Along with large lots, the exclusion of multi-unit dwellings was a principal tool of population regulation. The city of Ferguson first outlawed multi-family dwellings in 1932 and then again in 1956, when a cluster of duplexes was developed in one corner of the city. City planners in Webster Groves, claiming there was no demand for apartment buildings in the city, limited multi-family residences to the city’s commercial district. Meanwhile, they tracked development in the self-declared “City of Fine Homes” on a map that identified several areas as “100% Negro or very close,” and on which they noted their worry about a “developing ghetto” on the other side of the railroad tracks, labeled “the Great Divide.” In 1960, there were 200,000 housing units in St. Louis County, only about 7 percent of which were in multiple-family residences, and almost all of those were duplexes rather than apartment buildings.⁴³

None of these zoning codes were explicitly racial. And only occasionally did their underlying purpose spill into the public record. There were the indelicate notations on the planners’ map from Webster Groves in 1963. And the city of Kirkwood’s helpful suggestion that it would be much better for “all of the colored families to be grouped in one major section where they could be provided with their own school and recreational facilities, churches and stores.” And the decision by the cities of Ferguson and Berkeley to close off all but one of the roads that connected them with the neighboring all-Black town of Kinloch. And Ferguson’s yearlong argument about building a ten-foot-high brick wall along the length of its mile-long border with Kinloch. That was in 1976. But even then, city officials claimed that their position was not racial—it was just that the inhabitants of Kinloch, whoever they were, seemed to include an inordinate number of people interested in stealing the hubcaps off cars parked in all-white Ferguson.⁴⁴

Many in St. Louis County viewed the suburbs in the same way their forebears had viewed the West: as a “white man’s country.” But in time they learned not to say that out loud. For the most part, these years that saw the establishment of dozens of all- or almost-all-white towns through the cynical use of the tools of city planning were also years of officially sanctioned euphemism in St. Louis County. That poor white people were also unable to move into many of the new cities popping up along the horizon of white privilege was an acceptable cost—just another of the ways in which the excessive character of racial capitalism drags, disciplines, and diminishes poor white people along with the poor Black people who are its primary targets.

The nudge-nudge, wink-wink white supremacy of discriminatory zoning in the city of St. Louis reached a crossroads in the city of Black Jack. In the spring of 1970, the Inter-Religious Center for Urban Affairs, represented locally by St. Mark’s United Methodist Church in Florissant, proposed the construction of Park View Heights Apartments, a 210-unit, mixed-income, racially integrated apartment complex in a North County neighborhood known for the type of oak trees that grew there. Its goals were simple: to provide comfortable homes for families who needed them, and to foster “cultural interchange” and understanding between people separated by history. The immediate reaction among many of the white residents of Black Jack was the same mixture of self-righteous outrage and hypertrophic fear typical of white settlers from Jamestown right down to the present. It would be an “abscess in the middle of the community,” filled with the very people whom the residents of Black Jack (and nearby Spanish Lake) had just moved away from—people from Wellston and Walnut Park, people who had been displaced by urban renewal, people who would not be able to get to work because there were no buses out in the suburbs, people who would clog up the roads if they had cars. People who had lots of children.⁴⁵

Besides a few residents who insisted on speaking honestly—a man who told a reporter that he believed that people are just “happier with their own race,” or an old lady who admitted she would be terrified if she walked out of her house and saw a Black person—the leaders of the neighborhood associations were able to keep their people mostly on script. They set about resisting the integration of their neighborhood by emphasizing the burden that the new residents would put on the surrounding Hazelwood School District. Never mind that what was really at stake was adding about one hundred new students to a district that already educated nineteen thousand students—an increase of just over one-half of 1 percent.⁴⁶

The focus on the supposed number of children likely to be born to the hypothetical residents of a not-yet-built apartment building, and on schools as the site of the anticipated damage, calls our attention to the questions of gender and social reproduction in the suburban resistance movement. So, too, does the leading role taken by white women in Black Jack, represented by the “housewives march” in front of the St. Louis County Court Building in July 1970. This was not a simple struggle over whether or not Black people could be allowed to live in Black Jack: it was a fight over Black children being waged by white parents on behalf of their own children. At the bottom of the questions about school enrollments and property values was a set of calculations that mixed race, reproduction, and real estate into a cocktail of implacable animosity.⁴⁷

