadership roles as early as 1978, many of whom still hold municipal office today and were interviewed for this research, have also struggled mightily with issues of visibility because of the fact that they are Black women, which calls for more nuanced considerations of the forces and motivations driving their rhetorical and literal practices.

Feminist scholars and urban historians have long written about the suburbs as the imagined space of domesticity and traditional gendered roles—wives and mothers who are responsible for the home and whose supposed purpose and fulfillment in life is the advancement and well-being of their husbands and children.25 Whereas white single mothers have been able to push back against this cultural trope and establish themselves as liberal subjects, with varying degrees of success, Black women living in historically white suburbs still find themselves squarely judged against these standards, often by other Black women. As Roderick Ferguson observes, we are “in a historic moment in which minority middle classes ascend to power through appeals to normativity and thus become the regulators of working-class racial, gender, and sexual differences.”26

Black women respondents living in Pagedale often reported that they felt disrespected by Black leaders and administrators because they, instead of men, were the heads of their households. By virtue of this fact, they stated that they felt judged by leaders and others as bad parents and undeserving citizens. They also felt that, as single mothers whose time and money were stretched across many demands, they were an easy target for cities looking to increase revenue through property-related violations. Those who had lived in the so-called urban core of St. Louis or other cities stated that being a single mother was more of an issue in the county than it was in the city, and they believed, on the basis of observations, that employed men who owned homes were more or less left alone whereas they (who were often employed and in many cases owned their homes) were held responsible for underemployed partners and adult children. Many women also stated that leaders and the police did not see their bodies as worthy of protection because their lack of gendered conformity was framed as the primary problem in the area, and they were therefore held responsible for anything that happened to them.

As discussed in chapter 3, many residents feel that Black leaders are able to more overtly say derogatory things about Black constituents because they are Black and that white leaders elsewhere could not make overt statements such as “Folks from the ghetto need to be taught how to live in the suburbs.”27 Many residents in Pagedale also voiced their perception that the majority-Black female leadership could “get away with” targeting gendered stereotypes and behavior, such as “promiscuous girls,” young single mothers, and lesbian women, because they are women and that similar attitudes about girls and women would not be tolerated if they were men. Similarly, some respondents stated that the matriarchal image of many older Black female leaders in Pagedale allowed them to scold young Black men, telling them to “pull up their pants and get a job” without being accused of racialized or gendered biases. These types of admonitions of Black young people from an older generation of Black leadership fall squarely into long-theorized practices of respectability politics rooted in logics of assimilation and white heteronormative constructions of civil society. The way these logics play out in the historically white suburbs of St. Louis, however, sheds particular light on limits of suburban citizenship.

As described in preceding chapters, the suburbs have been a place where ethnic communities claim full citizenship through middle-class norms and space. Several scholars have described the quest for model-citizen status in and through the suburbs by various ethnic minorities, most often Asian Americans. Wendy Cheng describes how Asian and Latina/o Americans “had to either ‘pass’ as white . . . or evidence a ‘proper’ relationship to property as conceived as coextensive with a middle-class, white nuclear-family based vision of Americanness” in order to achieve provisional acceptance in the suburbs of Los Angeles.28 In the case of African Americans, however, the specific and long history of antiblackness and their initial status as property in the United States denies Black suburban residents the necessary symbolic relationship to property and also requires that they make up for economic losses resulting from the risk attached to blackness.

Pagedale found itself at the center of a class action lawsuit in 2015 brought by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm based in Arlington, Virginia, on behalf of Pagedale residents. Spurred by protests in Ferguson and the reports that followed, the complaint filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri accuses the city of violating due process and excess-fines protections ensured in the US Constitution by turning its code enforcement and municipal court into “revenue-generating machines” to go after residents.29 The complaint calls for an injunction against the city’s reliance on such fines. The complaint focuses on property violations as well as both overt and veiled racialized prohibitions found in Pagedale city ordinances, such as “no sagging pants”; “no barbecuing in front of or next to a house”; “no congregating on a porch”; and so on.30 According to the compliant, Pagedale residents could be, and were, ticketed for such things as not having curtains on their basement windows, having mismatched blinds, having more than three people at a barbeque, and having a basketball hoop in their driveway. The city prosecuted residents for conditions that were not forbidden by any applicable codes, such as having a crack in the driveway or not treating a fence, and many violations did not cite the reason the resident was receiving the violation.31

