foxtales

This is the third part of an unpublished essay on African American history in St. Louis that I wrote in the late 1990s. The final part will be published on The Write Fox Blog soon.

As even more African Americans moved to St. Louis in the early twentieth century, they quickly learned that they could only live in certain areas, separate from whites.

Significantly, these geographic boundaries would not increase in proportion to the swelling numbers, so overcrowding and poor conditions became a fact of life. Blacks in the early twentieth century congregated near the riverfront, in the older parts of downtown, and between Union Station and Grand Avenue.

The congested black neighborhoods outside of Union Station were particularly vexing to the white community in the years leading up to the 1904 World’s Fair. “The proposition to condemn the unsightly first view, as strangers immerge [sic] from Union Station, should be all means carry,” the World’s Fair Bulletin wrote in 1901, imagining the poor first impression the city would present to its guests. “The ugly catch penny buildings that have sprung up around the Depot are like weeds around a flower bed and only municipal action will ever eradicate them.”

St. Louis would have to wait several more decades to thoroughly clean up its municipal “flower bed”; meanwhile, informal segregation ruled the day. The city could not legally prevent blacks and whites from living together—a 1916 housing segregation ordinance became a “dead letter” after a similar ordinance in Kentucky was ruled unconstitutional—but it didn’t need to. Restrictive covenants, private places, and custom did the job.

Ironically, housing segregation played an important role in the formation of St. Louis’s most famous African American community, the middle-class community known as the Ville. Bounded roughly by Taylor, St. Louis Avenue, Sarah, and Easton (Martin Luther King Drive), the Ville was open to African American settlement. As a result, the percentage of blacks living in the neighborhood increased from 8 to 95 percent over a thirty-year period, 1920–50.

However, the twentieth-century growth of the Ville does not indicate that class distinctions among the African American community were a new phenomenon. Judith Gilbert has described the many eighteenth-century “free women of color” in St. Louis who amassed property through marriage, then proceeded to manage their sizable holdings well. “For them,” Gilbert writes, “property ownership represented security: a home that could not be taken away, a stable environment for their children, a base of operations for various kinds of work, an opportunity to supplement their income with boarders, a capital asset that lenders would accept as collateral.”

In the nineteenth-century, Pelagie Aillotte Rutgers was among the dozens of wealthy free blacks listed in Cyprian Clamorgan’s Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. Published in 1858, it testified to the many African Americans in St. Louis who inherited property, then used their holdings to generate greater wealth. St. Louis’s African American community, just like African American communities across the nation, have long been more varied and complex than has been acknowledged.

A chronic shortage of funds had prevented the cleanup of the area in time for the world’s fair, but Progressive reformers knew that beautifying the city would have to happen eventually, world’s fair or not. Unfortunately, clearing the area in front of Union Station would displace the thousands of people—mostly poor and black—who lived there. A group called the United Welfare Association (UWA) eagerly exploited this fact, playing on white fears of a displaced black lower class fleeing to white enclaves. Meanwhile, in 1913, the City Plan Commission drew up plans for a “Central Traffic Parkway” on Market Street between Twelfth and Jefferson.

“When work on the parkway is commenced,” UWA president Wayne Wheeler wrote in a letter to potential supporters, “some 15000 negroes who now live in that district will be forced to find other quarters, and some of them may move next door to you.” The work of the UWA, combined with controversy over city charter reform, led to the failure of the Central Parkway plan at the hands of St. Louis voters.

Significantly, the parkway did not fail at the hands of all St. Louis voters—in the Seventeenth Ward, whose population was 25 percent black, the proposal passed. The city’s black press boasted that this proved the city’s African Americans supported the city’s future, setting the black community in line with the city’s Progressive element and against the regressive UWA. The election also proved that the city’s growing and enfranchised black community was a political force to be reckoned with.

Throughout the 1920s, St. Louis’s African Americans became more politically aware and active, thanks in part to the presence of two black newspapers, the American and the Argus. In the wake of the Great Depression, black political allegiances shifted from the Republicans to the Democrats, affecting local as well as national politics. “We had 24 years of promises from the Republicans,” the Negro Division of Democratic Campaign Headquarters declared in a pamphlet. “We Got 4 Years Of Action!! From the Dickmann Administration.” “Vote Democratic April 6!” the pamphlet urged, calling for the reelection of Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann. The remainder of the pamphlet praised Dickmann’s many African American political appointments, his support of Homer G. Phillips Hospital in the Ville, and his plans for the Tandy Community Center. The African American community was beginning to realize its power to effect change, and the white community knew it.

The gulf between white and black St. Louis is deep and strong. It has been at times violent, of course, but more often it has been very subtle. A furtive glance in a department store, a tone of voice, a silently closed door—racism in St. Louis frequently took the form of slurs felt but not spoken, sensed but not sensational. Even dramatic events, such as the clearing of the black “slum” district known as the Mill Creek Valley that began in 1959, carefully concealed their racist overtones and implications.

This is the second part of an unpublished essay on African American history in St. Louis that I wrote in the late 1990s. The third part will be published on The Write Fox Blog soon.