Declaring themselves “ready for a street fight,” the white resistance of Spanish Lake and Black Jack held community meetings at which they organized letter-writing campaigns (to local, state, and federal authorities as well as to various Methodists) and hectored and shouted down representatives of St. Mark’s and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which had been created by the Fair Housing Act of 1968 to do things like build racially integrated low- and middle-income housing in St. Louis County. Most pointedly, however, the white resisters began to organize themselves as a city: the brand-new city of Black Jack, the formation of which was supported by a petition signed by over fourteen hundred of the area’s two thousand inhabitants. The city of Black Jack was incorporated on August 6, 1970, and although it lacked most of the standard features of municipal government—it had no police department, for example, and no city collector capable of overseeing the taxation of its residents—it did have a zoning code. That code stipulated that the area in which St. Mark’s United Methodist Church intended to build the Park View Heights Apartments was zoned for single-family residences with a minimum lot size of fifteen thousand square feet, or about one-third of an acre.⁴⁸

In 1970, the United States sued Black Jack, and in arguing that the city’s zoning code violated both the Fair Housing Act and the Supreme Court’s holding in Jones v. Mayer, it effectively claimed that the city’s prohibition on multiple-family dwellings was perpetuating the history of slavery. The city contended in response that its zoning code was simply meant to eliminate traffic, reduce pressure on the public schools, and protect property values, and that it had nothing to do with Black people per se. After all, the city argued, it was also discriminating against low- and moderate-income whites. In December 1974, the Eighth Circuit of the US Court of Appeals ruled in the federal government’s favor, noting that the history of race and real estate in St. Louis County—not to mention the fact that Black Jack, like North County generally, was 99 percent white—made it obvious that the city’s action was racially discriminatory. The court’s ruling, for the first time in housing law, used the legal standard of “disparate impact”—the idea that plaintiffs did not need to prove that there was an intention to discriminate against them, only that the action taken by the defendant had the effect of racial discrimination.⁴⁹

While several other federal circuit courts used the United States of America v. City of Black Jack, Missouri (1974) decision as precedent in housing discrimination cases, it was not until 2015, in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., that the Supreme Court took up the question of “disparate impact” and finally declared the standard constitutional, basing its decision on the government’s reasoning in the Black Jack case. For the third time in the past seventy years, the struggle to integrate a St. Louis neighborhood defined the housing law for the entire nation.⁵⁰

Despite the courage of those who were willing to move their families into hostile suburbs and send their children to all-white suburban schools—not to mention the courage of those children (and, indeed, the courage of their white supporters in organizations like the Freedom of Residence Committee and St. Mark’s United Methodist Church, who faced ridicule and retaliation in their own neighborhoods)—and despite the efforts of the NAACP and the ACLU, which supported fair housing litigation both nationally and in St. Louis, in many neighborhoods white separatists and their allies in the real estate industry held the line. Long after the end of restrictive covenants and redlining, the pattern of racial discrimination remained structured into the transportation system (interstates everywhere, but no buses) and the single-family suburbs. Indeed, by the time of the Black Jack case, the attorneys for both the United States and the city of Black Jack agreed on one thing: material life in St. Louis County was so profoundly segregated that one did not have to speak actively of discrimination in order to further segregation. It was so deeply structured into the nature of things that it provided its own alibi—one could speak of the houses, the roads, and the schools without saying the words “Black” or “white” and be perfectly clear about the demographic implications. In 1950, the population of St. Louis County was about 1.9 percent Black; twenty years later—years during which hundreds of thousands of new houses were built in the county—the comparable figure was 4.8 percent.⁵¹

Through some combination of the influence of the defense industry (and the imperial past), the local history of a genuinely radical alliance of communists and Black radicals, and the hothouse atmosphere of the emerging suburbs, the white enclaves of St. Louis in these years nurtured some of the most prominent right-wing voices in the United States. These were voices that amplified the oscillating sense of entitlement and embattlement in the white resistance in the suburbs into extremist jeremiad. The Christian nationalist monthly The Cross and the Flag, published in St. Louis from 1942 until 1977, was edited by Gerald L. K. Smith, founder of the isolationist America First Party during the Second World War and erstwhile ally of Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, and Henry Ford, whom he credited with teaching him that “Communism is Jewish.” Smith’s final years were devoted to the construction of the seven-story Christ of the Ozarks statue in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, the centerpiece of the Holy Land Christian theme park he was planning at the time of his death in 1976.⁵²