These restrictions are reminiscent of slave codes such as the Pennsylvania legislation listed at the end of W. E. B Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro. Included in Du Bois’s list are offenses punishable by whipping and fines such as “over four Negroes meeting together on Sundays or other days,” and city ordinances to suppress “tumults” of slaves or disruptions by groups of “Negroes.”32 Pagedale leaders continue to claim that race has nothing to do with official practices in the city since both they and residents are Black; however, residents argue that similar ordinances are rarely tolerated in white communities. Referring to a majority-white suburb, one middle-aged Black resident of Pagedale stated, “Imagine if the city of Ladue told people they couldn’t have more than three people at their backyard barbeque. The minute one person got a fine for that, everybody would be complaining and officials would have to listen. They don’t listen to us here because they don’t have to.” When asked to clarify why officials don’t have to listen to residents, she said, “because we’re Black.”33

Long before the Institute for Justice became involved in Pagedale in the aftermath of Ferguson protests, residents of Pagedale were sharing these stories with anyone who would listen, with little success at eliciting interest. The consistent story I heard over a ten-year period was of a city continuously fining, harassing, and sometimes jailing residents for minor traffic and nontraffic infractions. Residents routinely showed me the calendar handed out by the city that, in addition to providing information such as trash pickup days and holidays, included different laws and norms that residents were expected to follow (figure 5.2). Although these stories were in keeping with stories from other parts of North St. Louis County, accounts from Pagedale also involved the threat of demolition over non-safety-related code violations. Residents facing code violations, which include peeling paint, windows without screens or with a torn screen, loose siding, and mismatched curtains, are usually given thirty days to remedy issues. Properties that do not comply are cited again; owners with multiple citations can be jailed, and their homes may be placed on the demolition list. Many residents lack the resources to address repairs immediately and bear the added burden of fines and fees for violations, as well as jail time. One eighty-four-year-old Black woman who has lived in Pagedale for forty-seven years and is part of the lawsuit received a letter ordering her to fix a dozen violations, none of which were safety issues and all of which were beyond her limited retirement income to address immediately. She was told that “all windows need screens and window treatment such as matching blinds and/or curtains, slats, etc.,” and ordered to repaint her porch and paint her building foundation, as well as “touch up paint or repaint entire house, cut back weeds and treat fence line with brush killer,” and trim an overgrown tree.34 Much in the same way large urban areas became the front lines of the war on poverty through the criminalization of the poor and homeless (as discussed in chapter 1), Pagedale uses the concept of broken-windows policing to get rid of unbecoming properties the city claims bring down property values and, like many cities across St. Louis County, to fill budgetary gaps at the same time.

Property is a major theme in Pagedale. One leader stated, “If you don’t know how to cut your grass then you shouldn’t be living in a house.”35 When I relayed this statement to a resident who had received a violation for her grass being too long, she said, “If they don’t know how to serve their residents and take care of the vacant lots they own where the houses are gone, then they shouldn’t be running a city. They have vacant lots all over this city that they’ve taken away from people and they don’t always cut the grass on those lots. Then they come out and measure my grass with a ruler.”36 In a deposition given by the mayor of Pagedale, the acting attorney for the lawsuit brought by the Institute of Justice, William Mauer, asked the mayor questions regarding ordinances aimed at property:

MR. MAUER: Why does Pagedale regulate the window treatments in a person’s home?

MAYOR CARTER: The reason that ordinance was passed was because we had some, I would say, I don’t know if they were homeowners, rent-ers or what, but they put Christmas paper up at the windows. They put sheets and hung them up in the night. I mean, and these are on, you know, major streets and stuff. That’s why. That they would have to have some type of window treatment.

MR. MAUER: And so it was purely aesthetics?

MAYOR CARTER: Exactly.

