As the history of Black St. Louis disappeared into the dust, a new white world was built to the west—suburbs connected to the city and the world by roads that were quite literally built over the ruins of the old world. The decade after 1950 was the first in which the population of the city of St. Louis fell (from its high-water mark near 850,000), and it has continued to decline in every subsequent decade. Much of the city’s population loss was attributable to a one-to-one gain in the white population of the county, which had begun to explode in the 1940s as rural Missourians moved to the metro area to take up wartime jobs in the plants. In 1940, the population of almost entirely white St. Louis County was about 250,000; by 1960, it was over 700,000. Whites were moving out of the city and to the county on Bartholomew’s federally subsidized highways, taking with them their wealth and the potential tax revenue they provided. And because of the hard boundary established between city and county in 1876, there was no way for the city to follow them by expanding its limits to capture their taxes.
During the war, St. Louis had solidified its position in the defense and aerospace industries. Many of the residents of the county as well as some of those who lived in the city were among the thirty-five thousand who worked at McDonnell Aircraft (later McDonnell-Douglas), the nation’s second-largest defense contractor and the world’s largest producer of fighter planes through much of the Cold War. “There will be a demand for military aircraft so long as the necessity exists for the United States to police a disorderly world,” said the company’s chairman, James McDonnell, forging a link between what he saw as his company’s boundless future and his city’s imperial past. F-4 Phantoms, F-15s, and components of AWACs, Spartan missiles, and ABM missiles were all produced in St. Louis, and the planes were sold around the world (to Germany, Japan, South Korea, Greece, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel), as was McDonnell’s DC-9, its most visible and least reliable civilian aircraft. Monsanto, headquartered in Creve Coeur, emerged as the world’s largest chemical company in these years, producing, one after the other, some of the most notorious products in human history: DDT, Agent Orange, and Roundup, the herbicide whose effects are only now coming to light. In the 1950s, the CEOs of Monsanto, Mallinckrodt, Ralston-Purina, and McDonnell-Douglas all served together on the board of trustees of Washington University—a tidy representation of the network of shared purpose that one historian has called “the military-industrial-academic complex.”26
In 1965, when the television journalist Charles Kuralt went on the road in search of Cold War America, he found it in Webster Groves, Missouri. “Just below St. Louis, but above-average in every way,” he put it with wry disapproval. Kuralt and his crew spent several days at the high school, where they administered a thirty-seven-page survey to the school’s seven hundred or so sixteen-year-olds. The children of Webster Groves, Kuralt discovered, were greatly interested in getting good grades and achieving material success, but not much else. Only 13 percent of them were worried about being drafted (about the same number that were not planning to attend a four-year college, Kuralt pointed out); only 20 percent knew who North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh was, a sad contrast to the 99 percent who could identify the actor Dick Van Dyke; and 93 percent worried habitually about their appearance, almost twice as many as the number of those who worried about the threat of nuclear war. From Mrs. Condon’s Dance School to the Friendship Dance at the high school to golf at the country club and highballs at the Monday Club, from going steady to getting pinned, then engaged and married, and then moving from one house in Webster Groves to another house in Webster Groves—the lives of these suburban teens were shaped around a single categorical imperative: the social reproduction of Webster Groves. Get good grades to go to a good school to get a good job to have a good family and have children who get good grades… In the words of one almost animatronic teen explaining his goals: “I’d like to be financially a success, support my family handsomely, have two cars, have a two-story house, and have a high-status with my friends.” Insular. Conventional. Self-satisfied. Mediocre. “Sixteen in Webster Groves” Kuralt entitled his documentary.27
Kuralt was not the first to set out in search of America and end up in Webster Groves. In the mid-1950s, the Washington University anthropologist Jules Henry did research there as well, for the book that eventually became Culture Against Man. Henry found in Webster Groves an empty cavity at the heart of the American Dream. The community’s values were expressed by “pecuniary philosophy, pecuniary history, pecuniary psychology, and pecuniary truth,” which sentenced its children to the loneliness, shallowness, and materialism of foreshortened dreams. Henry’s book, an early example of anthropologists’ “studying up,” was widely reviewed and fulsomely praised as an intellectual’s guide to the suburbs. Kuralt’s nationally televised beatdown three years later was the occasion for an extended national self-reckoning with “the America we are becoming.” In the 1960s, Webster Groves, Missouri, was arguably the most famous suburb in the United States.28
Its residents bitterly resented Webster Groves being made into the archetype of the soulless suburb by Kuralt and CBS, both at the time and ever since. After the national television debut of the award-winning documentary, they demanded that Kuralt return to Webster Groves and make another documentary, this time portraying their frustration with the first documentary. The anchor on St. Louis’s most popular morning television show even suggested, as was the style in the city in those days, that Kuralt’s documentary had been part of a communist plot to undermine America. But the damage was done. Webster Groves had become a byword for suburban shallowness and materialism.29
