1. The National Building Arts Center in Sauget, Illinois (http://web.nationalbuildingarts.org/), is curated by the visionary archivist Larry Giles.
2. City of St. Louis, “Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority,” www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/sldc/boards/Land-Clearance-for-Redevelopment-Authority.cfm; “Paul McKee’s Northside Regeneration Accused of Tax Credit Fraud in Suit by Missouri Attorney General,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 14, 2018; “LRA Owns the 12,000 St. Louis Properties No One Wants. And It Can’t Afford to Maintain Them,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 17, 2018.
3. 99% Invisible, “Dollhouses of St. Louis,” November 7, 2017, https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/dollhouses-st-louis/.
4. Jason Purnell et al., “For the Sake of All: A Report on the Health and Well-Being of African Americans in St. Louis and Why It Matters to Everyone,” Washington University, 2015, 27; Melia Robinson, Mike Nudelman, and Andy Kiersz, “The 25 Wealthiest Suburbs in America,” Business Insider, November 4, 2014, www.businessinsider.com/richest-suburbs-in-america-2014-10.
5. One of the many extraordinary aspects of the history of St. Louis is the number of truly excellent books that have been written about the city. See, in particular, James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis Missouri, 1764–1980 (St. Louis: Missouri History Museum, 1981); Eric Sandweiss, St. Louis: Evolution of an American Urban Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936–75 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); Adam Arenson, The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Priscilla A. Dowden-White, Groping Toward Democracy: African American Social Welfare Reform in St. Louis, 1910–1949 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011); Henry W. Berger, St. Louis and Empire: 250 Years of Imperial Quest and Urban Crisis (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015); Phillip Longman, “Why the Economic Fates of America’s Cities Diverged,” Atlantic, November 28, 2015, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/cities-economic-fates-diverge/417372/; Keona K. Ervin, Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017); Ryan Schuessler, ed., The St. Louis Anthology (Cleveland: Belt Publishing, 2019).
6. Although they are too often considered in isolation, the histories of empire and anti-Blackness have been productively intertwined in Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1987); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1990); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and US Empire in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); David R. Roediger and Elizabeth E. Esch, The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in US History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York: Penguin, 2016); Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017); Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019); K-Sue Park, “Self-Deportation Nation,” Harvard Law Review 132 (May 10, 2019): 1878.
7. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Hale, 1920); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 2nd ed. (1983; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). The usage, emerging as it does out of the history of the Black radical tradition, is terrifically pertinent, but not perfect: it must be stretched to fully encompass the history of US imperialism and Indian killing—“settler colonialism.” For the state of the art, see Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 149–150.
8. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk”; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (New York: Verso, 2012); Robin D. G. Kelley, “Births of a Nation: Surveying Trumpland with Cedric Robinson,” Boston Review, March 6, 2017.
9. Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); K-Sue Park, “Race, Innovation, and Financial Growth: The Example of Foreclosure,” in Histories of Racial Capitalism, ed. Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming).
10. See Jonathan M. Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland (New York: Basic Books, 2019).
11. Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (2001): 866–905.
12. See Singh, Race and America’s Long War; Karuka, Empire’s Tracks; Park, “Self-Deportation Nation.” My argument owes a great deal to Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), as well as to the mind-shaping friendship, scholarship, and mentorship of Adam Green and Stephanie Smallwood.
13. Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness; Fields and Fields, Racecraft; Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument,” New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 257–337.
14. US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, March 4, 2015, www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf. The separate DoJ report on the murder of Michael Brown, on the other hand, is, at best, a legalistic restatement of the extraordinary latitude provided police officers who shoot unarmed people in the United States and, at worst, a complete misunderstanding of the full set of circumstances surrounding the shooting; see Khalil Gibran Muhammad, “The History of Lynching and the Present of Policing,” Nation, May 17, 2018.
15. Walter Johnson, “Ferguson’s Fortune 500 Company,” Atlantic, April 26, 2015.
1. See Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Virginia Scharff, Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement, and the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
2. UNESCO, “Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site,” https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/198; Joe Hollerman, “Spotlight: Last Indian Mound in St. Louis Still Deteriorating,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 4, 2015. See also Thomas E. Emerson, Brad H. Koldehoff, and Tamira K. Brennan, Revealing Greater Cahokia, North America’s First Native City: Rediscovery and Large-Scale Excavations of the East St. Louis Precinct, Studies in Archaeology 12 (Urbana: Illinois State Archaeological Survey, University of Illinois, 2018).
3. Timothy R. Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (New York: Penguin, 2009), 2, 14–26; Timothy R. Pauketat, Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 67–95.
4. Pauketat, Cahokia, 69, 109; Pauketat, Ancient Cahokia, 78–80, 84–95; Blake de Pastino, “America’s Largest Earthwork, Cahokia’s Monks Mound, May Have Been Built in Only 20 Years, Study Says,” Western Digs, September 17, 2015, http://westerndigs.org/americas-largest-earthwork-cahokias-monks-mound-may-have-been-built-in-only-20-years-study-says/.
5. Pauketat, Cahokia, 164–169.
6. Primm, Lion of the Valley, 7; Sarah E. Baires, “White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities,” Smithsonian, February 23, 2018.
7. Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 240.
8. William E. Foley, Wilderness Journey: The Life of William Clark (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 75–158; Landon Y. Jones, William Clark and the Shaping of the West (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 49–146, 145 (quotation).
9. Peter J. Kastor, William Clark’s World: Describing America in an Age of Unknowns (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 101–159.
10. Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (New York: Verso, 2019), 72–74.
11. Charles McKenzie, “Charles McKenzie’s Narratives,” in Early Fur Trade on the Northern Plains: Canadian Traders Among the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians, 1738–1818, the Narratives of John Macdonnell, David Thompson, François-Antoine Larocque, and Charles McKenzie, ed. W. Raymond Wood and Thomas D. Thiessen (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 232.
12. Elizabeth A. Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People (New York: Hill and Wang, 2014); John Logan Allen, Passage Through the Garden: Lewis and Clark and the Image of the American Northwest (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 18, 19, 121, 143; Kastor, William Clark’s World, 27–97.
13. Lewis quoted in Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 241–242; Reuben Gold Thwaites, Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: 1804–1806, vol. 1, 50–51; Kastor, William Clark’s World, 17, 151.
14. Scharff, Twenty Thousand Roads, 11–34; Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World, 214; Estes, Our History Is the Future, 79–81.
15. Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World, 216.
16. Foley, Wilderness Journey, 96, 102, 106–108, 110–111, 113, 116–118; Scharff, Twenty Thousand Roads, 11–34; Kastor, William Clark’s World, 5, 196.
17. Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World, 216; William Clark to Toussaint Charbonneau, August 20, 1806, quoted in Jones, William Clark and the Shaping of the West, 146, 194 (see also 129); Scharff, Twenty Thousand Roads, 11–34.
18. Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 375; Kastor, William Clark’s World, 160–190.
19. Jefferson quoted in Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 107; David J. Wishart, The Fur Trade of the American West, 1807–1840 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 27, 19 (quotation).
20. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families, 7; Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 1–12; Wishart, The Fur Trade of the American West, 64. DuVal’s notion of “native ground” is an intended contrast to Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
21. Quoted in Wishart, The Fur Trade of the American West, 18, 81; Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families, 41, 58.
22. DuVal, The Native Ground, 194, 183; Willard H. Rollings, The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995); Jay Gitlin, Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 73, 85, 88, 89–90, 128; Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families, 31, passim.
23. Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); quoted in Jones, William Clark and the Shaping of the West, 218.
24. Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Vintage, 2010); quoted in Jones, William Clark and the Shaping of the West, 151; Kastor, William Clark’s World, 97–102.
25. Jones, William Clark and the Shaping of the West, 207 (quotation), 214; Primm, Lion of the Valley, 102–104; Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families, 252–254.
26. Wishart, The Fur Trade of the American West, 45–46, 121.
27. Wishart, The Fur Trade of the American West, 45–46, 121; Aaron Robert Woodard, “William Ashley and Jedidiah Smith and the Arikara Battle of 1823,” Journal of the West 51, no. 4 (Fall 2012): 76–77, 78; Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families, 262–264; D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 2, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 71.
28. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families, 7, 59.
29. Aron, American Confluence; DuVal, The Native Ground, 232, 227–228; Jones, William Clark and the Shaping of the West, 310.
30. Jay H. Buckley, William Clark: Indian Diplomat (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 144–211.
31. Gitlin, Bourgeois Frontier, 73, 85, 88, 89–90, 128.
32. Jones, William Clark and the Shaping of the West, 331–334.
33. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families, 67; Primm, Lion of the Valley, 104. For the Lakota, see Estes, Our History Is the Future; Jeffrey Ostler, The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground (New York: Penguin Books, 2011); Pekka Hämäläinen, “Reconstructing the Great Plains: The Long Struggle for Sovereignty and Dominance in the Heart of the Continent,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 4 (December 2016): 481–509.
34. Primm, Lion of the Valley, 108; Sandweiss, St. Louis, 38; Meinig, The Shaping of America, 77–78.
35. John Francis McDermott, ed., The Western Journals of Washington Irving (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1944), 80–81; Wishart, The Fur Trade of the American West, 58; Kastor, William Clark’s World, 233–244.
36. McDermott, The Western Journals of Washington Irving, 60, 82.
37. McDermott, The Western Journals of Washington Irving, 81–82.
38. Foley, Wilderness Journey, 75–158; Jones, William Clark and the Shaping of the West, 137.
39. William Clark to Jonathan Clark, July 21, November 22, and December 17, 1808, in Dear Brother: Letters of William Clark to Jonathan Clark, ed. James J. Homberg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 144, 160, 167, 187.
40. McDermott, The Western Journals of Washington Irving, 82. I have standardized, just a bit, spellings and punctuation in the quotations from Irving’s journal entries.
41. In American Confluence, Stephen Aron frames Clark’s subsequent career as a repudiation of his debt to the Indians upon whom the success of the journey to the Pacific had depended.
42. Kastor, William Clark’s World, 244–250.
1. Elbert B. Smith, Magnificent Missourian: The Life of Thomas Hart Benton (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1958), 19–21.
2. Smith, Magnificent Missourian, 41–42.
3. Smith, Magnificent Missourian, 46–48.
4. Gitlin, Bourgeois Frontier, 48 (quotation), 143–144; Sandweiss, St. Louis, 38–40, 43, 49, 66.
5. Aron, American Confluence, 111, 114; Gitlin, Bourgeois Frontier, 61.
6. Smith, Magnificent Missourian, 81 (quotation); Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families, 257; Gitlin, Bourgeois Frontier, 67–73, 48 (quotation).
7. Smith, Magnificent Missourian, 59–64. “Indian money… treaty… lands and lastly their skins… must be our motto,” wrote a fur trader quoted in Gitlin, Bourgeois Frontier, 67.
8. Register of the Debates in Congress (24 Cong., 2nd sess., 1836–1837), vol. 2, 748; Smith, Magnificent Missourian, 88–89.
9. Register of the Debates in Congress (21 Cong., 1st sess., 1829–1830), vol. 6, 24; Smith, Magnificent Missourian, 109; Samuel J. Watson, Peacekeepers and Conquerors: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1821–1846 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2013), 80, 122.
10. Smith, Magnificent Missourian, 93–94.
11. “Selections from Editorial Articles from the St. Louis Enquirer on Oregon and Texas, as Originally Published in That Paper, 1818–1819,” Missouri Historical Society, quoted in Smith, Magnificent Missourian, 691; Takaki, Iron Cages, 155–156.