MR. MAUER: Okay. So they weren’t actually harming anybody by having—

MAYOR CARTER: Yeah, they’re harming somebody. They’re decreasing property value.

MR. MAUER: I see.... Does Pagedale regulate whether somebody has painted the foundation or not on their home?

MAYOR CARTER: Well, I don’t know because we use St. Louis County ordinances also, we adopt their ordinances, and we also use the BOCA [Building Officials and Code Administrators] code. If, like I said, it’s to keep the property values up. I mean, you going to have to paint it at some point.

MR. MAUER: Okay. So it’s an aesthetic consideration?

MAYOR CARTER: Yes, it is.

MR. MAUER: Does the city regulate whether a house has chipped paint on it?

MAYOR CARTER: I don’t know. If it just a couple of chips or something, but if the whole house is chipped, it’s bad.

MR. MAUER: Okay. Also for aesthetic reasons?

MAYOR CARTER: Yes. And for property value.

MR. MAUER: So the property values follow good aesthetics?

MAYOR CARTER: Yes, it does.37

FIGURE 5.2 Page from the City of Pagedale calendar. Each month features different city ordinances and reminders concerning property and behavior.

Collection of the author.

Although most cities in St. Louis County issue many more traffic violations than nontraffic violations, the opposite is true of Pagedale, where nontraffic violations have been historically more numerous.38 Several factors explain this phenomenon, but the most critical correlation is that Pagedale is effectively carrying out a land grab through the municipal court and through county and city liens on properties for unpaid taxes and unpaid fines and fees. Properties obtained by the city because of mounting citations or back taxes have often been turned over to the nonprofit housing and community-building organization, Beyond Housing, which builds new housing for low-income families participating in their home ownership and renters’ programs. Through this process and with an ironic twist, poor people in the St. Louis region benefit from the circumstances of the very poor. Those who are consistently unable to keep up their property or pay property taxes subsequently lose their property and, as a result, “the more deserving poor” are able to find housing.39 Leaders of Pagedale and others argue that turning “nuisance” properties, which bring down property values and scare away outside investment, into attractive new homes for low-income people participating in comprehensive programs through Beyond Housing benefits more people than it hurts because property values are brought up in the process and families are supported in areas that ensure their success.40 These benefits have indeed proven to be great, and the programs offered through Beyond Housing take an important holistic approach to circumventing poverty in ways that most programs aimed at supporting families miss. The logic rhetorically promoted in this process, however, a process I later realized I had participated in, essentially justifies stripping very poor residents of their homes through the prioritization of the rights of property, good citizenship, and an aesthetics of suburban norms. In another ironic twist, this logic uses the rights of private property to deny the rights of private property, which is why a libertarian public interest law firm took notice of this case.

At the time of this writing, Beyond Housing has been focusing residential and commercial revitalization efforts in Pagedale for over twenty years. Gradually, the nonprofit agency added multiple family support services, in addition to their original mission to provide affordable housing, and has understandably become a national model for holistic antipoverty initiatives that go far beyond affordable housing. During the same period, the City of Pagedale, in an apparent effort to improve public perception, attract outside investment and partnerships, and boost economic stability in the city, implemented a zero-tolerance policy for “weak links” within the municipal boundaries. As one resident put it, “Your house could be falling down around you from the inside and your kids could be starving but as long as you put your last dime into new paint and matching curtains and cut your grass, the city don’t care.”41 Another Pagedale resident stated, “They are putting so-called needy families in brand new homes but if you’re really poor, the message is ‘Get out.’”42 This raises a question regarding how nonprofit organizations with sincere missions to address poverty and assist poor families can, in some instances, aid and abet oppressive practices and implement subjective interpretations of “highest and best use” that in turn impact the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society.

