For all of Jorell’s troubles in his final months, he had one bright spot in his life: he was in love.
His girlfriend, Danielle, was a junior at McCluer, one year younger than he. She was soft-spoken and super sweet, a pale, red-haired girl with a chin piercing, who was also raised in poverty. She’d come to my surprise party in May 2015, and I’d chat with her when I visited Jorell. We stayed in touch after his death, though she didn’t want to be interviewed for my investigation. I suspect she feared retaliation.
In his final year, they were eager to share their love with the world. One of their Facebook photos was framed by emojis blowing kisses. In another picture, her pastel-green nails match her jacket, and he looks sharp in a hoodie and designer jeans. They’re hugging so tightly it’s like they’re holding on for dear life.
Jorell was proud of this relationship. He’d officially graduated from being the short, broke, runt on the block to manhood, and had the beautiful girlfriend to prove it. They would have spent every moment together, but she lived more than a mile and a half away, in the nearby municipality of Berkeley, and he had no driver’s license. Though he sometimes convinced family members to lend him their vehicles, he often found himself making the long slog on foot.
To get to her house he would cut through Kinloch—the same shortcut he took the day he was killed. In an effort to understand what this route was like, I traced it one autumn afternoon, leaving the Cleveland family’s Ferguson house and going north along Oak Avenue. I passed cars and trucks parked up on the curb, and the occasional passing bus. I kept going past an urban farm and turned left at a church.
From there it got quiet. I continued down blocks of declining property value into Kinloch, where the quality of the road deteriorated and the grass was no longer mowed.
Much of the landscape smells fresh and undisturbed in Kinloch, like you’re in the woods. Vines wrap around tree trunks. Birds sing. Though Kinloch was a bustling place until fairly recently, it’s now turning back into what it was in the nineteenth century—the country.
The town was named for a horse farm owned by James Lucas Turner, a Virginia-born West Point alum who, following the Civil War, was briefly jailed for his Southern sympathies. He brought his farm to the area around 1883 and, when he died of typhoid five years later, the land was sold off for residential development. City residents were lured by clean water and a rail line that had been established from downtown St. Louis, twelve miles to the southeast. Kinloch’s airfield made international news in 1910 when Teddy Roosevelt, recently out of office, became the first president to fly in an airplane, a three-minute flight on one of those boxy contraptions with bicycle wheels. That same year, a man who was believed to be the country’s only African American pilot at the time, J. Arthur Headon, gave a flight exhibition. The airfield also hosted the country’s first control tower, its first parachute jump, and its first animal—a cow—to be airlifted by plane.
By the early twentieth century Kinloch was a quickly developing suburb, with white commuters bringing their Black servants with them. Some Black people had already moved to the area; historians believe Kinloch may have been a pre–Civil War Underground Railroad site, where escaped enslaved people built farms. During the Great Migration it became a refuge for African Americans fleeing persecution in the South. Others arrived as a result of the East St. Louis massacre of 1917, which included lynchings and the burning of Black homes while residents were still inside. Plots of land in Kinloch were sold to both races, although in some cases African Americans were charged twice the price. Despite these obstacles, dozens of Black families moved into the southeast section of Kinloch, and before long the area’s population included more Black people than whites. This majority elected an African American school board member for the first time in Missouri history.
This was too much for Kinloch’s whites, who in 1937 broke away and incorporated the northern part of Kinloch as an independent city—Berkeley. There, they could have their own school district, one entirely free of Black people. Yet once again, Kinloch persevered. It opened its own high school, saving students the hour and a half commute to the only other Black high school in the county. Kinloch elected Missouri’s first Black school superintendent, and, in 1948, became the state’s first municipality to be incorporated by African Americans.
It went on to become the largest all-Black city in the country, and completely self-sustaining. Kinloch had its own grocery stores, appliance store, drug store, YMCA, and library, as well as a chapter of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. You could even see good live music; B. B. King once played a club in town, called 12 Oaks. The town’s population peaked in 1960, with about 6,500 residents.