12. Quoted in Smith, Magnificent Missourian, 253.
13. Quoted in Smith, Magnificent Missourian, 253; Tom Chaffin, Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002).
14. Thomas Hart Benton, “To the Railroad Convention,” October 16, 1849, in The Senate, 1789–1989: Classic Speeches, 1830–1893, ed. Robert C. Byrd (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1994), 219; Smith, Magnificent Missourian, 253; Theodore Roosevelt, Life of Thomas Hart Benton (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1886).
15. Benton, “To the Railroad Convention,” 219; Smith, Magnificent Missourian, 255–256.
16. Aron, American Confluence, 209–210; Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families, 284.
17. Francis Paul Prucha, The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783–1846 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), 75–77, 136–137, 324–353; Marc E. Kollbaum, Gateway to the West: The History of Jefferson Barracks from 1826–1894, vol. 1 (St. Louis: Friends of Jefferson Barracks, n.d.), 11.
18. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families, 235; Marc E. Kollbaum, They Served at Jefferson Barracks: The Generals of the Civil War Who—at Some Point in Their Careers—Served at Jefferson Barracks (St. Louis: Friends of Jefferson Barracks, n.d.), 59–62, 96; see also Kollbaum, Gateway to the West, 24–104.
19. Kollbaum, Gateway to the West, 161.
20. Watson, Peacekeepers and Conquerors, 52–54; Louis Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 46.
21. Patrick J. Jung, The Black Hawk War of 1832 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 18–20.
22. Jung, The Black Hawk War of 1832, 20; Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk, of Mà-ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk, Dictated by Himself, ed. Gerald Kennedy (1833; reprint, New York: Penguin Classics, 2008), 19.
23. Jones, William Clark and the Shaping of the West, 227.
24. Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk, 53–55.
25. Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk, 57.
26. Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk, 56–59; Adam John Waterman, “The Corpse in the Kitchen: Black Hawk and the Poetics of Extraction” (forthcoming), manuscript chapter in author’s possession.
27. Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk, 60; Jung, The Black Hawk War of 1832, 49, 75–76.
28. Watson, Peacekeepers and Conquerors, 7.
29. Prucha, The Sword of the Republic, 27, 216 (quotation); Watson, Peacekeepers and Conquerors, 10.
30. Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk, 74–75; see also Jung, The Black Hawk War of 1832, 88.
31. Jung, The Black Hawk War of 1832, 75, 77–78, 89.
32. Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk, 78; Jung, The Black Hawk War of 1832, 90.
33. Jung, The Black Hawk War of 1832, 100, 119; quoted in Buckley, William Clark, 209.
34. Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk, 79–82; Jung, The Black Hawk War of 1832, 150.
35. Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk, 84.
36. Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk, 85–86.
37. Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk, 87.
38. Adam John Waterman, “The Anatomy of a Haunting: Black Hawk’s Body and the Fabric of History,” in Phantom Pasts, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History, ed. Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Customs and Manners of the North American Indians, vol. 2 (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1842), 211.
39. Catlin, Letters and Notes, 211; Benita Eisler, The Red Man’s Bones: George Catlin, Artist and Showman (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2013), 154–158. Catlin was allowed to set up a studio in the hospital at Jefferson Barracks and was given access to Black Hawk and several other captured Indians for “as long as he needed them to pose” (Eisler, The Red Man’s Bones, 155).
40. Missouri Republican, February 28, 1825; Prucha, The Sword of the Republic, 234–235, 234; Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
41. Report of Secretary of War Eaton, Macomb to Eaton, January 4, 1830, in American State Papers: Military Affairs, vol. 4, 219; Jesup to A. H. Sevier, April 5, 1830, in American State Papers: Military Affairs, vol. 4, 371; Watson, Peacekeepers and Conquerors, 20–22; Prucha, The Sword of the Republic, 239.
42. Kollbaum, They Served at Jefferson Barracks, 47–51.
43. George Rollie Adams, General William S. Harney: Prince of Dragoons (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 12–16.
44. Adams, General William S. Harney, 36, 37, 40–42.
45. Adams, General William S. Harney, 47–48, 51, 53.
46. Harney to Taylor, August 15, 1839, Office of the Adjutant General: Letters Received, M567, roll 189, quoted in Adams, General William S. Harney, 71–73.
47. St. Augustine News, January 1, 1841; Adams, General William S. Harney, 76–77; Cameron Strang, “Violence, Ethnicity, and Human Remains During the Second Seminole War,” Journal of American History 100, no. 4 (March 2014): 973–994; Kenneth W. Porter, The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People (Gainesville: University Press of Florida), 1996.
48. Adams, General William S. Harney, 80–85, 102–103.
49. Adams, General William S. Harney, 120–121, 131.
50. Adams, General William S. Harney, 131–133.
1. Abraham Lincoln, “Address by Abraham Lincoln Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, as It Appeared in the Sangamo Journal, February 3, 1838,” reprinted in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8 vols., ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), vol. 1, 108.
2. Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839), 157; Elijah P. Lovejoy, “Awful Murder and Savage Barbarity,” St. Louis Observer, May 5, 1836; Lincoln, “Address by Abraham Lincoln Before the Young Men’s Lyceum,” 1:108–115; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 8.
3. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 8–9, 13, 31; Weld, American Slavery as It Is, 157.
4. John Quincy Adams quoted in introduction to Owen and Joseph C. Lovejoy, Memoir of the Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy (New York: John S. Taylor, 1838), 12; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 8–9, 31.
5. Lincoln, “Address by Abraham Lincoln Before the Young Men’s Lyceum.”
6. Weld, American Slavery as It Is, 157; Lea VanderVelde, Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 132.
7. Richard Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 15 (quotation), 16.
8. Quoted in Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 14 (emphasis in original).
9. Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, in Memoirs, Correspondence, and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 4, ed. Thomas Jefferson Randolph (London: Shackell and Baylis, 1829), 323–333.
10. Congressional Globe, 15th Cong., 2nd sess., 1213 (1818).
11. Philadelphia Register and National Recorder, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Little & Henry, 1819), 279.
12. Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 40; Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, in Randolph, Memoirs, Correspondence, and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 323–333; Annals of Congress, US House of Representatives, 15th Cong., 2nd sess., 1204–1206. My framing of the historical meaning of the controversy owes much to Forbes’s excellent book. See also Adam Rothman, Slavery Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Laura Ford Savarese, “Slavery’s Battleground: Contesting the Status of Enslaved and Free Blacks in St. Louis Freedom Suits, from Statehood to the Civil War” (undergraduate thesis, Harvard University, 2013).
13. Everett S. Brown, ed., “Documents: The Senate Debate on the Breckinridge Bill for the Government of Louisiana, 1804,” American Historical Review 22, no. 2 (January 1917): 354.
14. Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath, 207, 99.
15. Missouri Constitution of 1820, article 3, sections 26–28. The same convention narrowly defeated a provision directing the state legislature to require any emancipated slave to “depart from the state and give security that he will never thereafter return thereto.” See Donnie D. Bellamy, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Missouri, 1820–1860,” Missouri Historical Review 67, no. 2 (1973): 198–199.
16. Cyprian Clamorgan, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis (St. Louis, 1858), 27; Aron, American Confluence; see also Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 2–175.
17. Harrison Traxler, Slavery in Missouri, 1804–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1914), 226; Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 20; see W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Free Press, 1992), 19.
18. Missouri Constitution of 1820, article 3, sections 4, 6; Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 127–161; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 28.
19. Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath, 110.
20. Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath, 110.
21. “The Revised Statutes of the State of Missouri,” vol. 2 (1856), 1101; Bellamy, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Missouri,” 205; Elizabeth Lawson, The Gentleman from Mississippi: Our First Negro Senator, introduction by William L. Patterson (New York: Elizabeth Patterson, 1960), 9.
22. Clamorgan, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, 32, 39, 32, 38, 42, 29, 36. For the history of Black barbers and barbershops, see Quincy T. Mills, Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
23. James Thomas, From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur: The Autobiography of James Thomas, ed. Loren Schweniger (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984).
24. Thomas, From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur, 74.
25. Thomas, From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur, 73, 199, 143; see also 90.
26. Thomas, From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur, 89–90, 87, 71, 158.
27. Thomas, From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur, 115, 90, 87, 93.
28. Clamorgan, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, 27.
29. Bellamy, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Missouri,” 198–205.
30. Thomas, From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur, 155, 158, 81; VanderVelde, Mrs. Dred Scott, 180.
31. William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (Anti-Slavery Office, 1847), 27; Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (G. W. Carleton & Co., 1868); Lucy A. Delaney, From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom (St. Louis: J. T. Smith Publishing House, [189–?]).
32. A. B. Chambers, Trials and Confessions of Madison Henderson, Alias Blanchard, Alfred Amos Warrick, James W. Seward, and Charles Brown (St. Louis: Chambers and Knapp, 1841), 34, 63, 75–76.
33. Chambers, Trials and Confessions of Madison Henderson, 13, 14. For the “Madison Henderson Gang” and the unruly world of enslaved and free people of color on the Mississippi River, see Thomas C. Buchanan’s excellent Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); see also Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
34. Chambers, Trials and Confessions of Madison Henderson, 14–18, 23; Darrel Dexter, Bondage in Egypt: Slavery in Southern Illinois (Cape Girardeau: Center for Regional History, Southeast Missouri State University, 2011), 336–368. Dexter’s book is a little-known gem treating a mostly forgotten and utterly fascinating corner of the history of slavery. See also John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, ed. F. N. Boney (Savannah: Library of Georgia, 1991), 43–45; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 61–67.
35. Chambers, Trials and Confessions of Madison Henderson, 24–27, 29, 64–68, 70–72.
36. Dexter, Bondage in Egypt, 241–368.
37. Chambers, Trials and Confessions of Madison Henderson, 72–74, 42–43, 75.
38. Chambers, Trials and Confessions of Madison Henderson, 62.
39. Chambers, Trials and Confessions of Madison Henderson, 34, 62.
40. Chambers, Trials and Confessions of Madison Henderson, 34, 75–76.
41. Chambers, Trials and Confessions of Madison Henderson, 76, 46, 2, 35, 4, 76.
42. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 27, 1857.
43. Lea VanderVelde, Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom Before Dred Scott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), x, 128.
44. VanderVelde, Redemption Songs, 57–65, 61 (quotation).
45. VanderVelde, Redemption Songs, x, 128.
46. VanderVelde, Mrs. Dred Scott.
47. Scott v. Emerson, 15 Mo. 576, 583 (Mo. 1852); Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 27.
48. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857).
49. Thomas, From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur, 93. For “grace,” see Julie Jeanette Miller, “A History of the Person in America Before the Civil War” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2017).
1. Arenson, The Great Heart of the Republic.
2. Benjamin Madley, American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 45–47, 49–50; Chaffin, Pathfinder, 310–311.
3. The classic account is Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Man: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
4. Galusha Anderson, The Story of a Border City During the Civil War (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1908), 72–74; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 78, 80.
5. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 79.
6. William Vocke, “Our German Soldiers, Paper Read Before the Commandery of the State of Illinois, Military Order of the Loyal Legion, April 9, 1896,” in Military Essays and Recollections (Chicago, 1899), vol. 3, 340–371, quoted in Karl Obermann, Joseph Weydemeyer: Pioneer of American Socialism (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 118.
7. Adams, General William S. Harney, 220.
8. Adams, General William S. Harney, 221–227; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 95–96.
9. Anderson, The Story of a Border City, 89–92; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 98–100; Henry Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody: The Missouri Years of an Austrian Radical, 1849–1866, trans. Steven Rowan (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1997), 294.
10. Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, 296; Anderson, The Story of a Border City, 84; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 101–104.
11. James Neal Primm, “Missouri, St. Louis, and the Secession Crisis,” in Germans for a Free Missouri: Translations from the St. Louis Radical Press, 1857–1862, ed. Stephen Rowan and James Neal Primm (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 4; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 43.
12. Andrew Zimmerman, “From the Rhine to the Mississippi: Property, Democracy, and Socialism in the American Civil War,” Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 1 (March 2015): 7–10. On 1848 in Europe, see Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (1962; New York: Vintage, 1996); Jonathan Sperber, Rhineland Radicals: The Democratic Movement and the Revolution of 1848–1849 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). On the postwar migration from Europe, including to the United States, although not St. Louis, see Helena Toth, An Exiled Generation: German and Hungarian Refugees of Revolution, 1848–1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
13. Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, 203–210.
14. Frank Blair, “The Destiny of the Races of This Continent: An Address Delivered Before the Mercantile Library Association of Boston Massachusetts on the 26th of January, 1859” (Washington, DC: Buell & Richard, 1859), 4, 22, 7, 8, 16–18.
15. Blair, “The Destiny of the Races of This Continent,” 23, 19. On Blair, see William E. Parrish, Frank Blair: Lincoln’s Conservative (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998).
16. “Speech of the Hon. B. Gratz Brown, of St. Louis, on the Subject of Gradual Emancipation in Missouri: Delivered in the House of Representatives, February 12, 1857,” 5, 25.
17. Arenson, The Great Heart of the Republic, 65–66, 67, 71–79.
18. Arenson, The Great Heart of the Republic, 67–70, 80.
19. “Speech of the Hon. B. Gratz Brown,” 5, 25.
20. Zimmerman, “From the Rhine to the Mississippi,” 12, 13. See also Stephen D. Engle, The Yankee Dutchman: The Life of Franz Sigel (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993); “The Rising of the People [Volksturm],” Westliche Post, May 8, 1861, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, 202–203; Franz Sigel, untitled document, Saturday, March 28 [no year], “Gegen Heinzen und Marx—Gegen Kinkel: Andere Aphorismen: Aphorismen: März 1852,” unpaginated, translation by Alison Frank Johnson, Franz Sigel Papers, folder 10, Missouri History Museum Library and Research Center.
21. Sigel, “Gegen Heinzen und Marx.”
22. Zimmerman, “From the Rhine to the Mississippi,” 11, 13; see also Engle, The Yankee Dutchman.
23. Daniel Hertle, Die Deutschen in Nordamerika und der Freiheitskampf in Missouri (Chicago: Staatszeitung, 1865), 59–60.
24. Kristen Layne Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016), 43–79.
25. Daily Alta California, May 28, 1850, 2, quoted in Madley, American Genocide, 128–130, 130 (quotation).
26. As we reflect on the politics of memorialization, on the question of which history of the Civil War will be commemorated in the public squares and parks of the United States, we would do well to remember that many of the men who fought to free the slaves, even the most passionately radical among them, had been Indian killers before the war—and would be again in its aftermath.
27. Anderson, The Story of a Border City, 100–101; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 101, 103.
28. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 99, 104–105, 108–110.
29. Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, 297–298, 309–311; “Important from St. Louis; Capture of Secessionists at Camp Jackson. Trouble Between the Mob and the United States Troops,” New York Times, May 12, 1861; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 109–111; Adams, General William S. Harney, 230.
30. Anderson, The Story of a Border City, 106–115; “Important from St. Louis,” New York Times, May 12, 1861.
31. Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, 300–303; Heinrich Börnstein, Fünfundsiebzig Jahre in der Alten und Neuen Welt: Memoiren eines Unbedeutenden, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1881), 289–290.
32. Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, 304.
33. Adams, General William S. Harney, 233–238.
34. Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, 312, 315; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 120, 123–124.
35. “Die Flüchtigen Rebellen-Sklaven,” Westliche Post, June 19, 1861, quoted in Zimmerman, “From the Rhine to the Mississippi,” 18.
36. Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody, 322, 324; Anzeiger des Westens, June 20, 1861, quoted in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, 265–266.
37. Zimmerman, “From the Rhine to the Mississippi,” 22–23.
38. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 55.
39. Anzeiger des Westens, August 28, 1861, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, 279.
40. Philip S. Foner and David R. Roediger, “Die Achtstundenbewegung: Artikel Joseph Weydemeyers in der ‘Westlichen Post’ (St. Louis),” Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 7 (1984): 321; Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 149; Obermann, Joseph Weydemeyer, 7–19, 74, 92, 106.
41. David R. Roediger, Joseph Weydemeyer: Articles on the Eight Hour Movement (Chicago: Greenleaf Press, 1978), 1; Obermann, Joseph Weydemeyer, 84, 89–94, 118–119.
42. Anzeiger des Westens, September 4 and 18, 1861, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, 284–285; Chaffin, Pathfinder, 460; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 146, 154; Anderson, The Story of a Border City, 204–206.
43. “Proclamation by the Commander of the Western Department,” St. Louis, August 30, 1861, in “Die Flüchtigen Rebellen-Sklaven,” Westliche Post, June 19, 1861, quoted in Zimmerman, “From the Rhine to the Mississippi,” 18, 416n (Lincoln’s response).
44. Anzeiger des Westens, November 13, 1861, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, 290; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 153–156; Chaffin, Pathfinder, 467 (quotation); Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 151 (quotation, emphasis in original). For the conventional wisdom about Frémont, see Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis. For an account that positively emphasizes the revolutionary potential of Frémont’s actions (and those of his subordinates), see Zimmerman, “From the Rhine to the Mississippi,” 22–23.
45. Anzeiger des Westens, December 4, 1861, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, 291.
46. John F. Marszalek, Commander of All Lincoln’s Armies: A Life of General Henry W. Halleck (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 4–66; Madley, American Genocide, 128–130; “Miscellaneous Documents of the House of Representatives for the 2nd Session of the 52nd Congress” (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1893), series 1, vol. 3, 93–94; H. W. Halleck, Lieutenant of Engineers and Secretary of State for California, “Circular to Indian Agents and Others,” in California Star, September 18, 1847, quoted in Madley, American Genocide, 148.
47. Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, series 1, vol. 1, 399, 401; “Commander of a Brigade in the Army of the West to the Headquarters of the Western Department,” Boonville, MO, October 6, 1861; “Order by the Commander of the Department of the Missouri,” St. Louis, MO, November 20, 1860; “Missouri Former Soldier to the Secretary of War,” Rolla, MO, December 1, 1861; “Circular by the Commander of the 4th Division of the Department of Missouri,” Rolla, MO, December 18, 1861; “Commander of the Frémont Hussars to the Commander of the 4th Division of the Department of Missouri,” December 19, 1861; “Commander of the Department of Missouri to the Commander of the 4th Division of the Department,” St. Louis, MO, December 26, 1861; all in Berlin et al., Freedom, 416, 417, 420, 421–422, 423, passim; Sharon Romeo, Gender and Jubilee: Black Freedom and the Reconstruction of Citizenship in Civil War Missouri (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 39–56; Anzeiger des Westens, December 4, 1861, in Rowan and Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri, 291; Zimmerman, “From the Rhine to the Mississippi,” 3, 21.
48. Kristen Layne Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016), 112, 131–132, 137–140.
1. The reading of the “counterrevolution of property” as imperial and Western that follows is deeply indebted to Karuka, Empire’s Tracks, and Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 170–171.
2. Mark E. Neely, The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 34; Anderson, The Story of a Border City, 214–216, 192, 234–237.
3. Neely, The Fate of Liberty, 34; Anderson, The Story of a Border City, 234–237, 245.
4. Anderson, The Story of a Border City, 251, 262–263, 263–267. For slaveholders locking up enslaved people’s shoes and coats during the night, see Berlin et al., Freedom, 410; Romeo, Gender and Jubilee, 33; Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri, 144.
5. Romeo, Gender and Jubilee, 80–84.
6. US Department of War, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, series 2, vol. 4 (Washington, DC, 1880–1901), 72–73, 94–95, 171, 260, 295–298; J. G. Forman, The Western Sanitary Commission: A Sketch… (St. Louis, MO: R. P. Studley & Co., 1864), 134; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 282; Berlin et al., Freedom, 410; Romeo, Gender and Jubilee, 34–36, 73–93; William Wells Brown, The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity (Boston: Lee and Shepherd, 1867), 157 (with thanks to Johari Jabir, who alerted me to the existence of “Give Us a Flag”). See also Mycah Lynn Conner, “‘On This Bare Ground’: The Ordeal and the Aftermath of ‘Contraband Camps’ and the Making of Emancipation in the Civil War West” (PhD diss., Harvard University, forthcoming).
7. US Department of War, The War of the Rebellion, 72–73; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 224–225, 231; US Department of War, The War of the Rebellion, 295–298. “No traitor is too good to be killed by a Negro, nor has any traitor a right to insist on being killed by a white man,” said Missouri Republican Charles Drake at the time. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 282.
8. Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri, 150–151.
9. Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri, 153.
10. Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri, 155; Gary R. Kremer, James Milton Turner and the Promise of America: The Public Life of a Post–Civil War Black Leader (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 13–18; John Kaag, “America’s Hands-On Hegelian,” Chronicle Review, March 20, 2016; Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri, 158; Liat Spiro, “Drawing Capital: Depiction, Machine Tools, and the Political Economy of Industrial Knowledge, 1824–1914” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2019), chap. 4; Laura Leigh Schmidt, “Subject-Object Lessons: Social Science in the St. Louis Style, 1866–1917” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2018).
11. Kremer, James Milton Turner, 19–24; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 667.
12. Anderson, The Story of a Border City, 251, 253–255, 261.
13. Joseph Weydemeyer, “The Eight Hour Movement,” Saint Louis Daily Press, August 8, 1866 (Westliche Post, July 16, 1866), in Roediger, Joseph Weydemeyer, 5.
14. Joseph Weydemeyer, “The Eight Hour Movement—IV,” Saint Louis Daily Press, August 19, 1866 (Westliche Post, July 24, 1866), in Roediger, Joseph Weydemeyer, 19; Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri, 154.
15. Missouri State Constitution of 1865, article II, section 18 (Jefferson City: E. S. Forester, Printer, 1865).
16. Missouri State Constitution of 1865, article II, sections 3–14, 23, 24; Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 330–332.
17. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 322; Hans L. Trefousse, Carl Schurz: A Biography (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 15–38, 126–175.
18. Trefousse, Carl Schurz, 15–38, 126–175; Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri, 135–137, 181–192.
19. Parrish, Frank Blair, 254–256; Stewart Mitchell, Horatio Seymour of New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), 23.
20. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1989), 546–586.
21. Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (New York: Pathfinder, 1977), 43–210.
22. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, 216, 217–222.
23. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, 224, 228; Anderson, Abolitionizing Missouri, 163–164.
24. Madley, American Genocide, 22; Singh, Race and America’s Long War.
25. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, 233, 235, 238.
26. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, 211, 238–239, 242.
27. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, 244, 245.
28. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877, 214–215, 222, 229, 248, 249, 252, 266, 290.
29. St. Louis Evening Post, October 9, 1878, 5, quoted in Thomas M. Spencer, The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration, 1877–1995 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 19. Spencer notes that the newspapers differed about the outfit worn by the prophet; my account is based on the woodcut that ran in the St. Louis Republican on October 6, 1878.
30. Primm, Lion of the Valley, 299–306.
31. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 148–149; James D. Richardson, The Messages and Papers of the President, 1789–1897 (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1902), 127; Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 8, 97.
32. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 140–142.
33. Estes, Our History Is the Future, 101–102; Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, “Criminal Empire: The Making of the Savage in a Lawless Land,” Theory and Event 19, no. 4 (2016).
34. Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, 137–138; Estes, Our History Is the Future, 101–102, 105; Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Mark Grimsley, “‘Rebels’ and ‘Redskins’: US Military Conduct Toward White Southerners and Native Americans in Comparative Perspective,” in Civilians in the Path of War, ed. Mark Grimsley and Clifford J. Rogers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Elliot West, “Reconstructing Race,” Western Historical Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2003); Khal Schneider, “Distinctions That Must Be Preserved: On the Civil War, American Indians, and the West,” Civil War History 62, no. 1 (2016).
35. Estes, Our History Is the Future, 108–109, 169.
36. Karuka, Empire’s Tracks, 69–79; Meghan Black, The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 26–29; Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, 9–10.
37. White, The Republic for Which It Stands; Karuka, Empire’s Tracks; Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2012).
38. Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999), 85, 154, 165–191; Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 63; see also William H. Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1967); and David Krueger, “To Hold What the US Has Taken in Conquest: The United States Army and Colonial Ethnic Forces, 1866–1914” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2020).
39. Black, The Global Interior, 16–28; Hans Trefousse, “Carl Schurz and the Indians,” Great Plains Quarterly 4, no. 2 (1984): 115.
40. Nick Estes, “On William Henry Pratt,” High Country News 5, no. 17 (October 14, 2019).
41. Trefousse, “Carl Schurz and the Indians,” 116. See, generally, Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984); Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, 139, 149, 157–161.
42. L. U. Reavis, Saint Louis: The Future Great City of the World (St. Louis: Gray, Baker & Company, 1870), 6; Primm, Lion of the Valley, 274–275, 289.
43. Primm, Lion of the Valley, 274–275; Arenson, The Great Heart of the Republic, 178–198, 184 (quotations).
44. Manu Karuka, “Remembering the Golden Spike Ceremony,” Boston Review, May 10, 2019.
45. Primm, Lion of the Valley, 286–290.
46. Primm, Lion of the Valley, 292, 294; White, Railroaded.
47. “The Opening of the Great Southwest” (St. Louis: MKT, 1970), 10–11.
48. Berger, St. Louis and Empire, 46, 47–49, 52; Joshua Specht, Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
49. Berger, St. Louis and Empire, 57.
50. Berger, St. Louis and Empire, 62, 90–91.
51. Berger, St. Louis and Empire, 66, 87, 98–109. On the revolution generally, see John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1968). See also Painter, Standing at Armageddon.
52. Berger, St. Louis and Empire, 71.
53. Berger, St. Louis and Empire, 77, 81–83; Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Hart Benton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889).
54. Eric Love, Race over Empire: Racism and US Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 104–105, 182–183; Berger, St. Louis and Empire, 76–77; see also Painter, Standing at Armageddon.
55. Berger, St. Louis and Empire, 346–347; Leo A. Landau, The Big Cinch (St. Louis: Franklin Co., 1910); Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 584, 585, 634; Painter, Standing at Armageddon.
56. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 634.
57. Primm, Lion of the Valley, 358–359, 274 (quotation).
58. “Three Killed and Fourteen Wounded; Statement Regarding Sunday’s Shooting,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 11, 1900.
59. “Three Killed and Fourteen Wounded; Statement Regarding Sunday’s Shooting,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 11, 1900; “An Old Man Was Shot Dead,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 11, 1900.
60. “Inquest on Riot Victims Today,” “Recruits for the Posse,” “Southern Electric Cars to Run,” and “Six Fined in Police Court,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 12, 1900; “Civil War Veterans to Serve on Posse,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 13, 1900.
61. Primm, Lion of the Valley, 264, 274, 360.
1. Primm, Lion of the Valley, 274, 358.
2. W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 26.
3. Theodore Dreiser, Newspaper Days: An Autobiography, ed. T. D. Nostwich (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 2000), 229, 231, 267–268; see also Cecil Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 91.
4. Dreiser, Newspaper Days, 348–350.
5. Dreiser, Newspaper Days, 405, 388; see especially Kevin J. Mumford’s indispensable Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
6. Dreiser, Newspaper Days, 101–103, 128, 198, 292–295, 321–324. On this and all that follows, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign People at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).
7. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (Chicago: Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1899). On Chopin in St. Louis, see George Lipsitz, Sidewalks of St. Louis: Places, People, and Politics in an American City (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 61–64. On the turn-of-the-century coverup of the fact that white women were attracted to Black men, see Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” New York Age, June 25, 1892.
8. Stephen Longstreet, ed., Nell Kimball: Her Life as an American Madam: By Herself (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 72–73. Nell Kimball is a complicated source of uncertain provenance. It is partially plagiarized and almost certainly ghostwritten (or perhaps even entirely written) by the man who claimed to be its editor. Nevertheless, the terrific amount of information it contains about St. Louis in the 1870s that can be verified from other sources suggests that it was written by or with someone with a good deal of knowledge about the city. I have thus treated it as a compilation of street stories—a gathering of many otherwise unheard voices into the voice of an autobiographical avatar.
9. Dreiser, Newspaper Days, 395, 413–414.
10. St. Louis Republic, January 18, 1894.
11. Dreiser, Newspaper Days, 399–400.
12. Dreiser, Newspaper Days, 235, 402.
13. Dreiser, Newspaper Days, 402. On the history of ragtime generally, see Edward A. Berlin, King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Edward A. Berlin, Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); John Edward Hasse, Ragtime: Its History, Composers, and Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1985); Mary Collins Barile and Christine Montgomery, Merit, Not Sympathy, Wins: The Life and Times of Blind Boone (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2012); Thomas C. Holt, Children of Fire: A History of African Americans (New York: Hill & Wang, 2011), 208–210.
14. Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy, 1–15. There are many versions of the song, and the elements I itemize do not appear in all of them, nor do they always appear in the same guise—in some versions, for example, Billy Lyons has two children and in some versions he has three. All of this and much more can be learned from Brown’s book, which is painstaking, fascinating, and indispensable.
15. Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy, 23–25, 37, 91. My reconstruction of Lee’s outfit is based on Brown (23) and on Dreiser, Newspaper Days, 403–404.
16. Nathan B. Young, excerpt from Your St. Louis and Mine, in “Ain’t but a Place”: An Anthology of African American Writings About St. Louis, ed. Gerald Early (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Museum Press, 1998), 345–346; Berlin, King of Ragtime, 112; Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy, 65; see also Arna Bontemps, God Sends Sunday (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1931).
17. Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy, 75–84.
18. Allen E. Wagner, Good Order and Safety: A History of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, 1861–1906 (St. Louis: Missouri History Museum, 2008), 100–108, 301; see also Dreiser, Newspaper Days, 130 (“Gambling and prostitution were never so rampant as now [1893]”).
19. “Report of the Committee of the General Assembly Appointed to Investigate the Police Department of the City of St. Louis” (St. Louis: Missouri Democrat Book and Job Printing House, 1868), vi–xi (series 1), viii–xi (series 2) (with thanks to Garrett Felber); Wagner, Good Order and Safety, 161, 212, 218.
20. Wagner, Good Order and Safety, xvii, 161, 212, 218, 182–183; Dreiser, Newspaper Days, 141–143, 233; Handy, Father of the Blues, 27; Longstreet, Nell Kimball, 31.
21. Wagner, Good Order and Safety, 291–292; Handy, Father of the Blues, 27.
22. Longstreet, Nell Kimball, 8; Wagner, Good Order and Safety, 303. On minstrel shows, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Rhae Lynn Barnes, Darkology: When the American Dream Wore Blackface (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., forthcoming). On Joplin in St. Louis, see Lipsitz, Sidewalks of St. Louis, 68–72.
23. Berlin, King of Ragtime, 8, 44–46.
24. Berlin, King of Ragtime, 112–113.
25. Handy, Father of the Blues, 26–28; Berlin, King of Ragtime, 10, 50, 145, 199, 253, 295, 301, 309–311, 326.
26. Elsa Barkley Brown, “Polyrhythms and Improvisation: Lessons for Women’s History,” History Workshop 31 (Spring 1991): 85–90.
27. Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy, 41. For an earlier example of a similar process, see Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
28. Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (New York: McClure, Phillips, and Co., 1904), 29–62, 101–146.
29. Steffens, The Shame of the Cities, 213, 23, 29, 31, 34.
30. Steffens, The Shame of the Cities, 23.
31. Steffens, The Shame of the Cities, 29, 54–59.
32. Edward McPherson, The History of the Future: American Essays (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2017), 62; William R. Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 207, 226; James Gilbert, Whose Fair? Experience, Memory, and the History of the Great St. Louis Exposition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 20.
33. McPherson, The History of the Future, 62; Gilbert, Whose Fair?, 14; Everdell, The First Moderns, 207.
34. McPherson, The History of the Future, 65; Gilbert, Whose Fair?, 63, 76, 138; Everdell, The First Moderns, 210; Lee Gaskins, “At the Fair,” https:// atthefair.homestead.com/1904Fair.html (accessed June 11, 2018); Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at the American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 156.
35. Everdell, The First Moderns, 220–225.
36. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 154, 159–160.
37. Pamela Newkirk, Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (New York: Amistad, 2015), 129; Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 163; Everdell, The First Moderns, 215; Gilbert, Whose Fair?, 39; see also Sadia Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
38. Newkirk, Spectacle, 3–17, 79–139, 236–240.
39. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), no. 7.
40. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 167, 170–172; Gilbert, Whose Fair?, 58, 139; Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 230–284; Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference, 123–129; Painter, Standing at Armageddon.
41. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 171; Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference, 127.
42. Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference, 128; Gilbert, Whose Fair?, 31; Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 163.
43. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 162.
44. Gilbert, Whose Fair?, 137; Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 49; Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference, 126.
45. See Dowden-White, Groping Toward Democracy, 27; Gilbert, Whose Fair?, 131–152; McPherson, The History of the Future, 65; Gaskins, “At the Fair,” https://atthefair.homestead.com/1904Fair.html (accessed June 12, 2018); see also Brown, “Polyrhythms and Improvisation.”
46. McPherson, The History of the Future, 76–77; Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 160.
47. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2011); David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2018); Everdell, The First Moderns, 208; Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 155, 159.
48. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 172.
49. Gilbert, Whose Fair?, 123–152.
50. Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of US Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 262–290.
51. “Filipinos Become a Fad with Foolish Girls,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 3, 1904; “Scouts Lose First Battle with Marines,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 7, 1904; Gilbert, Whose Fair?, 150–151; Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 176–177.
1. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century (Chicago: Negro Fellowship Herald Press, 1917), 3.
2. Elliott M. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis: July 2, 1917 (Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964); Andrew J. Theising and Debra H. Moore, Made in USA: East St. Louis: The Rise and Fall of an Industrial River Town (St. Louis: Virginia Publishing, 2003); Malcolm McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing in East St. Louis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Charles L. Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008).
3. Wells-Barnett, The East St. Louis Massacre, 4.
4. Theising and Moore, Made in USA: East St. Louis, 94–103.
5. Excerpt from Miles Davis, with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), in Early, Ain’t but a Place, 213.
6. Theising and Moore, Made in USA: East St. Louis, 103, 111–112, 118; W.E.B. Du Bois, “Of Work and Wealth,” in Du Bois, Darkwater, 42; McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 31.
7. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 177–178, 187; Theising and Moore, Made in USA: East St. Louis, 134, 137.
8. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 193.
9. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 190, 192–193; Theising and Moore, Made in USA: East St. Louis, 140 (Anderson quotation).
10. McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 197–210.
11. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 197–210; Du Bois, “Of Work and Wealth,” 30; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 30.
12. McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 11; see James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage, 2011).
13. McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 35, 15–17; see also Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference.
14. McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 38, 45; Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 24.
15. McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 45; Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 24. For this strain of white supremacy, see Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (New York: Basic Books, 2016); Hernández, City of Inmates; Ikuko Asaka, Tropical Freedom: Climate, Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in the Age of Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). See also W.E.B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of War,” Atlantic, May 1915, 707–714.
16. Berger, St. Louis and Empire, 114–115; Theising and Moore, Made in USA: East St. Louis, 118; Rudolf Alexander Clemen, The American Livestock and Meat Industry (New York: Ronald Press Co., 1923), 473 (with special thanks to Joshua Specht).
17. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 166.
18. US House of Representatives, Select Committee to Investigate the Race Riots in East St. Louis (1917), “Statement of Ben Beard (Colored) of East St. Louis, Laborer at Aluminum Ore,” vol. 2, 342, and “Statement of Earl Jimerson, Financial Secretary, Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America,” vol. 10, 2045, 2057–2058.
19. US House of Representatives, Select Committee to Investigate the Race Riots in East St. Louis (1917), “Statement of Henry Kerr, District Organizer, AFL,” vol. 9, 1869–1870, 1939; “Statement of Earl Jimerson, Financial Secretary, Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America,” vol. 10, 2024–2025; Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 13, 158–159, 161, 168–169; McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 47–52; Lumpkins, American Pogrom; Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 13. On ethnic cleansing and democracy, see Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
20. McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 52; “Statement of Henry Kerr,” vol. 9, 1869–70; Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 214.
21. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Shape of Fear,” North American Review 223 (June 1925): 291–304. The passage reappeared, unaltered, in the sixteenth chapter of Black Reconstruction in America (1935), where Du Bois introduced the notion of the “wages of whiteness”; see Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 573–574. See also Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993); and Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness.
22. McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 39.
23. McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 116; Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 25.
24. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 145, 152–153; McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 39–40; Du Bois, “Of Work and Wealth,” 46.
25. McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 96–97.
26. McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 19, 100–103.
27. McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 107, 171–172.
28. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 27–28.
29. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 29–30.
30. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 30–31.
31. McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 98; Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 149.
32. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 38–40.
33. US House of Representatives, Select Committee to Investigate the Race Riots in East St. Louis (1917), “Statement of Paul Y. Anderson,” vol. 2, 252; “Statement of G. E. Popkess,” vol. 2, 492; W.E.B. Du Bois and Martha Gruening, “The Massacre of East St. Louis: An Investigation by the NAACP,” The Crisis (September 1917): 219–222, 232, 235; Wells-Barnett, The East St. Louis Massacre, 7; Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 41–65; McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 125–162.
34. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 53–55; McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 163–177; Du Bois, “Of Work and Wealth,” 42.
35. Du Bois and Gruening, “The Massacre of East St. Louis,” 219–222, 232, 235; Wells-Barnett, The East St. Louis Massacre, 6, 7; Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 41–65; McLaughlin, Power, Community, and Racial Killing, 125–162; US House of Representatives, Select Committee to Investigate the Race Riots in East St. Louis (1917), “Statement of Charles Roger,” vol. 1, 107.
36. Carlos F. Hurd, “Post-Dispatch Man, an Eye Witness, Describes Massacre of Negroes,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 3, 1917.
37. Wells-Barnett, The East St. Louis Massacre, 4–7.
38. Du Bois and Gruening, “The Massacre of East St. Louis,” 226–227, 231; US House of Representatives, Select Committee to Investigate the Race Riots in East St. Louis (1917), “Statement of Thomas Hunter,” vol. 5, 1073–1080.
39. Wells-Barnett, The East St. Louis Massacre, 4–5.
40. Du Bois and Gruening, “The Massacre of East St. Louis,” 235.
41. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 46, 67; Marcus Garvey speech, July 11, 1917, reprinted in Early, Ain’t but a Place, 305.
42. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, 111–131.
43. US House of Representatives, Select Committee to Investigate the Race Riots in East St. Louis (1917).
44. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Black Man and the Unions,” The Crisis (March 1918).
45. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” 16, 21, 22. My reading of Du Bois owes everything to Robinson, Black Marxism; to the work of Robin D. G. Kelley, especially Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); and to “What Is Racial Capitalism and Why Does It Matter?,” a lecture given by Kelley at the University of Washington on November 18, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=--gim7W_jQQ. See also Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy, eds., The Old History of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). Finally, I must express my gratitude to my colleague Tommie Shelby, who allowed me to horn in on his franchise and coteach our course on “Reading Du Bois,” and to all of the terrific students we have had in the class over the years we have taught it together.
46. Du Bois, “Of Work and Wealth,” 48, 42.
47. Du Bois, “Of Work and Wealth,” 44.
48. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” 24.
49. Du Bois, “Of Work and Wealth,” 44.
50. Wells-Barnett, The East St. Louis Massacre, 5.
1. “One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Great Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North,” www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2015/onewayticket/; Selwyn K. Troen and Glen E. Holt, eds., St. Louis (New York: New Viewpoints, 1977), 211.
2. “United Welfare Association Explains Its Attitude on Question of Segregation,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 16, 1916; see also “Negro Leaders’ Needless Alarm,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 25, 1915; Dowden-White, Groping Toward Democracy, 77–80.
3. Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1916); Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948); Dowden-White, Groping Toward Democracy, 34.
4. Wayne E. Wheeling, secretary, United Welfare Association, “In Defense of Race Segregation,” letter to the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 27, 1915.
5. Harland Bartholomew, Comprehensive City Plan: St. Louis, Missouri (St. Louis: City Plan Commission, 1947), 15; Richard Wright, Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941; New York: Basic Books, 2002), 91–140; Dick Gregory, N****r: An Autobiography, with Robert Lipsyte (New York: Pocket Books, 1964), 34.
6. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017), 172–173.
7. Gregory, N****r, 3–4.
8. Gregory, N****r, 8, 11, 15, 17, 29, 30, 49–50; see also excerpt from Any Boy Can: The Archie Moore Story, reprinted in Early, Ain’t but a Place, 81–92.
9. Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
10. Gregory, N****r, 25, 26, 28, 55, 59, 77. For dozens of similar neighborhood stories about Mill Creek Valley, see Ron Fagerstrom, Mill Creek Valley: A Soul of St. Louis (St. Louis: author, 2000).
11. Fagerstrom, Mill Creek Valley. For the rich history of Black St. Louis in these years, see Early, Ain’t but a Place.
12. Early, Ain’t but a Place, 81–120, 152–243.
13. James W. Endersby and William T. Horner, Lloyd Gaines and the Fight to End Segregation (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2016).
14. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938); Chad Garrison, “The Mystery of Lloyd Gaines,” St. Louis Riverfront Times, April 4, 2007.
15. See excerpt from Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins, and Langston Hughes, “In Racial Matters in St. Louis ‘De Sun Do Move,’” both in Early, Ain’t but a Place, 65, 348; see also Zachary Bostwick Nowak, “The State in the Station: The Nineteenth-Century American Train Station and State Power” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2018). For these struggles as well as their underlying class character, see Dowden-White, Groping Toward Democracy; and Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 14, 17–42.
16. St. Louis Urban League, Annual Report for 1944, 2, 9–10; see also St. Louis Urban League, Annual Report for 1939, 6.
17. Shelley v. Kraemer. See Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 12, 78, 81, 141, 142, 191.
18. Phillip O’Conner, “Pool Riot Pivotal in Race Relations: City’s Decision in ’49 to Integrate Pools Sparked Violence That Triggered Change,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 21, 2009; Jamala Rogers, “Reflections on a Racist Ambush,” St. Louis American, June 25, 2009.
19. O’Conner, “Pool Riot Pivotal in Race Relations”; Rogers, “Reflections on a Racist Ambush.”
20. O’Conner, “Pool Riot Pivotal in Race Relations”; Rogers, “Reflections on a Racist Ambush.”
21. Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974); Kelley, Hammer and Hoe; Hosea Hudson and Nell Irvin Painter, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: The Life and Times of a Black Radical (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009). For St. Louis in particular, see Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, and Ervin, Gateway to Equality.
22. Larry Giles, National Building Arts Center, interview with the author, January 8, 2019; Emma Goldman, Living My Life (New York: Dover Publishing, 1970), vol. 1, 452–453, 477; vol. 2, chap. 47.
23. Giles, interview with the author, January 8, 2019; see also Alice Martin Turner, The Tempest Maker: The Story of Harry Turner (New York: Exposition Press, 1955); Jack Conroy, A World to Win (New York: Covici Friede, 1935); Douglas Wixson, Worker-Writer in America: Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism, 1898–1990 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994); James R. Green, Grassroots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895–1943 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 136, 221.
24. Conroy, A World to Win, 154, 165, 295; “‘Hooverville’ and ‘Merryland,’ New ‘Subdivisions Along Riverfront Here’,” St. Louis Star and Times, August 15, 1931; “Hooverville Will Decide Whether It Wants a New Mayor,” St. Louis Star and Times, January 22, 1932; “Hooverville to Have Its Brightest Christmas,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 24, 1933; “Shot to Death by Rival in Row About a Woman,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 1, 1933.
25. Dowden-White, Groping Toward Democracy, 36–38.
26. Adam Kloppe, “New Insights from an Old Panorama,” Missouri Historical Society, February 21, 2018, https://mohistory.org/blog/new-insights-from-an-old-panorama/.
27. “1,500 in Parade to City Hall Seek Food for Needy,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 9, 1932.
28. “1,500 in Parade to City Hall Seek Food for Needy,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 9, 1932.
29. “Police Drive 3,000 Led by Communists from City Hall with Tear Gas,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 11, 1932; see also “Four Shot in Riot at St. Louis,” Moberly Monitor-Index, July 11, 1932.
30. “Police Drive 3,000 Led by Communists from City Hall with Tear Gas,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 11, 1932.
31. “Police Drive 3,000 Led by Communists from City Hall with Tear Gas,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 11, 1932.
32. “Police Drive 3,000 Led by Communists from City Hall with Tear Gas,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 11, 1932; “Police Seeking Warrants for 13 Charging Rioting,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 13, 1932.
33. “Directs Police to Stop Meetings of Communists,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 11, 1932; “Court Postpones Hearing for 35 in City Hall Rioting,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 14, 1932.
34. “Charges Police Beat Suspects in City Hall Riot,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 24, 1932.
35. “Alderman Brock Explains Plan to Establish Free Food Depots,” St. Louis Star and Times, July 14, 1932; “Hung Jury at Trial of Alleged Red Rioter,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 23, 1932; Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 27–28.
36. Myrna Fichtenbaum, The Funsten Nut Strike (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 14.
37. Fichtenbaum, The Funsten Nut Strike, 6–8, 15; excerpt from Julius Hunter, Kingsbury Place: The First Two Hundred Years, in Early, Ain’t but a Place, 391–401.
38. Fichtenbaum, The Funsten Nut Strike, 15–18.
39. “500 Negro Women Go on Strike for ‘Living Wage,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 1, 1933; “Women Nut Pickers’ Strike Continues; Factories Closed,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 17, 1933; Fichtenbaum, The Funsten Nut Strike, 15–18.