Similar to the ways in which E. Franklin Frazier’s antiracist work, discussed in chapter 1, was used to draft the culture-of-poverty discourse that directed decades of racialized federal, state, and local policy afterward, this case illustrates how efforts that earnestly seek to alleviate oppression, and which have clearly helped many families, can also (directly and indirectly) reinforce messages of respectability and responsibility that determine and explain who succeeds and who fails within a model of community development. It also reveals the many complications and contradictions faced by those trying to transform communities and combat poverty. Beyond Housing’s community participation approach relies on residents to be “engaged citizens,” both discursively and in practice. Given the limitations of institutional structures and the democratic ideals behind this approach, responsibility for failures is inadvertently yet inherently placed on those who fall through the cracks and those who, for a multitude of reasons, do not participate. The difficulty in engaging an aggrieved population within a community while also partnering with entities viewed as oppressive and predatory tends to result in narrow outcomes of engagement.43

During the several years I spent working with the leadership of the City of Pagedale and Beyond Housing as a faculty representative of Washington University, I witnessed the contradictions that arise when forces align to “help residents,” with varying definitions, methods, and metrics concerning that objective. Because the leadership of Pagedale is democratically elected and Black, the university categorically did not question whether leaders were acting in the best interest of their citizens. Moreover, because of the measurable impacts that Beyond Housing has had in this geography, its commitment to holistic intervention, and the recognition it has received for innovative practices, administrators at the university did not question specific methods or practices carried out by the nonprofit. Nor did I. Over the course of my extended time in the community and throughout the process of conducting a health impact assessment (HIA) of a Beyond Housing–initiated project in Pagedale,44 it became evident that dis-cursive representations of the community by people in charge were out of sync with the experiences of the most vulnerable residents. In fact, residents began to share many of the stories described throughout chapters 3 and 4, regarding constant harassment and what many felt were abuses of power by the city for the purpose of extracting money, obtaining property, and regulating behavior that supported development. By extension, many residents assumed Beyond Housing directly benefitted from these practices, which was often not the case. In spite of these discoveries, the HIA report promoted the discourses of healthy eating, active living, and even broken-windows policing, suggesting that if residents have access to healthy food and walkable streets, and maintain their property, the vast economic and health disparities found in their zip code would be greatly remediated. That is not to say that food security and walkable communities are not critically important issues; however, if residents are afraid to leave their houses for fear of being fined by the city and they must choose between fixing cosmetic issues with their property and buying healthy food, these factors will have no effect on their lives.

These conflicts were difficult to navigate personally yet paled in comparison to the difficulties residents articulated. As a principal investigator on the HIA, I found measurable positive impacts within the metrics of health, food security, and economic well-being that could result from the development proposed jointly by Beyond Housing and the City of Pagedale. At the same time, I observed veiled as well as explicit efforts to rid the city of the most economically and behaviorally “undesirable” residents, and experiences shared by residents reinforced these observations. While critiques of neoliberal urban practices, discussed in chapter 1, assume that cities will act in the interest of the few and not the many, such critiques become more complicated when cities are also connected to agencies like Beyond Housing, which earnestly seek to better the lives of many poor people. Beyond Housing’s continued alignment with and vehement defense of the leadership of Pagedale, even as egregious practices of predatory policing were publicly exposed by the media post-Ferguson, were personally surprising, yet they reveal how the politics of community transformation can mirror the contradictions found in humanitarian discourse and practice. This is similar to what Jean Bricmont calls humanitarian imperialism, defined as helping individuals and families with one hand while (consciously or not) strengthening the structures that create underlying problems with the other.45 My own experiences and relationships with leaders in Pagedale made it even more clear that sincere care and compassion can and does simultaneously exist with blatant forms of oppression.

Another frame I found helpful for understanding what is happening in Pagedale and other areas of North St. Louis County is triage. Conceptually developed within the medical field, triage refers to a decision-making hierarchy that dismisses those considered to be beyond hope, identifies those who can wait for help, and focuses resources on those who can be helped by immediate care. When I asked a friend who has worked as a social worker in North St. Louis County for many years whether nonprofits there help the poor at the expense of the very poor, her response was, “absolutely.” She followed this statement up by lamenting that nonprofits, including those she worked for, are constantly trying to establish an evolutionary threshold separating those they can help from those who are beyond hope or refuse to conform to the stipulations of help that workers are required to enforce. In order to make and justify difficult decisions regarding limited resources, nonprofits also use well-established discourses and cultural politics to distinguish the worthy poor from the unworthy poor, or what Chandan Reddy calls “the dialectic of exceptionality and disposability.”46 This may explain why an organization with a clear mission and track record of assisting poor families would also be aligned with a government that stratifies its residents through cultural politics and racialized narratives of risk in order to bring up property values for those struggling toward the top of the spectrum. In this way, the nonprofit does not appear to compromise its values because the city establishes the metrics for differentiation and carries out punitive practices, thus revealing another double bind: in order to help residents, the nonprofit must be aligned with a structure that preys on residents.