Actress Jenifer Lewis’s hundreds of television, movie, and theater roles have included Anthony Anderson’s straight-talking mother on Black-ish, Will Smith’s Aunt Helen in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Tupac’s mother in Poetic Justice. She is among Kinloch’s most famous alums, and she discusses her childhood in her memoir The Mother of Black Hollywood :
The Kinloch of my childhood consisted of little wood houses, some not more than shacks, outhouses, and rocky roads. Most residents were so damn poor they couldn’t afford to go to the doctor unless they were damn near dead. It seemed that people were always dying just walking down the street or coming out of the Threaded Needle, the only legal bar in town (there were many underground juke joints that sold moonshine).
When Lewis was a toddler, she, her mother, and her six siblings were forced to take refuge in a windowless room in the basement of an abandoned Baptist church to avoid homelessness. Even when they found permanent housing they still had to use an outhouse—or, if it was too cold, a bucket. Growing up, she would sneak out to see movies in Ferguson, despite warnings that it wasn’t safe for Black folk. But not everything about her childhood was bad.
The people in authority came from our community and were part of our culture.… When Mama was really struggling and our refrigerator was empty, I could stop by the house of any of my play mamas: Miss Barnes, Miss Clark, or Miss Benson. When I got real lucky, someone had made a tub of greens or cornbread in a skillet or a pot of neck bones.
As a young girl she held one-woman talent shows in the Catholic school basement. She posted handmade signs all over town for these Saturday night performances, for which she charged thirty-five cents, performing songs by Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight. “The talent shows became so popular,” Lewis writes, “folks would barbecue outside in the parking lot and sell rib tip sandwiches, pigs’ feet, and hot dogs, with orange and cream sodas. It was the Saturday night event in Kinloch.”
Just as they are today, protests against law enforcement were common in the Kinloch of Lewis’s childhood. In 1962, hundreds protested and rioted for days following the killing of a teenager by a Kinloch police officer. (Both were Black.) It’s unclear exactly what happened; officer Israel Mason was apparently trying to serve nineteen-year-old Darnell Dortch with a traffic court summons following a drag race. Mason contended the young man wrestled for his pistol, which then discharged by accident, though others said Mason pulled the youth from his car and fired on him. Mason doesn’t appear to have been criminally charged.
In the aftermath three policemen were shot and fires were set around town, including at the home of Kinloch’s police chief. St. Louis County police reinforcements patrolled the streets with machine guns, and they rounded up people they thought had set the fires.
Neighboring Ferguson, meanwhile, had developed into a mostly white bedroom community. Some residents chafed at the all-Black city next door, and around the 1960s Ferguson installed a barricade on a main thoroughfare, Suburban Avenue, which blocked traffic between the two towns. These types of roadblocks can be found all over the St. Louis region. In the city, giant concrete planters filled with dirt and scraggly plants block traffic at many intersections. They’re known as Schoemehl pots, after Vince Schoemehl, a three-term mayor of St. Louis from the early 1980s to the early ’90s. Though they were imagined as crime deterrents and intended to slow traffic, many believe they have racist intent. A Saint Louis University study showed they don’t actually reduce crime.
Following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968, Kinloch citizens marched to the site of the barricade with Ferguson and demanded it be removed. Ferguson leaders complied, though another version of the roadblock sprang back up. In 1975 a Ferguson city councilman proposed erecting a ten-foot fence running for thousands of feet along the border with Kinloch. The measure failed, and Ferguson’s mayor permanently opened up Suburban Avenue. Today, cars can pass freely, and the Ferguson side of Suburban Avenue has been improved by attractive medians with manicured shrubs and flowers. At the Kinloch border, however, the quality of the road diminishes.
For Jenifer Lewis, show business called. She departed for New York City following her graduation from St. Louis’s Webster University in 1979. She didn’t know it at the time, but Kinloch would never be the same.