40. Ervin, Gateway to Equality, 34; “Frees Woman Beaten by Police,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 17, 1933; “68 Freed on Peace Charges in Strike of Nut Pickers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 23, 1933.
41. “Mayor Hears Wage Protest of Nutpickers,” St. Louis Star and Times, May 23, 1933; Mayor’s Group Takes Up Strike of Nut Pickers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 23, 1933; Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 30, 32.
42. “Nut Pickers to Return to Jobs at Double Pay,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 24, 1933; “Mayor’s Arbiters Settle Strike of 1,200 Nut Pickers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 25, 1933.
43. Ervin, Gateway to Equality, 33, 39–40; Trade Union Unity League, “To the Workers of St. Louis,” reproduced in full in Fichtenbaum, The Funsten Nut Strike, 68.
44. Ervin, Gateway to Equality, 35.
45. “Communist Party Oral Histories: Hershel Walker,” posted July 25, 2017, Tamiment Library, New York University, https://wp.nyu.edu/tamimentcpusa/hershel-walker/; see also Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 32.
46. “Communist Party Oral Histories: Hershel Walker,” posted July 25, 2017, Tamiment Library, New York University, https://wp.nyu.edu/tamimentcpusa/hershel-walker/. For the March on Washington Movement, see Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway. For the PMEW, see Gerald Horne, Facing the Rising Sun: African Americans, Japan, and the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity (New York: New York University Press, 2018).
47. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981), 158; William H. Patterson, “Sikeston: Hitlerite Crime Against America” (St. Louis: Communist Party of Missouri, 1942); Rosemary Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 65–68; “Communist Party Oral Histories: Hershel Walker,” posted July 25, 2017, Tamiment Library, New York University, https://wp.nyu.edu/tamimentcpusa/hershel-walker/. In the years immediately following, Herbert Aptheker sexually abused his young daughter, who told her story in Bettina F. Aptheker, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel (New York: Seal Press, 2006).
48. “Communist Party Oral Histories: Hershel Walker,” posted July 25, 2017, Tamiment Library, New York University, https://wp.nyu.edu/tamimentcpusa/hershel-walker/.
49. Ervin, Gateway to Equality, 42–45; Fichtenbaum, The Funsten Nut Strike, 45.
50. Ervin, Gateway to Equality, 53–69.
51. On the mainstream civil rights movement seeing economic injustice as a key issue only in the late 1960s, see Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006); on the movement outside the South, see Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2009).
52. Ervin, Gateway to Equality, 79–95. The skepticism expressed by the St. Louis Urban League about the actions of the working-class Black women of the CCC seems an uncanny premonition of Oprah Winfrey’s 2015 criticism of the protests in the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown. “I’m looking for leadership,” she said of a movement full of leaders.
53. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 2, 8, 9, 16, and 22, April 1, 19, and 29, and May 16, 1937; St. Louis Star and Times, March 22, 1937. On the Emerson strike, see Feurer, Radical Unionism, 65–68; “A Yale Man and a Communist,” Fortune 28, no. 5 (November 1943): 147.
54. Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 44–49; George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 58; “A Yale Man and a Communist,” Fortune 28, no. 5 (November 1943): 218; see also Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).
55. Berger, St. Louis and Empire, 175.
56. Berger, St. Louis and Empire, 160–161; Denise Degarmo, The Disposal of Radioactive Wastes in the Metropolitan St. Louis Area: The Environmental and Health Legacy of the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006).
57. Ervin, Gateway to Equality, 97; “Communist Party Oral Histories: Hershel Walker,” posted July 25, 2017, Tamiment Library, New York University, https://wp.nyu.edu/tamimentcpusa/hershel-walker/; Ervin, Gateway to Equality, 97–112.
58. Ervin, Gateway to Equality, 97–112. See also Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 50; Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 2011).
59. Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 99.
60. Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 47, 48, 55; “A Yale Man and a Communist,” Fortune 28, no. 5 (November 1943).
61. Feurer, Radical Unionism, 163–176; Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 99–135; Michael L. Lawson, Dammed Indians: The Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944–1980 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).
62. William Sentner v. United States of America, US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, 253 F.2d 310 (1958).
63. Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, 157–181; Robert H. Zieger, The CIO: 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor’s War at Home: The CIO in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Karl E. Klare, “Judicial Deradicalization of the Wagner Act and the Origins of Modern Legal Consciousness, 1937–1941,” Minnesota Law Review 62 (1977–1978): 265.
1. Mark Abbott, “A Document That Changed America: The 1907 A City Plan for St. Louis,” in Mark Tranel, ed., St. Louis Plans: The Ideal and the Real St. Louis (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2007), 17–53, 49 (quotation); Michael R. Allen, “The Evolution of the Gateway Mall (Part 2): The Civic Center,” Preservation Research Office, January 6, 2012, http://preservationresearch.com/downtown/the-evolution-of-the-gateway-mall-part-2-the-civic-center/.
2. Harland Bartholomew and Associates, series 1–7 (“City Planning Reports”), Harland Bartholomew and Associates Collection, University Archives, Washington University, St. Louis; Norman J. Johnson, “Harland Bartholomew: Precedent for the Profession,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 39, no. 2 (1973): 115–124.
3. Harland Bartholomew, “Zoning for St. Louis: A Fundamental Part of the City Plan” (St. Louis: Nixon-Jones Printing Co., 1918), 16–17; Harland Bartholomew, “The Zone Plan: City Plan Commission” (St. Louis: Nixon-Jones Printing Co., 1919), 11, 30.
4. Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference, 115–120; Rothstein, The Color of Law, 60–62, 82–88; Bartholomew, “The Zone Plan,” 30.
5. Tracy Campbell, The Gateway Arch: A Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 21–23.
6. Campbell, The Gateway Arch, 35.
7. Campbell, The Gateway Arch, 32–33 (quotation).
8. Campbell, The Gateway Arch, 37–43, 37 (quotation).
9. Campbell, The Gateway Arch, 27, 36, 46.
10. Campbell, The Gateway Arch, 27, 36, 45–52; Mark Tranel, “From Dreams to Reality: The Arch as a Metaphor for St. Louis Plans,” in Tranel, St. Louis Plans, 1–13.
11. Bartholomew, Comprehensive City Plan.
12. “3 Superhighways Planned for Postwar St. Louis,” Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, October 3, 1943; Rothstein, The Color of Law, 128; http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/washington-park/about-cemetery. For the highways in St. Louis and throughout the nation, as well as the overall vision of race, space, and economy that frames this chapter, see Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness; see also Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Ira D. Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2006); Painter, The History of White People.
13. Bartholomew, Comprehensive City Plan, 28, plates 11, 12, and 13; Mark Abbott, “The 1947 Comprehensive City Plan and Harland Bartholomew’s St. Louis,” in Tranel, St. Louis Plans, 125.
14. Bartholomew, Comprehensive City Plan, 29; Abbott, “The 1947 Comprehensive City Plan and Harland Bartholomew’s St. Louis,” 125.
15. Bartholomew, Comprehensive City Plan, 28, plates 11 and 13.
16. “Map of ‘Cancerous Slum District Eating Away at the Heart of the City,’” and “Marching Blight,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 12 and April 4, 1948.
17. Bartholomew, Comprehensive City Plan, 35; Abbott, “The 1947 Comprehensive City Plan,” 135–138.
18. Fagerstrom, Mill Creek Valley, 62.
19. Park, “Self-Deportation Nation.”
20. Jas. L. Ford (First National Bank) to “Dear Edna” (League of Women Voters), February 2, 1948; Jas. L. Ford to “Dear Addie” (League of Women Voters), March 11, 1948; Special Committee, St. Louis Race Relations Commission, October 7, 1948; Katherine Shryven (Progressive Party) to “Mrs. L. Matthew Werner” (League of Women Voters), December 28, 1948; all in box 107 (“Slum Clearance Bond Issue”), folder 1351 (“League of Women Voters Addenda, 1916–1977”), State Historical Society of Missouri, St. Louis.
21. Ervin, Gateway to Equality, 154; Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 103–109.
22. Roy Wenzlick and Co., Market Analysis and Reuse Appraisal, Mill Creek Valley Redevelopment Project, St. Louis, Missouri, submitted to the Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority, October 1, 1956, 12, 36, 56.
23. Fagerstrom, Mill Creek Valley, 20; Early, Ain’t but a Place, 79, 101.
24. Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 103; George Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 212.
25. Francesca Ressello Ammon, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); see also Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Rootshock: How Tearing Up Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It (New York: Random House, 2004).
26. Berger, St. Louis and Empire, 179–190, 180 (quotation).
27. “Sixteen in Webster Groves” aired on CBS on February 25, 1966; it is clear from footage that includes a football game and the roasting of a turkey that it was shot the preceding fall of 1965.
28. Henry called the city in his study “Rome,” but evidence in the Jules Henry Papers in the Washington University Archives (series 5, box 5), including student survey answers in which the respondents self-identify as students at Webster Groves High School, demonstrates that his research was in Webster Groves.
29. “56 in Webster Groves,” Riverfront Times, March 1, 2006.
30. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness; Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Picador, 2010); Rothstein, The Color of Law.
31. Rothstein, The Color of Law, 65 (quotation), 85.
32. Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 96–97; Rothstein, The Color of Law, 64–65; University of Richmond, “Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America,” https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=4/36.71/-96.93&opacity=0.\8. On the importance of remembering the racial capitalist mechanism that the federal government was subsidizing, see Destin Jenkins, “Who Segregated America?,” Public Books, December 21, 2017.
33. Rothstein, The Color of Law, 89–91, 91 (quotation). The deed quoted is from a home sale in Pasadena Hills.
34. Gordon, Mapping Decline, 87.
35. Gordon, Mapping Decline, 83–88, 97; “Windows Smashed at Negro Home,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 19, 1969; Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 177.
36. Jim Singer, “Beirne Park: The Shame of Creve Coeur,” unpublished paper in my possession; see also City of Creve Coeur, “Parks & Rec,” www.creve-coeur` .org/284/Parks; Rothstein, The Color of Law, 125.
37. Freedom of Residence Committee Papers, 1962–1969, S0438, State Historical Society of Missouri.
38. Rothstein, The Color of Law, ix–xi.
39. Quoted in Gordon, Mapping Decline, 87. In this case, the “clients” were reporting to the Freedom of Residence Committee.
40. Jamala Rogers, Ferguson Is America: Roots of Rebellion (St. Louis: Mira Digital Publishing, 2015), 18–19.
41. Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926); Gordon, Mapping Decline, 114, 136, 143.
42. Gordon, Mapping Decline, 129–136.
43. Gordon, Mapping Decline, 137–145, 147.
44. Gordon, Mapping Decline, 147; “Ferguson Again Considers Fence as Crime Deterrent,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 25, 1976; see also “Ferguson Council on the Fence for Barrier,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 24, 1975; “Ferguson Fence,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 25, 1975; “Ferguson to Seek Insurance Bids,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 14, 1975.
45. “Church-Sponsored Housing Project Is Under Attack,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 8, 1970.
46. “Church-Sponsored Housing Project Is Under Attack,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 8, 1970; “Political Figures Voice Opposition to Housing Project,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 10, 1970.
47. “Housewives March,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 22, 1970.
48. “‘I’m Ready for a Street Fight,’ Says Opponent of Church Homes,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 21, 1970; “Move to Incorporate Black Jack Advances,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 26, 1970.
49. United States of America v. City of Black Jack, Missouri, 508 F.2d 1179 (1974).
50. Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., 576 U.S. ___ (2015).