Looking back at past research and documents from my time working in Page-dale, I came across a spreadsheet that one of my graduate students had created in 2008. It was produced at the request of Beyond Housing, which had asked for assistance with what was termed a “housing audit” in Pagedale. The list of ninety homes to be audited was provided by the mayor of Pagedale. Without questioning it much, I sent the student to meet with the person overseeing the request and tasked him with doing what was asked. When the spreadsheet was completed, I filed away a digital copy labeled “Pagedale Housing Audit.” When looking at this document years later, I was dismayed to discover that I had assisted in carrying out the very practices I describe in chapter 2. The homes on the list were described as vacant, and the student was asked to perform a physical audit of each property and make recommendations concerning whether it should be demolished for a vacant lot, demolished and rebuilt as a Beyond Housing project, rehabbed as a Beyond Housing project, or remain as it was. The results of the audit showed that more than twenty of the properties listed as vacant had families living in them. The student color-coded the spreadsheet, making notes regarding the requested classifications. After rediscovering this document, I went back to look at the ownership history of the ninety properties and found that only eight of them were still in the same ownership as in 2008. Since 2008, Pagedale had taken over eighteen, Beyond Housing had been deeded six, and the St. Louis County land trust had gained control of two. Many of the remaining properties had been foreclosed on by lenders and sold at auction.

Narratives, as discussed at length in the preceding chapter, are important for justifying city practices, for carrying out development efforts, and for securing funding. In 2016, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which funded the HIA in Pagedale described above, awarded the Culture of Health Award to the 24:1 Community in North St. Louis County. The website for the award describes 24:1 by stating,

On a map, 24 contiguous municipalities just northwest of St. Louis resemble nothing more than a crazy quilt. And for decades, their governance and services were a patchwork, too. Each municipality—from the tiny, two-street Village of Glen Echo Park, population 160, to the neighborhood-sized City of Normandy, population 5,008—has its own government. That’s two dozen mayors and city councils and almost as many police departments in an area that spans almost 11 square miles, is home to 36,250 people, and is served by one school district.47

This is an apt description, and the website goes on to justly praise the work of Beyond Housing and the leaders across this area for consolidating resources and coming together for the purpose of improving health and wellbeing and strengthening education across the twenty-four cities that make up the Normandy Schools Collaborative (formerly NSD). The narrative depicted on the website also reveals the complexities and contradictions that arise when agendas that support families trapped in poverty potentially collide with those that promote the priorities of economic development and the funding of city budgets. The website goes on to state,

Banding together has enabled the cities to secure federal and state grants to begin widening streets, building sidewalks, and planting and trimming trees—efforts that make 24:1 safer, healthier, and more attractive for residents.

To hold themselves accountable to their communities, the mayors wrote a set of 10 best practices, including having an annual budget, an annual audit, and police coverage. In a state that has come under intense scrutiny following the death two years ago of 18-year-old Michael Brown in a police shooting in Ferguson, a suburb just outside of 24:1, they were ahead of the curve. Last year, Missouri passed a statute that put in place 12 similar standards for municipalities across the state.48

What this narrative fails to mention is that the mayors credited as “ahead of the curve,” in terms of best practices and accountability, are the same mayors who oversee cities with the highest degrees of policing for profit. The alliance also brought cities together to fight tooth and nail against state laws, including the one mentioned on the website, to regulate the percentage of city operating budgets that could be funded through predatory policing and the municipal courts. While there was a racialized outcome regarding which cities were most impacted by state laws stemming from Ferguson protests, as discussed in chapter 3, neither the white Republican lawmakers who sponsored the bills nor the Black mayors who opposed the laws were ultimately the people whose voices were underrepresented and erased through the various politics that were employed. Having used similar narratives to secure a significant amount of funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for research in and on this area, research that indeed contributed to this book, I have benefitted from similar politics of representation.