The construction of I-170—which cut right through Kinloch—had already displaced many. But the death knell rang in the 1980s, when TWA moved its hub to St. Louis and the airport began expansion plans. It bought up more than a thousand properties in Kinloch as part of a noise abatement program. Kinloch drew up an elaborate relocation and renovation plan, but most of it was never realized, and pretty much anyone who could afford to leave town, did.
Meanwhile the airport’s plans fizzled. American Airlines’ acquisition of TWA in 2001 was followed shortly by 9/11, and local air traffic withered. No expansion was needed after all.
This doomed program, combined with the easing of racist housing restrictions around the region, led to Kinloch’s unraveling. “We got what we wanted, which was the freedom and the ability to go places and buy homes,” said former Kinloch resident Dorothy Squires in the documentary Where the Pavement Ends, “but we lost what we had.”
Tax revenue declined and public facilities fell into disrepair. Rent-paying residents were replaced by squatters, whom corrupt politicians began bribing for their votes. In the early 2000s, St. Louis County Executive Buzz Westfall asked Kinloch’s mayor to consider disincorporating, but he refused. Ten years later the town sued a different mayor for buying a house with city funds. Her replacement was charged with spending money stolen from the volunteer fire department on liquor, cigarettes, and a family member’s funeral. City Hall was sold to a man who had once been convicted of cocaine dealing.
In 2015 I profiled Kinloch for Vice. I saw vagrants burning fires in shells of homes, and I photographed a hand-painted cement wall, trumpeting town accomplishments like “First Black-Owned Theater” and “First Black School District,” that had become overgrown with weeds. Kinloch had a postapocalyptic beauty, with trees growing inside abandoned apartment complexes and whole blocks gone back to nature.
But just getting around was a challenge. The city’s Google Maps grid included many unnamed and grayed-out thoroughfares, making navigation difficult, and some roads had dining room table–sized potholes. People from all over the county came to Kinloch to dump trash. Giant heaps of it have been known to obstruct emergency vehicles. Sometimes bodies were even dumped there, such as a murder victim named Darrius Marks in 2017.
My Vice story was published not long after Michael Brown’s killing, when news reports were portraying Ferguson as a racist police state. But locals at a Kinloch salvage yard—one of the town’s only remaining consumer businesses—told me Kinloch was worse. “They’re crazy-ass motherfuckers,” a former Kinloch resident named Gene Lee said of the cops, adding he’d been unjustly arrested the previous evening for allegedly depositing trash.
“They lock you up and tow your car for running a stop sign,” said Lee’s friend CJ Jones. “Kinloch stopped me more times than Ferguson. Once you get to Ferguson, it’s smooth sailing! Ferguson, they have to see you doing something wrong. Here, you just have to come through.”
It seemed strange that a place as small as Kinloch—with a population below three hundred—needed its own police force at all. Its three police cars were uninsured around the time of my article (making them illegal to drive), and when a TV news reporter tried to report on this in 2016, he was handcuffed and shackled to a holding bench. Meanwhile Kinloch’s violent crime rate was much worse than Ferguson’s, reaching almost three incidents per one hundred people by the mid-2010s, four times the rate in St. Louis—which was, and is, the most dangerous big city in the country.
Today Kinloch’s unemployment rate is a staggering 55 percent. Of the eighty-eight municipalities that comprise St. Louis County, Kinloch is probably the poorest. The town’s violence and ubiquitous drug dealing have driven almost all the residents away.
Still, those whose families called it home for generations retain nostalgia for the city and its history. “Take the name Kinloch and stop with the first three letters: Kin,” Gene Lee told me. “We all kin, or close to it.”
“We don’t say we’re from St. Louis, we say we’re from Kinloch,” said Justine Blue, the Kinloch city manager. “We’re all proud to be from here. We’re not proud of what’s happening, but we are proud to be from here.”