51. US Census Bureau, “Census of Population and Housing,” 1950 data, vol. 2, Missouri, 76, www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html; Social Explorer and US Census Bureau, “Census 1970” (St. Louis County, Missouri), www.socialexplorer.com/tables/C1970/R12366530. On the role of federal mortgage subsidies in disciplining the white working class, see Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (New York: Haymarket Books, 2016).
52. “The Great Passion Play,” www.greatpassionplay.org/holy-land.html.
53. “Christian Nationalism Defined,” The Cross and the Flag 11, no. 4 (July 1952). The Cross and the Flag is often cataloged by librarians as having been published in Detroit, where Smith lived, but it accepted submissions to a St. Louis post office box and stated in every issue that it was “Published at 1533 S. Grand, St. Louis Mo.” See also “The Great Passion Play,” www.greatpassionplay.org/holy-land.html.
54. John A. Stormer, None Dare Call It Treason (Florissant, MO: Liberty Bell Press, 1963), 158–159; “John Stormer, Whose ‘None Dare Call It Treason’ Was a Landmark of Conspiracy Literature, Dies at 90,” Washington Post, July 16, 2018.
55. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, February 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, and 26, 1960, June 23, 1965, October 1, 1962, July 13, 1967, and July 30, 1968; see also “What’s the Purpose Behind the Globe-Democrat’s Military Expert’s Sociopolitical ‘Riot’ Column,” St. Louis American, February 19, 1967.
56. Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 176, 221–222; “Ultimatum of Percy Green,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 23, 1965; see also “Police Brutality,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 24, 1965.
57. Molly Ivins, Nothin’ but Good Times Ahead (New York: Random House, 1993), 136.
58. Phyllis Schlafly, A Choice Not an Echo (Alton, IL: Pere Marquette Press, 1964), 16, 25, 56, 63, 67, 79, 99, 107, 111, 121.
59. Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States, 617, 655, 658–671, 662, 664, 668, 768, 777–778.
60. “Hostile Crowd Blocks Nazi March, Rally,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 12, 1978; see also “Nazis Get Permit for Protest to Go Through South St. Louis,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 3, 1978; “No Evidence to Link Hinckley to St. Louis Nazis,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 1, 1981.
61. Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History (New York: Picador, 2006).
62. “Hedy Epstein, Rights Activist and Holocaust Survivor, Dies at 91,” New York Times, March 28, 2016; “Paul Revere of Ecology,” Time, February 2, 1970; Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971); Barry Commoner, The Poverty of Power: Energy and the Economic Crisis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972).
63. “100,000 to Take Part in Parade of ‘Hard Hats,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 7, 1970; “Some Violence at March Backing War,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 8, 1970; “Some Who Watched Parade Were Just Visitors from Park,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 8, 1970; “The Hard Hats in Lindell,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 9, 1970; see also Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010), 135, 178, 347.
64. A separate essay could be written on the indispensable role of the colors green and purple in proving that white people are not racist (“Sixteen in Webster Groves”).
1. Kenneth S. Jolly, Black Liberation in the Midwest: The Struggle in St. Louis, Missouri, 1964–1970 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 18–28; Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 97.
2. Jolly, Black Liberation in the Midwest, 19–21.
3. See Clarence Lang, “Locating the Civil Rights Movement: An Essay on the Deep South, Midwest, and Border South in Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of Social History 47, no. 2 (2013): 371–400. Lang’s argument for both the particularity and importance of the civil rights history of St. Louis provides the polestar of my analysis.
4. Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 112–114.
5. Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 112–134, 113 (quotations).
6. Percy Green, interview with the author, St. Louis, Missouri, March 7, 2018.
7. Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 158; Percy Green, interview with the author, St. Louis, Missouri, March 7, 2018.
8. Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 162.
9. Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 162–163.
10. See St. Louis Post-Dispatch photos dated October 10, 1963, and Jefferson Bank Collection, St. Louis Mercantile Library Collection, University of Missouri–St. Louis; “August 30, 1963: Protests at Jefferson Bank Lead to Major Changes in Hiring Practices in St. Louis,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 30, 2016; Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 166.
11. Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 166–177.
12. Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 103–109. Civic Progress is still around; see www.civicprogressstl.org/.
13. Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 178–179.
14. Percy Green, interview with the author, St. Louis, Missouri, March 7 and 8, 2018; “Put Capitalism to Work in Ghettos,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 30, 1968.
15. Percy Green, interview with the author, St. Louis, Missouri, March 8, 2018. Green described the surreal sensation of walking into his otherwise entirely white department at McDonnell and greeting coworkers who had seen him perched on the Arch on television that afternoon and evening.
16. Percy Green, interview with the author, St. Louis, Missouri, March 8, 2018.
17. Percy Green, interview with the author, St. Louis, Missouri, March 8, 2018.
18. Percy Green, interview with the author, St. Louis, Missouri, March 8, 2018; Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 194, 199, 200, 209, 212, 213, 220, 224, 234, 242, 246; McDonnell-Douglas Corp. v. Green, 411 U.S. 792 (1973); Chuck Henson, “Title VII Works—That’s Why We Don’t Like It,” University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review 41 (2012); Chuck Henson, “In Defense of McDonnell Douglas: The Domination of Title VII by the At-Will Employment Doctrine,” St. John’s Law Review 89, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 551–596.
19. Percy Green, interview with the author, St. Louis, Missouri, March 8, 2018.
20. Percy Green, interview with the author, St. Louis, Missouri, March 8, 2018; Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 201.
21. Percy Green, interview with the author, St. Louis, Missouri, March 8, 2018.
22. Percy Green, interview with the author, St. Louis, Missouri, March 8, 2018; Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 241; Lucy Ferris, Unveiling the Prophet: The Misadventures of a Reluctant Debutante (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975).
23. “Fading St. Louis Area Has Partial Revival,” New York Times, December 9, 1979.
24. Hubert Schwartzentruber, Jesus in the Back Alleys: The Story and Reflections of a Contemporary Prophet (Teleford, PA: Dreamseeker Books, 2002), 39.
25. “Fading St. Louis Area Has Partial Revival,” New York Times, December 9, 1979”; Cecil Miller, interview with the author, St. Louis, Missouri, September 25, 2018. Miller remembered “Mr. Shepard” as a man whose “definition of an educated person was someone who could go anywhere in the society, from the top to the bottom, without embarrassing themselves or embarrassing anyone else” (“Fading St. Louis Area Has Partial Revival”). See also Michael R. Allen, “The Vernacular as Repossession Project: Jeff-Vander-Lou in St. Louis,” unpublished paper in author’s possession. On everything JVL, see Mark Loehrer’s forthcoming master’s thesis, University of Missouri–St. Louis.
26. Ivory Perry, interview from “A Strong Seed Planted,” in Early, Ain’t but a Place, 357–358.
27. Jolly, Black Liberation in the Midwest, 89–91; Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 149.
28. Jolly, Black Liberation, 87–88. Also during these years, Curt Flood, the talented St. Louis Cardinals center fielder, challenged Major League Baseball’s “reserve rule,” arguing in court that it violated the Thirteenth Amendment. Though unsuccessful, Flood’s suit paved the way for free agency in baseball. See Curt Flood, The Way It Is, in Early, Ain’t but a Place, 121–133.
29. Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 103.
30. Bob Hansman, Pruitt-Igoe (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2018), 7–22. Davis et al. v. St. Louis Housing Authority, the case in which Frankie Muse Freeman was the lead counsel, seems to have been unreported.
31. Hansman, Pruitt-Igoe, 20–21, 33.
32. Colin Marshall, “Pruitt-Igoe: The Troubled High-Rise That Came to Define Urban America,” Guardian, April 22, 2015.
33. See Chad Friedrichs’s extraordinary 2010 film The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.
34. Hansman, Pruitt-Igoe, 48, 65, 67, 68, 69, 80. One place where the image of the icicles cascading out of the windows of the complex appeared was on the cover of Lee Rainwater’s Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum (Chicago: Aldine, 1970).
35. Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls, ix, 9; see also Evan Stark, “Talking Sociology: A Sixties Fragment,” in Radical Sociologists and the Movement: Experiences, Lessons, and Legacies, ed. Martin Oppenheim, Martin Murray, and Rhonda F. Levin (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
36. Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls, 524.
37. Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls, xv, 520, passim. That Joyce Ladner (about whom more soon) was part of both the Washington University Pruitt-Igoe project and the social world of ACTION suggests at least some interchange. See the photo of Joyce Ladner and her sister Dorie at ACTION’s Afro-Bougaloo Festival, St. Louis American, March 5, 1968; Percy Green, interview with the author, St. Louis, Missouri, March 8, 2018.
38. Joyce A. Ladner, Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman (1971; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), xxi, xxv–xxvii.
39. Ladner, Tomorrow’s Tomorrow, 52–53, 65, 78, 84, 97, 101.
40. William B. Helmreich, The Black Crusaders: A Case Study of a Black Militant Organization (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 43–44; Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 23–24, 44, 46, 47, 91, 137. See also Jabari Asim’s fictionalized memoir of the Northside, A Taste of Honey: Stories (New York: Broadway Books, 2010), which begins with a story about a police killing.
41. “Abuse Greets Foot Patrols,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 10, 1969; “Night Patrol,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 7, 1969; “Police Car Set on Fire in Pruitt-Igoe,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 30, 1969; ACTION, “Thugs in Blue Uniform” (1970), vii–viii.
42. Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 51; Hansman, Pruitt-Igoe, 34, 43; Peter Hudson, “Who Killed Robert McCulloch’s Father,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 18, 2014.
43. William Leahy, Curbstone Justice: A Collection of True Cop Stories from the Fifties and Sixties (St. Louis: self-pub., 2010), 46, 52, 63, 74, 198, 212; “Police Dog Nips Piece of T-Shirt in Losing Chase,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 14, 1962.
44. ACTION, 1968–69 Picture Magazine, unpaginated.
45. ACTION, “Thugs in Blue Uniform” (1970), iv–xiii.
46. ACTION, “Thugs in Blue Uniform” (1970), unpaginated.
47. Jolly, Black Liberation in the Midwest, 151, 154–159; Percy Green, interview with the author, St. Louis, Missouri, March 8, 2018.
48. Jolly, Black Liberation in the Midwest, 96.
49. Helmreich, The Black Crusaders, 85, 98, 110; Jolly, Black Liberation in the Midwest, 58, 73, 76, 78, 82, 89, 96, 105, 158–159, 163–167.
50. Jolly, Black Liberation in the Midwest, 164; Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, photo between pages 126 and 172. Percy Green maintains that the Liberators did not have the operational capacity to target Grimes at his home; he believes that white officers shot into the house, hoping to provoke the volatile Lieutenant Grimes to attack the Liberators. Percy Green, interview with the author, St. Louis, Missouri, March 8, 2018; ACTION, 1968–69 Picture Magazine, unpaginated.
51. Jolly, Black Liberation in the Midwest, 164–165. Missouri Court of Appeals, St. Louis District, Second Division, Walsh v. Rudolph Oehlert, et al., 508 S.W.2d 222 (1974).
52. Jolly, Black Liberation in the Midwest, 165–167; “Roy W. Harper, 88; Was Longtime Federal Judge,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 15, 1994.
53. J. Anthony Lukas, “Bad Day at Cairo, Illinois,” New York Times, February 21, 1971; Civil Rights Crusader Dr. Charles Koen Dies at 72,” Chicago Crusader, July 26, 2018. The violence in Cairo is the subject of my forthcoming book, The River City Race War.