In 1965, when Kuralt visited Webster Groves, the city was 96 percent white and fighting to stay that way. For Jules Henry, who was obsessed with advertising, the whiteness of Webster was apparently beside the point. Kuralt was more pointed. In spite of the incessant substitution of the word “community” for the words “white people” in the interviews—“nice community,” “good community,” “our community”—Kuralt did manage to break through several times. Having asked one of the stars of the football team whether he would go on a double date with his Black teammate, one of the very few Blacks in the school, he was told that the white boy’s father would never let him, nor would he want to himself, though he couldn’t quite say why. Asked by Kuralt whether he had ever been downtown, another boy, who stands out in the context of the film as comparatively worldly and curious, says that when he went downtown for an internship, he saw “people I’d never seen before in my life. They were from the slums… they were mentally retarded.… They have all these depressing problems.” After asking a group of parents whether they would let their children participate in a civil rights demonstration, Kuralt was told by the fathers both that any child who did so “would not be able to sit down” for a week after getting punished upon returning home and that sixteen-year-olds in Webster Groves were not competent to make decisions about political matters because they “can’t even change their diapers.” The proximate images of butt-punishing and bowel movement would probably have delighted the Freudian Henry, but they were deployed to more straightforward purpose by Kuralt in “Sixteen in Webster Groves.” His documentary revealed that the city of St. Louis, only two miles away on the map, was both unimaginable to the people of Webster Groves, and at the bottom of everything.
The insularity of Webster Groves was no accident. It was the deliberately engineered result of US government policy and municipal law: federally subsidized and locally enforced whiteness. In the years after the Second World War, and in a pattern that reflected developments nationwide, thousands, then tens of thousands, then literally hundreds of thousands of whites left behind the city of St. Louis for St. Louis County, as well as St. Charles and Franklin Counties. In so doing, they left behind houses that were soon filled by Blacks, some of them displaced by the destruction of Mill Creek Valley and the construction of the interstates, whose unwanted proximity touched off still other waves of white migration. All of this movement was subsidized by the United States of America. And all of it was money in the bank for white realtors, contractors, and construction workers—racial capitalism.30
Founded in 1934, the Federal Housing Administration observed a strictly segregationist policy in the provision of loan guarantees for qualifying home-buyers. The FHA provided its on-the-ground appraisers with a manual, first distributed in 1935, that advised them, “If a neighborhood is to retain stability it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes,” and cautioned them to guard against the “infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups.” When the St. Louis developer Charles Vatterot sought FHA funding to develop the suburb of St. Ann, built beginning in 1942 to house defense workers living near the airport in St. Louis County, his proposal included a requirement that “no lot or portion of a lot or building erected thereon shall be sold, leased, rented or occupied by any other than those of the Caucasian race.” Following the Second World War, as the Veterans Administration extended Depression-era home loan guarantees to returning soldiers, it followed the same policy. Like the New Deal, the charter documents of postwar suburban America turn out to have had a whites-only codicil.31
To simplify their decision-making and improve their efficiency in responding to any given case, federal home loan specialists across the nation made maps of their cities, dividing the metropolitan area into color-coded blocks according to their racial composition and the supposed risk of lending in each of them. In St. Louis, the first maps were made in 1937, and they were colored red (“hazardous”) along the riverfront and then westward into the center of the city; these were the same neighborhoods that Harland Bartholomew would target for razing and redevelopment: the Black neighborhoods. The categories attached to the colors seem to have been trying to capture and stabilize the process of the westward migration of the Black population within the city, and of the white population from the city to the county: red (“hazardous”), yellow (“definitely declining”), blue (“still desirable”), and green (“best”). Ladue, just to the northwest of Webster Groves, for example, was green-lined in 1940 because it contained, in the words of the federally employed researcher, “not a single foreigner or Negro.” Between 1934 and 1960, the FHA insured over five times as many home loans in increasingly white St. Louis County as it did in the increasingly Black city of St. Louis. By the 1960s, only 3.3 percent of FHA-insured mortgages in the metro area (city and county) were held by African Americans; in the county, the rate was less than 1 percent. These were, remember, only loan guarantees, not loans: this was a public-private partnership. Indeed, because the FHA eventually shared the maps it had made with private bankers, who used them as proxy evaluations for loan applicants, federally sanctioned segregation had a decades-long afterlife subsequent to its supposed legal demise.32