In the decades after the Second World War, Smith devoted most of his time to giving speeches at rallies across the country and editing his journal. Published out of an office on Grand Avenue, The Cross and the Flag promoted a ten-point code for Christian nationalists, including promoting “America as a Christian Nation” against the substitution of “Jewish Tradition for Christian Tradition”; fighting “mongrelization and all attempts being made to force the intermixture of the black and white races”; ending “Immigration in order that American jobs and American houses may be safeguarded for American citizens”; following “the George Washington foreign policy” of ending entangling alliances; and abolishing the Federal Reserve Bank.⁵³

As well as The Cross and the Flag, St. Louis in the years of the Cold War was home to the Reverend John A. Stormer. Stormer came of political age under the guidance of the anticommunist and segregationist Oklahoma minister George Benson and was for many years the pastor of Heritage Baptist Church in suburban Florissant. In 1963, Stormer published None Dare Call It Treason under his own imprint, Liberty Bell Press, PO Box 32, Florissant, Missouri, and sold this bottled lightning to a generation of right-wing Republicans and John Birchers who distrusted mainstream media and the publishing industry. Stormer’s book sold a reported seven million copies in the years just before Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign and is often credited as having provided a good measure of the intellectual infrastructure for the far right wing of the Republican Party in the years that followed.

In Stormer’s view, virtually every institution in the United States had been infiltrated and corrupted by communists, and sinister forces were at work trying to convince ordinary Americans that their traditions and cherished values were indecent and perhaps even insane. “Do you hold rigidly to ‘outmoded’ concepts of right and wrong? Do you reject Socialism? Do you oppose foreign aid waste? Do you object to letting African cannibals vote on how we should live under world government?” Stormer wrote, before suggesting that holding these positions in the United States of America could be grounds for involuntary commitment and forcible “mental health” treatment, including “electric shock treatments, chemotherapy, hypnosis, or conceivably, a frontal lobotomy.” Four years before his death in 2018, Stormer warned that the uprising following the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, which shares a border and a school district with Florissant, was part of a communist conspiracy—“hundreds of people from all over the country,” he insisted, had been brought to St. Louis “to bring about revolution.”⁵⁴

Also living in St. Louis in the early 1960s was the young Patrick Buchanan, an editor at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, which spun together anticommunism, anti-elitism, suburban separatism, white resentment, and unwavering support for the police into one strand of the double helix of the Goldwater-Reagan-Buchanan-Trump wing of the Republican Party. Through those years, the Globe-Democrat editorialized, variously, in favor of the greater use of police dogs in the city of St. Louis; in favor of the immediate execution of Californian inmate Caryl Chessman in spite of the “maudlin” and “Communist” opposition to the death penalty; in favor of massive expansion of government funding for the Nike air defense missile program, but against federal support for local public transportation; in favor of mincemeat pie (an often neglected aspect of Anglo-Saxon cultural inheritance); in favor of military action against Cuba’s Fidel Castro, before whom the United States had too long been “supine”; in favor of more and wider expressways connecting the city to the suburbs in metro St. Louis; against the formation of a civilian review board to oversee the St. Louis Police Department; in favor of missile sales to Israel; in favor of Nixon’s program for “Black capitalism” (“Capitalism is not racist. It works equally well for all)”; in opposition to the “reverse racism” of the “slogan ‘Black Power’”; and so on. Working up and down the scales of politics, the editorial page of the Globe-Democrat connected global anticommunism to local opposition to civil rights and unwavering support for the police.⁵⁵

At the behest of Pat Buchanan, the Globe-Democrat was one of five newspapers in the United States to cooperate with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a precursor to COINTELPRO (the “Counter-Intelligence Program” targeting African American activists), publishing planted stories designed to undermine Black activism in St. Louis and elsewhere. Beginning in late 1963, and in cooperation with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which provided the newspaper with classified documents, the Globe-Democrat ran a series of ten articles by the reporter Denny Walsh asserting that the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had been infiltrated by “pro-Communists” and “outside agitators.” Walsh’s reporting focused particularly on the ongoing employment protest at Jefferson Bank in downtown St. Louis, singling out the presence of onetime communists like Hershel Walker in order to try to associate a struggle to make it possible for Black people to get wage-earning jobs in a bank with communism. In June 1965, in an editorial defending the St. Louis Police Department from charges of police brutality and opposing calls for the appointment of a civilian review board, Buchanan’s editorial page specifically named the activist Percy Green and called on the police to beat him up: “Police officers ought to put a knot in his head if he tries some monkey shines and interferes with police work.”⁵⁶