When Auguste Chouteau began building St. Louis in 1764 under orders from Pierre Laclède, the new town was part of French colonial Missouri. As such, it was subject to the Code Noir (Black Code), issued by King Louis XIV in 1685.

Under the Code, enslaved blacks were considered property, but they also enjoyed protection from unwarranted cruelty and disruption of their families. As historians Lorenzo J. Greene, Gary R. Kremer, and Antonio F. Holland point out in Missouri’s Black Heritage, these protections were more de jure than de facto under both French and Spanish colonial rule—“Ultimately,” they write, “the masters wielded the real power over how their slaves would be treated.”

As Spain began to exert more power over the colony of St. Louis, the everyday lives of slaves came under more rigid control. For example, on August 12, 1781, Spanish lieutenant governor Don Francisco Cruzat laid down the law concerning the “unruly conduct” of St. Louis slaves. Cruzat’s order forbade slaves from holding “any assembly at night, in the cabins or elsewhere,” under penalty of “fifty blows from the lash . . . [or] a more severe punishment according to the result of said assemblies.” Furthermore, Cruzat declared, slaves were not to dance, go out at night without their masters’ permission, or “receive in their cabins other slaves, except those who belong to their own masters.”

Three days later, he issued another order that forbade “negroes who belong to this post” from dressing “in barbarous fashion, adorning themselves with vermilion and many feathers, which render them unrecognizable, especially in the woods.” Though his rationale for this last order was to prevent blacks and “savages” from being accidentally shot, the law indicated that Spain was seeking more control over the colony and its black inhabitants, both free and slave.

African Americans had several avenues to freedom during the colonial period, but few of them involved personal choice. For example, slaves sometimes won freedom through their masters’ wills. This arrangement guaranteed the master a slave’s loyalty in life while it cost the slaveowner nothing in death. Black or mulatto mistresses of slaveholders might also be granted freedom, which could then extend to children of the union. However a black person attained freedom, he or she remained a threat to the institution of slavery and to the new colony’s power structure. The threat only grew as more settlers moved to the state, increasing the need for an efficient, controlled slave labor force.

By 1810, the Missouri Territory counted 607 free blacks and 3,011 slaves; when Missouri became a state in 1821, its slave population had increased to 9,797, while only 376 blacks were free. Of course, these figures should be considered in context. In the early nineteenth century, Missouri’s statehood became a bargaining chip in the war of words between antislavery Northerners and proslavery Southerners. Under the 1820 “Missouri Compromise” negotiated by Speaker of the House Henry Clay, Missouri was to be admitted to the Union as a “slave state,” and Maine would be admitted as a “free state,” thus maintaining the balance between free and slave states. The compromise also prohibited slavery north of a line extended westward from Missouri’s southern border through the Louisiana Purchase territory. Thirty-six years later, the Supreme Court would declare the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional in its Dred Scott vs. Sanford ruling.

In the meantime, David Barton, a conservative St. Louisan, led the group of lawyers, merchants, and gentleman farmers that drafted the state’s proposed constitution. Thirty-three of the forty-one delegates had been born in slave states, and their influence showed: the draft they presented to Congress not only limited the state legislature’s control over what slaveholders did with their slaves, but also enabled legislation that would forbid free blacks from entering the state. When Congress balked at limiting citizens’ movements across state lines, Clay drew up another compromise. Missouri’s constitution would stand as written, except for the provision that kept free blacks out of Missouri.

By 1860, Missouri’s African American population had swollen to 114,931 slaves and 3,572 free blacks. Such numbers seem staggering, but slavery was relatively uncommon in Missouri when compared to other slave states, and it was downright rare in St. Louis, where only 3 percent of the state’s slave population lived. The city, however, was not free of slavery or its side effects.

First, because many of the slaves who entered Missouri came through St. Louis, the city played a role in the slave trade, even if it didn’t rely on slave labor as much as rural parts of the state did. Second, even though large numbers of antislavery German immigrants in the 1850s had made St. Louis a Union stronghold, “antislavery” did not necessarily mean “pro-equality.” Finally, “3 percent of the state’s slave population” represents 3,447 slaves in the city. In other words, there were more slaves working in St. Louis 140 years ago than there are people living in the municipality of Frontenac today.

What would life have been like for a slave in St. Louis? After being bought at auction on the Old Court House steps or a slave pen on Fourth Street, a St. Louis slave could expect to be put to work in virtually any type of position, from the rough-and-tumble levee to the genteel mansions in the city’s West End.

Generally, slaves in St. Louis are thought to have led a better life than slaves in rural areas, especially in the Deep South, but some former slaves have taken issue with that perception. William Wells Brown, for example, who worked as a slave in both Kentucky and St. Louis, writes: “Though slavery is thought, by some, to be mild in Missouri, when compared with the cotton, sugar and rice growing States, yet no part of our slaveholding country, is more noted for the barbarity of its inhabitants, than St. Louis.” The description of atrocities Brown witnessed while being “hired out” in St. Louis gives credence to his claim, though geography alone could save few slaves from beatings, rape, torture, family disruption, or humiliation at some point during their service.