Long after the Supreme Court’s 1948 decision in Shelley v. Kraemer, realtors in St. Louis enforced the separation of white and Black neighborhoods. The National Association of Real Estate Boards code of ethics, adopted in 1924, had stated that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood… members of any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.” This plank in the racial capitalist platform continued to control much of the real estate business in St. Louis through the 1970s and beyond, with varying degrees of legality. In barely concealed defiance of the US Supreme Court’s decision in Shelley v. Kraemer, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in 1949 that, although restrictive covenants could not be invoked in order to use state power to evict a Black family from a white-covenanted neighborhood, they could nevertheless be grounds for white parties to the covenant to file a civil suit claiming damages against those who sold their houses to Blacks. Even when the US Supreme Court ruled these civil suits unconstitutional in 1953, realtors in St. Louis (and elsewhere in the United States) continued to include covenant language in the deeds of the houses they sold. Indeed, in spite of a 1972 Supreme Court ruling that the recording of such deeds was unconstitutional, deeds containing stipulations that forbid the sale of a given house to, for instance, “Negroes or Malays,” turn up at home-sale closings in both St. Louis and St. Louis County to this very day. To several generations of white home-buyers, they must have seemed (at best) a curious historical relic, but inevitably they remind unsuspecting minority home-buyers of the line they are about to cross.33
Well into the 1950s, realtors in St. Louis advertised home sales in a separate “for colored” section of newspapers for listings north of Delmar, east of Union, south of Natural Bridge, and west of Grand (the onetime western boundary of Black habitation). The St. Louis Real Estate Exchange continued to defend segregation well into the 1960s, directing Black clients to homes and apartments in Black neighborhoods and even advising sellers to pull their property off the market in response to letters of interest or offers from Black buyers. “We never sell to colored. When they ask for a specific house, we tell them there is already a contract,” bragged a St. Louis realtor in 1969. Beginning in the 1970s, real estate agents played both sides against the middle, creating “block-busting” panic among white residents about a Black “invasion” by, say, hiring a Black woman to walk down the street pushing a baby carriage, and then earning commissions as the white owners sold their houses, one after the other. As recently as the early 1990s, realtors in University City admitted steering Black clients to one corner of the city, a practice that many believe persists up until the present day.34
African American families who were able to pull together enough cash or somehow secure a loan to buy a house in St. Louis sometimes faced violence if they tried to move into “white” neighborhoods. Black families who bought houses to the west of Grand on Market Avenue in the 1940s were targeted with stink bombs and drive-by threats, a pattern that was replicated block by block in many neighborhoods of the city as African Americans moved westward during the Second World War and after. Mr. and Mrs. Byron Boone, who became the first Black family on their Walnut Park block in 1965, were still facing harassment four years later: in December 1969, a forty-pound concrete block was heaved through their front window, the eighth such incident since they had moved in. Black families who moved into the county faced similar acts of intimidation and violence. In the fall of 1963, whites in Jennings staged a series of nighttime demonstrations outside the house of a Black family who had moved into the all-white North County suburb.35
Much of the resistance to Black home-buyers was organized by all-white homeowners and neighborhood associations, which transformed the formalized racketeering of the restrictive covenants into a form of white supremacist civil society. In April 1956, Dr. Howard Venable, an African American ophthalmologist who was the head of his department at Homer G. Phillips Hospital and an instructor at the St. Louis University School of Medicine, began construction on a house in Creve Coeur, an outer-ring suburb of the city of St. Louis. His existing house was in the pathway of the Daniel Boone Expressway being built to connect the city to its growing suburbs. Over the course of the next few months, Dr. Venable was approached several times by lawyers representing white citizens of Creve Coeur who had pooled money in the hope of buying the property before he moved in—a common tactic throughout the metropolitan area.
By June, the doctor had refused all offers, and the neighborhood association that had been trying to buy him out had reconstituted itself as an arm of the city government: a newly created “Citizens Advisory Committee on Parks.” Before long, the new committee made its first proposal to the city—the proposal it had, in fact, been created to make: the city should use its police power to condemn and take any property for which a group of citizens was willing to donate one-half of the cost of turning it into a public park. Over the objection of the mayor, who feared that the city might go bankrupt if it bought the property out from under every Black family trying to move to Creve Coeur, the city council unanimously approved the proposal and gave Dr. Venable two weeks to agree to sell the property or face condemnation. Two weeks later, they sued the doctor to force him to surrender his property to the eminent domain of the city. And not long after that, the city elected a new mayor—John T. Beirne, one of the original members of the Citizens Advisory Committee on Parks.