After supporting Goldwater in 1964, Buchanan left the Globe-Democrat to work for the 1968 Nixon campaign and eventually worked as an adviser and speechwriter in the White House until Nixon’s resignation in 1974. It was Buchanan who coined the phrase “silent majority” as a tag for the (self-described) embattled, traditionalist, working-class, white Americans to whom he thought the Republican Party should address itself. Over the following decades, Buchanan held down the “traditionalist” (read: white nationalist) right wing of the Republican Party, running for president in 1992, 1996, and 2000, occasionally appearing with a pitchfork at campaign rallies in a gesture reminiscent of the South Carolina populist and white supremacist “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman. Of Buchanan’s speech at the 1992 Republican Convention, the journalist Molly Ivins famously wrote, “It probably sounded better in the original German.”⁵⁷

Also living in the St. Louis metro area during the formative years in which the New Right emerged out of segregationist “massive resistance” and Cold War anticommunism was Phyllis Schlafly, who traces the historical thread of the other half of the double helix of Trumpism. In 1964, Schlafly published A Choice Not an Echo, which urged “grassroots Americans” to join her in supporting Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid and opposing both leftist subversives within the government and the “phony Republicans” who let them get away with it. While Schlafly never mentioned “the Jews” (of the St. Louis extremists, she was unquestionably the most likely to be invited out in polite company), her book was full of dark innuendo about “secret kingmakers,” “New York financiers,” “Communists,” J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Democrat Liberals,” “hidden persuasion and psychological warfare techniques,” “internationalists,” A. O. Sulzberger of the New York Times, “mysterious financial support,” “powerful but shadowy figures,” “egghead reasoning,” “the international power structure,” “the Cosa Nostra, Black Muslims, and CORE,” Eugene Mayer of the Washington Post, Lehman Brothers, the Morgan banking group, and even the Des Moines Register. Her main suggestions were that the United States adopt a more isolationist foreign policy, which she termed “America First,” and prepare for a global war against communism. Suitably edited, it all might have fit well in the pages of The Cross and the Flag, but Schlafly instead published the book independently. It very shortly sold three million copies, joining None Dare Call It Treason as one of the forgotten best-sellers of the rise of Goldwater and the so-called New Right.⁵⁸

Schlafly sat out the 1968 and 1972 presidential campaigns. She respected Nixon’s anticommunism, but thought him soft on school segregation and housing discrimination; in comparison to many of her St. Louis neighbors, he no doubt was indeed “soft”—it was, after all, the Nixon Justice Department that sued the city of Black Jack in 1970. The author of the Phyllis Schlafly Report reemerged in the mid-1970s as a self-declared antifeminist “housewife” (much like the women of Black Jack) opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment, reproductive rights, affirmative action, homosexuality, and, in later years, immigration. In a March 2016 rally in St. Louis, she endorsed Donald Trump for president, declaring that “Donald Trump is the one who has made immigration the big issue it really is… because Obama wants to change the character of our country.” Four months later, Schlafly’s The Conservative Case for Trump declared that “Christianity is under attack all over the world, most dramatically from Islamists, but also insidiously here at home.” Later that fall, Donald Trump was the first to speak at Schlafly’s memorial service, held at the St. Louis Cathedral. “With Phyllis, it was always America first,” he said.⁵⁹

The American Nazi Party was an insistent, if episodic, aspect of politics in St. Louis in the 1970s and even after. In March 1978, the party organized what it billed as the first legally permitted Nazi march in the United States since 1945, and a lead-up to their planned rally the following month in Skokie, Illinois. After a drawn-out struggle with the city of Florissant about gaining access to a public park for an outdoor rally, the Nazis finally obtained a court order allowing them to march in the city of St. Louis. Planned in coordination with the party’s national meeting that spring, the march was to follow a path down Cherokee Street to party headquarters at 2808 Chippewa, on the city’s Southside. The march was well publicized in advance, and on the morning of March 12 the forty-five or so Nazis assembled on Jefferson Avenue were vastly outnumbered by thousands of protesters lining Cherokee Street. Instead of marching through the hostile corridor, the marchers rode on the back of a flatbed truck, yelling “White Power!” while flanked by hundreds of policemen, some of them on horseback, others with dogs. As the onlookers threw snowballs at the passing Nazis, the police drove them back in what might in other circumstances have been referred to as a police riot. The Nazis themselves were evacuated to the Third District Police Station, where they were allowed to change out of their brown shirts before sneaking back out onto the street.⁶⁰