In 2018, after almost three years of litigation, residents of Pagedale won the class action lawsuit they had brought against the city in federal court. In May of 2018, the parties involved in the lawsuit agreed to a consent decree that was approved by the federal judge overseeing the case. The consent decree included dropping all pending cases where there was no good reason to proceed, eliminating several fines, fees, and laws in the municipal code that specifically punish poor residents and criminalize non-safety-related housing conditions, no longer writing citations that have no basis in municipal code, and providing residents with information regarding why they are being ticketed and how they can respond to the citation. After the consent decree was approved, Valarie Whitner, one of the lead plaintiffs in the case, was quoted in a press release from the Institute for Justice as saying, “Finally, my nightmare is over. Every morning I woke up worried that I’d get another ticket. Now I can sleep easy and get on with my life.”49 Longtime leaders of Pagedale continue to insist that they did nothing wrong, and many continue to be reelected. The consent decree makes Pagedale the second municipality in North St. Louis County to have outside oversight of its policing, administrative, and court practices, joining Ferguson, which agreed to a consent decree following the US Department of Justice report in the aftermath of Ferguson protests.

Throughout my work and research focused on Pagedale, a mix of contradictory (positive and negative) factors and outcomes emerged constantly, often simultaneously. This fact was further complicated by my personal relationships with residents, city leaders, and people from the nonprofit agency. I came to believe that city leaders and those working with Beyond Housing truly care about Pagedale and think they are doing the right thing, according to how they view the world and what is at stake. Many Pagedale residents have greatly benefitted from these efforts. Partnering with Beyond Housing and utilizing the tax increment financing structure described in chapter 3, Pagedale has gained a grocery store, a bank, a senior housing facility, a movie theater, a health clinic, and a coffee shop. This level of development in a low-income community that is not gentrifying is nonexistent elsewhere in Missouri and in most places across the country. Moreover, many Pagedale leaders have personally sacrificed much in order to dedicate their lives to public service. Black women who have served for decades overcame public slander and backlash specifically aimed at their gender and race. They did not back down to pipe bombs, car bombs, and threats to their families, and they have stood up to regional and state leaders of municipalities and agencies that have poached resources out of their cities and that they perceive as threats to their city and to local autonomy.

In spite of the many positive changes in recent years, the practices carried out by leaders in Pagedale devastate many residents, especially those who are the most economically vulnerable, and leaders have maintained this trajectory for a very long time. The fact that many contradictions exist at once and together is difficult to come to terms with personally and even more difficult analytically, but it speaks to what Avery Gordon, drawing on Patricia Williams, has simply stated: “Life is complicated.” She goes on, “that life is complicated is a theoretical statement that guides efforts to treat race, class, and gender dynamics and consciousness as more dense and delicate than those categorical terms often imply.” Gordon also reminds us that “all people possess a “complex personhood,... all people remember and forget, are beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others.”50 The same people who do much good can, and do, bring about much harm. This applies to all people, including those who are preyed upon by municipal officials and also have the capacity to act against their own self-interest and against each other. “Even those who live in the most dire circumstances possess a complex and often times contradictory humanity and subjectivity that is never adequately glimpsed by viewing them as victims or, on the other hand, as superhuman agents.”51 That life is complicated “is a theoretical statement that might guide a critique of privately purchased rights, of various forms of blindness and sanctioned denial; that might guide an attempt to drive a wedge into lives and visions of freedom ruled by the nexus of market exchange.”52 Wrestling with how to guide a critique of such things is where research gets messy, and it is where I have struggled not only to make sense of my findings but also, more importantly, to know when something is indeed “found” and how much it counts. In many ways this book reflects the contradictions that arise from the fact that people and places are messy and life is complicated.