Of course, in the nineteenth century as in the eighteenth, slavery was not a part of the life of every African American in the city. As Katharine Corbett writes in her 1983 Gateway Heritage article “Missouri’s Black History: From Colonial Times to 1970,” “The city of St. Louis had more free blacks than any county in the state of Missouri,” and those African Americans continued to enjoy the right to own property—including other slaves.

Like their enslaved counterparts, free blacks played key roles in building the city, but they could rarely escape the fact that they or their ancestors had once been enslaved. Many of the injustices, both major and minor, serve as reminders of this legacy. Slavery played a central role in establishing the black person’s lower status in society, and justifying behaviors and restrictions based on that status.

The reality that slavery would always be a part of life for blacks, even free blacks, became more painfully clear after the Missouri General Assembly freed the state’s slaves on January 11, 1865. African Americans streamed to the cities to find out what freedom would bring. Between 1860 and 1870, St. Louis’ black population increased by a factor of six. Statewide, by 1890, almost half of the black population lived in cities, a figure that jumped to 55 percent just ten years later. However, growing numbers of blacks and legalized freedom did not guarantee equal access in important areas such as education, housing, or health.

In Missouri, for example, the legislature ordered separate schools for African American children in 1889; sixty-five years would pass before Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren’s declaration that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Meanwhile, faced with the prospect of inadequate facilities, African Americans such as James Milton Turner worked to improve educational opportunities.

Turner, secretary of the Missouri Equal Rights League in St. Louis, worked for better education and the right to vote statewide, while in the city itself, parents of African American children successfully campaigned for a black high school. The result, Sumner High School (originally known as the High School for Colored Children), opened on Eleventh Street in 1875. The first African American high school west of the Mississippi, it stood as a monument to the persistence and foresight of the city’s burgeoning African American community.

Nancy Kranzberg was one of the first non-work-related St. Louisans I met after I moved to town.

The Missouri Historical Society was looking for ways to promote its first Holiday Book Fair. My boss, Lee Sandweiss, suggested we get on Nancy’s arts show on community radio station KDHX.

I would be the spokesperson.

I had never done radio before. Or TV. Or even a newspaper interview. Needless to say, I was nervous.

That ended as soon as I stepped into the studio with Nancy.

I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I imagine it went something like this:

“Now you just sit in that chair, baby doll, and I’ll ask you about why you’re here, and you tell me, and I’ll ask you something else, and you tell me about that, and we’ll just talk, OK? And don’t worry if you screw up, because it’s all on tape and we have people who can fix that. They do it all the time. And believe me, if they can fix me, they can fix anyone!”

Then she laughed. Of that, I am sure.

It was 1994. Over the next 20-plus years, there would be lunches with Nancy, St. Louis Art Museum shindigs (as she would say) with Nancy, even a baby shower for Maggie at Nancy’s house, with all my historical society colleagues and my family.

For the shower, she brought in an a cappella group. It was the happiest I’ve ever seen my mom, and my mom always looked happy.

Nancy and I sat down for lunch in the art museum’s restaurant last week.

“Oh, honey child, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do, so tell me what you want to know!” she said.

Nancy still does her show on KDHX, but she has added a monthly radio show on St. Louis Public Radio station KWMU. It allows her to do what she does best–tell stories that connect St. Louis to the national and international arts scene.

No one is better qualified than Nancy. She and her husband, Ken, are the biggest “cheerleaders for the arts” St. Louis has.

There’s the Kranzberg Arts Center in Grand Center. The Kenneth and Nancy Kranzberg Art & Architecture Library at Washington University (she is a Washington University alumna, Class of ’66). The Nancy Spirtas Kranzberg Studio for the Illustrated Book, also at Washington University. Even Nancy’s Jazz Lounge in Jazz at the Bistro.

Then come the boards she has served, more than half a dozen of them, from the art museum to Laumeier Sculpture Park to the Sheldon Arts Foundation. Oh, and the awards! The St. Louis Visionary Award, 2015 Woman of Achievement for Cultural Enrichment, the Distinguished Alumnae Award at Washington University . . .

“Just Google me to find all that stuff,” she said.

Recently, the couple announced that their Kranzberg Arts Foundation will develop Grand Center’s 1919-era Cadillac Building on Locust Street as a performing arts center. The move is in line not only with their love of historic architecture, but also with their newest passion: live theater.

“There must be about 25 professional theater companies in St. Louis, plus all the wonderful community theater programs,” Nancy told me. “St. Louis is culturally the richest city per capita in the country.”

Several local theaters now bear the names of the Kranzbergs’ grandchildren. One of them, the Marcelle, is home to New Line Theatre. Through June 25, New Line is presenting Atomic, a rock musical about the Manhattan Project.

“The play gets into the moral issues of developing the atomic bomb,” she said. “You wouldn’t think that would work as a musical, but it does. Tell you what–would you and Ellen like to go? I’ll get you on the guest list. Which works best, Friday night or Saturday night?”

Walking back to my car, I had an overwhelming feeling–for the first time in the week since Orlando–that anything is possible, that people are fundamentally good, and that everything will one day be OK.

I can’t think of a better reason to support the arts than that.