Not all the white people in St. Louis or the county were like Schlafly or Stormer or Buchanan or the white separatist “housewives” of Black Jack or the namesake of Beirne Park. Far from it. Many whites in the St. Louis suburbs during these years probably grew up the way I did, living two hours to the west. They believed in “good schools,” “nice neighborhoods,” and “high property values,” and dis-identified (if not always openly or, still less, courageously) with the overt racism of some of their neighbors. And that served them, as it did me, as an alibi for failing to connect the dots between their own privileged lives and the white supremacists out on patrol on the perimeter of their towns.⁶¹

Had they looked a little harder, they might have found inspiration and insight in the life of the Holocaust survivor and housing rights activist Hedy Epstein, who was a mainstay in the “freedom of residence” movement during these years. In later years, she was a fierce critic of Israel and the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and she was arrested along with other protesters in Ferguson in August 2014 after the police killing of Michael Brown. Barry Commoner, founder of the Citizens’ Party, a leader in the nuclear test ban movement, and America’s most famous eco-socialist, was teaching at Washington University in these years, though he remained largely aloof from politics in the city. And Washington University was home to a lively and effective branch of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), some of whom, most notably the merry prankster Eugene Tournour (and even the subsequent biographer of the activist Ivory Perry and the intellectual godfather of this book, George Lipsitz), became strongly involved in Black politics in the city.⁶²

But the leading edge of white separatism in St. Louis was prominent and hard-edged. It was evident at the Grapevine Tavern, the Arsenal Street bar owned by John Larry Ray, brother of Martin Luther King assassin James Earl Ray, and frequented by the white supremacist Gordon Baum, who later became a member of the school board. In June 1970, an estimated forty-five thousand marchers—drawn, the Post-Dispatch declared, from “virtually every community within a fifty mile radius of St. Louis,” and virtually all of them white—marched in one of the largest of that summer’s national series of “Hard Hat” parades. Although it was generally and properly understood as a march in support of the Vietnam War, the stated purpose of the march was to “show that we honor the police”; a white women’s auxiliary of the march pinned roses to the lapels of the officers stationed along the route. “There was a threat in the air, a sense of belligerence and intolerance,” reported the Post-Dispatch. At various points along the four-mile route, marchers waded into the crowd and attacked counterprotesters, injuring dozens by the end of the day. A photo in the following day’s Post-Dispatch depicted a young man curled in a fetal position on the ground while two marchers kicked him in the head. He had been holding a sign that read VIET NAM VETERAN AGAINST THE WAR, and he told the paper that he had only been out of the army for two days. The police stood by and watched the mayhem unfold, according to the paper, doing “little to ease the tension.”⁶³

So, it bears asking: From what—against whom—were all of these suburban warriors trying to defend themselves? What were they so scared of? One answer comes from Webster Groves. Provoked by one of Charles Kuralt’s questions about civil rights, one of the Webster Groves fathers, a large, loud, and self-assured white man, perhaps a former Webster Groves football player, who sat for the camera with his legs crossed and his pant leg pulled up to reveal a large stretch of flesh between cuff and sock, was derisive, angry almost. “You remember when I sat Clark down during the Jefferson Bank demonstration?” he said, looking momentarily to his wife for confirmation, “and all any normal child had to do was look at the demonstration at Jefferson Bank, and a bunch of beatnik whites, Blacks, green, yellow, everything. And most of them filthy. They looked like they pulled them out of some wine jug or something and put them out to demonstrate.” Something had spooked Clark’s father. As far as he had burrowed into the all-white womb of suburban conservatism, he could not escape his fear of the city and the Black-beatnik insurgency he believed was unfolding there. To truly understand the reaction, we need to look to the radicalism: to the Jefferson Bank protest and the Black working-class movement it reignited in the city of St. Louis.⁶⁴