The disparate politics of (now) older Black women who have been in leadership in North St. Louis County for more than thirty years and the young women and gender-nonconforming protesters who emerged after the death of Michael Brown illustrate the messy and often contrasting facets of gendered, generational, and sexual identity and the power of discourse and cultural politics in determining regimes of truth. The “truths” put forward by the municipal leaders, who fought long and hard to gain and maintain positions of power, are very different from the “truths” of the young women and gender-nonconforming individuals leading resistance in North St. Louis County; however, the fact that these groups have all suffered the violence of illegibility brought about by their existence as Black women, or nonconforming Black people, is abundantly clear. As Brittany Cooper points out, laying claim to a public space from which to speak and be heard was a critical step for early Black women activists and intellectuals, and “respectability” provided such a space.53 Cooper also points out that the Black women activists and intellectuals who were historically categorized as matriarchs of respectability politics pushed the limits placed on Black feminized bodies at critical junctures through intentional as well as embodied practices. Pagedale leaders in the 1970s and 1980s did indeed push the limits placed on their bodies at a critical time in Black political enfranchisement. Cooper brings an important dimension to other studies of Black women and respectability politics that developed during and after Black rural migration to cities like St. Louis after Reconstruction. She does so by contextualizing how “acceptable” public spaces and public personas were essential to visibility.54 This visibility was crucial for the success of the first Black women elected to office in US cities like Pagedale. However, just as subjectification, subjectivity, and identity played out in complex and nuanced ways for Black women and gender-nonconforming people throughout history, a cultural politics rooted in tropes of respectability is both claimed and rejected by Black women in leadership positions as well as residents across North St. Louis County, often simultaneously. Black women leaders expressed over and over in this research that many of their actions stem from pushing back against the limitations placed not only on their own identities—as Black and female—but also against the representations of the places they have been elected to lead. This is a driving motivation behind their actions—to be perceived as worthy suburban communities by the larger region.

For multiple reasons explored in the next section, the space of death where Michael Brown’s body lay did in fact open up spaces of visibility—a visibility of the realities of everyday life and death in this place—which is very different from the visibility sought by Black women in leadership in Pagedale. The Black queered ethics that protesters advance, particularly those identifying as women and queer, pushes beyond a demand for recognition and refuses to simply work within existing structures of governance—it requires an imagining beyond that which already is. The collective imagination, as argued in chapter 4, is a powerful thing, as is taking control of one’s own narrative. As the young women who led protests in Ferguson pointed out in various ways, the emphasis placed on respectability politics by Black men and women throughout the post-Reconstruction era, during the 1960s and 1970s civil rights struggles, by Black women in cities across North St. Louis County, and even by those occupying the space of protest in Ferguson, did and does not result in the social, political, and spatial equity promised by the liberal state. According to one young woman I interviewed, the mistakes that Black women assuming leadership roles in the 1970s and 1980s made did not stem from their desire for visibility, or their tenacious insistence on being heard, or holding power, or a lack of care. Rather, these missteps stem from working within the system they inherited—a system they did not create and a system designed to equate blackness with risk. She explains,

When we were protesting Kimberlee King’s death in the Pagedale jail55 I heard about all these things that were going on there and what people were saying about how the city was looking for all kinds of ways to put people in jail. Then later you told me about how Pagedale was the first city in America that had all Black female leadership and I was like “damn,” I would never have known that because nobody ever talks about that. I want to be like proud of that fact but then you see how the leadership is still all Black women and you see what’s happening there. They thought they could just move on out to the suburbs when the laws said they could and that would make them just like anybody else who lived there. When that didn’t work out, when white people left because their daughter might date a Black guy, they thought they could get respect by making everybody else respectable and then I guess they thought, “Well I guess if we can’t get respect we may as well make money.”

We’re showing that Black women will never be respected so stop living as if you’re going to get that. Black women need to stop living how they’re told and ask themselves who they really are. Living outside of what you’re told is protest. Clearly being the first all-Black women leadership in Pagedale didn’t liberate women in Pagedale. But that’s not the fault of the Black women—who they are—it’s because they tried to do it in the structure that was already there.56

It is clear to residents of Pagedale, regardless of whether or not they support municipal leadership, that this system, which exploits and produces blackness-as-risk, is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do.