Dr. Venable fought the city in the courts and continued to build his house, but in December 1959, the Missouri Court of Appeals ruled in the city’s favor. The court’s decision acknowledged the evidence of racial animus and a conspiracy to deprive Dr. Venable of his civil rights, as presented by the defense in its counterclaim against the city, but ruled that these issues were not relevant to the city’s power to decide where it put its parks and how it got the property to put them there. Seeing the writing on the wall, Dr. Venable sold his house to the city and moved farther west, to Ballwin, where he started over. And Creve Coeur turned his land into a park, converting his single-story ranch-style house into a clubhouse for the city’s white citizens. Today the park boasts a “half-mile paved trail, three tennis courts, and a soccer field.” It is named for John T. Beirne, the man who rode Dr. Venable’s dispossession into the mayor’s office.36
Actions like those taken by the white citizens of Creve Coeur and countless others throughout the metro area inspired outrage among Black St. Louisans—particularly middle-class Black St. Louisans—and among many whites as well. In 1961, Black and white activists formed the Freedom of Residence Committee, which cataloged complaints, provided legal and limited financial support to Black home-buyers seeking homes in “white” areas, and ran informal undercover operations that sent white and Black members to inquire in turn about a given piece of property. In response to their efforts and those of many others, the city passed a fair housing ordinance in 1961, as did St. Louis County in 1964.
It was the Freedom of Residence Committee that in 1965 helped Joseph Lee and Barbara Jo Jones file suit against the Alfred H. Mayer Corporation, which had refused to sell the Joneses a house in the developer’s newly constructed Paddock Woods neighborhood in Florissant, northwest of the city, because Joseph Jones was Black. Although Shelley v. Kraemer had ruled that state enforcement of restrictive covenants in the real estate market violated the Fourteenth Amendment, it had left open the question of whether or not private parties could continue to discriminate in the absence of state action (by simply agreeing to racist covenants and abiding by them, not allowing any Blacks into the country club, and so on).37
In Jones v. Mayer (1968), the last case decided by the comparatively liberal Warren Court, the US Supreme Court set aside the question of state action and the Fourteenth Amendment in holding that racial discrimination of the type faced by the Joneses violated the Thirteenth Amendment, which had abolished slavery in the United States, and the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which had outlawed action perpetuating the “badges or incidents” of slavery—the various forms of racist wrong to which enslaved people had been subjected, including the violation of their freedom to choose to live where they wanted. It is this case that provides the legal foundation for the recent revival of the effort to claim reparations from the US government for its legal complicity in perpetuating the “badge” of slavery in the form of discriminatory policies and practices in the FHA, the GI Bill, and so on. The decision in Jones v. Mayer followed passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and it might have seemed to portend the end of housing discrimination in the United States.38
And yet, amid all this seeming change, the president of the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange assured clients who wanted to make sure that the neighborhoods in which they bought houses would remain all-white—so that they could send their children to all-white schools to prepare them to properly steward the legacy of all-whiteness that would be passed on to them along with their parents’ property—that realtors in St. Louis had ways to “weed out the n—s.” Among other things, he was counting on the fact that the Fair Housing Act had been methodically stripped of any enforcement provisions in advance of its passage, and that both the city and county governments lacked the resources (not to mention the will) to set about the massive task of desegregating the metro area.39
More than anything else, however, the president of the Real Estate Exchange was counting on zoning—that is, on the tools passed down to him by the patriarch of the St. Louis suburbs, Harland Bartholomew, and on the identification of police power with the protection of property values. As a trickle of Black people began to try to move to the county in the 1960s, then many more in the 1970s, they found all manner of obstacles still barring the way.40
In 1926, the US Supreme Court’s decision in Village of Euclid v. Ambler (which originated in a suburb of Cleveland) added zoning to the police powers of cities, as Bartholomew had been urging since the time of the First World War. If cities were bound to try to foster their citizenry by maintaining the general welfare, the court reasoned, and if one dimension of general welfare was the protection of private property from the downward influence of proximity to undesirable neighbors, then cities had a legal interest in controlling development within their limits. In so doing, the Court created a legal framework for the same conflation of public order and property values that had underlain the segregation ordinances of the previous decade. This time, however, the language was color-blind, although some of the support behind the measure surely was not. As an amicus curiae brief in the case argued, zoning could be an effective tool in protecting middle-class homeowners from “disorderly, noisy, slovenly, blighted and slum-like districts”: from you know who.41
In the 1940s and 1950s, as developers built outward into previously undeveloped areas of St. Louis County, zoning became the principal tool of racial capitalist real estate development. Inner-ring suburbs like Maplewood, Ladue, and Webster Groves were zoned to foster and protect the development of single-family residences on large lots in the years immediately following the Second World War. In much of the rest of the county, zoning followed the pattern of settlement. Small clusters of new homeowners in the county would organize a neighborhood association and then incorporate themselves as a city, the guiding purpose of which was to zone their neighborhood and the surrounding area. Of the ninety-two municipalities in St. Louis County today, over half were established during the single-family suburban land rush between 1943 and 1954. Many of these new towns featured very small populations (the smallest was Champ, which had seven people) and absurdly large lot sizes—often as large as three acres (for instance, in much of Ladue), and very rarely less than five thousand square feet. In 1965, the government of St. Louis County rezoned ninety thousand acres into three-acre lots in order to create a vast land bank for future high-end development.42