54. Singh, Race and America’s Long War, xiv–xv, 6–13; Leahy, Curbstone Justice, 224.
55. Lisa Martino-Taylor, Behind the Fog: How the US Cold War Radiological Weapons Program Exposed Innocent Americans (New York: Routledge, 2018), 74–77, 81.
56. Martino-Taylor, Behind the Fog, 74–77, 81; National Research Council, US Committee on Toxicology, Toxicologic Assessment of the Army’s Zinc Cadmium Sulfide Dispersion Tests: Answers to Commonly Asked Questions (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1997), www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK233549/.
57. Martino-Taylor, Behind the Fog, 73, 95–102.
58. Martino-Taylor, Behind the Fog, 110.
59. Martino-Taylor, Behind the Fog, 110; Jeffrey Tomich, “Decades Later, Baby Tooth Legacy Survey Lives On,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 1, 2013.
60. Ervin, Gateway to Equality, 181–183.
61. Ervin, Gateway to Equality, 183.
62. Ervin, Gateway to Equality, 180, 184; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 14, 1969; Percy Green, interview with the author, St. Louis, Missouri, March 8, 2018.
63. Hansman, Pruitt-Igoe, 86–95.
64. Hansman, Pruitt-Igoe, 102–113; Allen, “The Vernacular as Repossession Project”; see also “Jeff-Vander-Lou, Inc. and the Ministers Union of Greater St. Louis Meeting on the Redevelopment of the Pruitt-Igoe Site,” Missouri Historical Society, May 5, 1983.
65. Oscar Newman, “Creating Defensible Space” (1972; US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1996), 10.
66. Newman, “Creating Defensible Space,” 13.
67. Christopher G. Prener, Taylor Harris Braswell, Kyle Miller, and Joel P. Jennings, “Closing the Gateway: Street Closures, Bisected Geography, and Crime in St. Louis, MO,” February 21, 2019, https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/2wext/; Michael R. Allen, “The City Body at War with Itself: Street Blockages in St. Louis,” NextSTL, October 16, 2014, https://nextstl.com/2014/10/city-body-war-street-blockages-st-louis-2/; Leah Thorsen, “To Make St. Louis Safer, Hundreds of City Streets Were Closed Off. What if It Was a Mistake?,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 25, 2019; Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, 288–289.
68. Patrick Cooper-McCann, “The Trap of Triage: Lessons from the ‘Team 4 Plan,’” Journal of Planning History 15, no. 2 (2016): 149–156; Rogers, Ferguson Is America, 11–12.
69. Team Four, Inc., Citywide Implementation Strategies (1975), 7–15; Cooper-McCann, “The Trap of Triage: Lessons from the ‘Team 4 Plan,’” 156.
70. Sylvester Brown, interview with the author, St. Louis, March 28, 2018.
71. “Special Panel Is Considering Consolidation of City Hospitals,” and “Violence Hinted over Closing Phillips,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 9, 1979; Durrie Bouscaren, “Homer G. Phillips Hospital: ‘They Were Not Going to Be Treated as Second-Class Citizens,’” St. Louis Public Radio, February 21, 2017, https://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/homer-g-phillips-hospital-they-were-not-going-be-treated-second-class-citizens.
72. “Letter to the Editor,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 3, 1979: “Gregory May Fast in Phillips Protest,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 31, 1979; “Phillips Protest Is No Joke to Dick Gregory,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 2, 1979; “Phillips Backers Threaten Boycott,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 18, 1979.
73. “Hospital,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 29, 1979; “Hospital Defenders Vow to Continue Protest,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 2, 1970; “Private Group No Longer Interested in Phillips,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 21, 1979; “Clay Blasts Conway Decision to Reduce Phillips Service,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 26, 1979; “Homer Phillips Backers Sit-in, Sleep-in to Protest Against Move,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 1, 1979; “Blockade at Phillips,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 1, 1970; “Phillips Nurse Arrested in Scuffle with Guards,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 4, 1979.
74. “Massed Policemen Shield Phillips Transfer,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 17, 1979; “Police Show of Force, Feints Effective in Phillips Shift,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 19, 1979; “Phillips Doors Closed,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 19, 1979.
75. “Black Leaders Analyze Fizzle of Phillips Picket,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 21, 1979.
76. City of St. Louis, “A Proposal by the City of St. Louis to the Department of Housing and Urban Development for Participation in Section 810 Urban Homesteading Demonstration,” St. Louis City Data Collection Addenda, Publications, 1902–1985, State Historical Society of Missouri; Don Crinklaw, “What This Guy Needs Is Some Good $1 Houses,” undated magazine article included in City of St. Louis, “A Proposal by the City of St. Louis to the Department of Housing and Urban Development…,” 25–45; see also Estes, Our History Is the Future, 189.
1. Jeanette Cooperman, “The Kirkwood Shootings: Why Did Cookie Thornton Kill?” St. Louis Magazine, April 24, 2008; Andrea S. Boyles, Race, Place, and Suburban Policing: Too Close for Comfort (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 150. The manuscript of this book was at the publisher by the time Colin Gordon’s Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019) came out. Readers wishing to look further into the issues discussed here would do well to begin there.
2. Kevin Murphy, “He Couldn’t Be Consoled,” South County Times, February 15, 2008.
3. Murphy, “He Couldn’t Be Consoled,” South County Times, February 15, 2008.
4. Cooperman, “The Kirkwood Shootings: Why Did Cookie Thornton Kill?”; Boyles, Race, Place, and Suburban Policing, 155.
5. Cooperman, “The Kirkwood Shootings: Why Did Cookie Thornton Kill?”
6. Cooperman, “The Kirkwood Shootings: Why Did Cookie Thornton Kill?”
7. “Revoltin’ Redevelopment,” Riverfront Times, December 7–13, 1994; Boyles, Race, Place, and Suburban Policing, 12; Carla McGown, quoted in Webster-Kirkwood Times, August 13–18, 1994.
8. “Meacham Group Calls Development a Double Cross,” Webster-Kirkwood Times, August 13–18, 1994; Tony Di Martino and Suzanne Langlos, “The Taking of Meacham Park,” Riverfront Times, August 24–30, 1994.
9. Cooperman, “The Kirkwood Shooting: Kirkwood, Meacham Park, and the Racial Divide,” St. Louis Magazine, April 24, 2008; Webster-Kirkwood Times, March 17–23, 1995.
10. Cooperman, “The Kirkwood Shooting: Kirkwood, Meacham Park, and the Racial Divide”; Webster-Kirkwood Times, March 17–23, 1995; Di Martino and Langlos, “The Taking of Meacham Park,” Webster-Kirkwood Times, March 17–23, 1995; “Undone Deal,” Riverfront Times, April 19–25, 1995; see also the Kirkwood Commons website at www.regencycenters.com/property/detail/60543/Kirkwood-Commons.
11. Cooperman, “The Kirkwood Shootings: Why Did Cookie Thornton Kill?”; Boyles, Race, Place, and Suburban Policing, 72, 138.
12. Boyles, Race, Place, and Suburban Policing, 140.
13. Cooperman, “The Kirkwood Shootings: Why Did Cookie Thornton Kill?”; “Meacham Group Calls Development a Double Cross,” Webster-Kirkwood Times, August 13–18, 1994; Di Martino and Langlos, “The Taking of Meacham Park.”
14. Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, 14, 187, 197; Gordon, Mapping Decline, 103, 178–180, 202.
15. Gordon, Mapping Decline, 178–180, 103 (quotation).
16. “Spending the Block Grant: Spent Effort,” and “Brightside Car Phones Cost $8,000,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 9, 1991.
17. “Spending the Block Grant: Opportunity Denied,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 8, 1991.
18. Tim Barker, “Other People’s Blood: On Paul Volcker,” n + 1, February 26, 2019; Emerson Electric Co.: A Century of Manufacturing, 1890–1990 (Ferguson, MO: Emerson Electric Co., 1989), 19.
19. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Berger, St. Louis and Empire, 213.
20. Marie-Monique Robin, The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of the World’s Food Supply (New York: New Press, 2010); Berger, St. Louis and Empire, 213, 216.
21. Gordon, Mapping Decline, 56, 202.
22. Gordon, Mapping Decline, 161–163.
23. Missouri Department of Economic Development, “Chapter 353 Tax Abatement,” https://ded.mo.gov/programs/community/chapter-353-tax-abatement; Gordon, Mapping Decline, 164–167.
24. Gordon, Mapping Decline, 155.
25. Gordon, Mapping Decline, 155; “With Rams Gone, St. Louis Still Stuck with Stadium Debt,” Reuters, February 3, 2016; Neil deMause, “Pay-to-Play Is the Stadium Grift That Keeps on Giving,” Deadspin, April 29, 2019, https://deadspin.com/pay-to-play-is-the-stadium-grift-that-keeps-on-giving-1834338811.
26. George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 73.
27. Gordon, Mapping Decline, 171.
28. Celeste Bott and Jacob Barker, “LRA Owns the 12,000 St. Louis Properties No One Wants. And It Can’t Afford to Maintain Them,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 17, 2018.
29. Parking Systems, Inc. v. Kansas City Downtown Redevelopment Corporation, 518 S.W.2d 119 (1974); Maryland Plaza Redevelopment Corporation v. Greenberg, 594 S.W.2d 284 (1979); Gordon, Mapping Decline, 167.
30. Edward C. Lawrence, Ellen N. Briskin, and Jane Qing-Jiang Qu, “A Review of State Tax Incentive Programs for Creating Jobs,” Journal of State Taxation 118, no. 3 (2013): 25–32.
31. Paric, “Express Scripts Headquarters,” www.paric.com/project/express-scripts-headquarters/; Armstrong Teasdale, “New Headquarters for Express Scripts,” http://web.archive.org/web/20150923230942/https://www.armstrongteasdale.com/New-Headquarters-for-Express-Scripts/; Kase Wickman, “Express Scripts Inc. to Add New Building to Headquarters,” Riverfront Times, December 10, 2017; Tim Bryant, “Express Scripts to Add Building,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 17, 2017; Lawrence et al., “The Economic Impact of Express Scripts on St. Louis and Missouri”; Blythe Bernhard, “Students ‘Were the Victims’: End of the Transfer Program Highlights Inequality in St. Louis Area Schools,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 5, 2019, www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/students-were-the-victims-end-of-the-transfer-program-highlights/article_c007f390-268c-51d6-ad48-675186f33292.html.
32. Missouri Department of Economic Development, “Local Incentive Programs: Tax Increment Financing,” https://ded.mo.gov/community/local-programs#LocalTIF; Missouri Department of Economic Development, “State Supplemental Tax Increment Financing (TIF),” https://ded.mo.gov/programs/community/state-supplemental-tax-increment-financing; Gordon, Mapping Decline, 181.
33. Gordon, Mapping Decline, 181. The law providing for the additional diversion of state revenue toward the repayment of TIF bonds stipulates that, to be eligible, a TIF district must include at least one building that is fifty years old and it must also have experienced over the previous twenty years “generally declining” population and property tax revenue. See Missouri Department of Economic Development, “State Supplemental Tax Increment Financing.”
34. Quoted in Boyles, Race, Place, and Suburban Policing, 63, 68.
35. Greg LeRoy, “TIF, Greenfields, and Sprawl: How an Incentive Created to Alleviate Slums Has Come to Subsidize Upscale Malls and New Urbanist Developments,” Planning and Environmental Law 60, no. 2 (2008): 3.
36. “To TIF or Not to TIF?,” St. Louis Business Journal, August 18, 1996; “Richmond Heights Approves TIF for Boulevard Expansion,” St. Louis Business Journal, October 4, 2016; Oasis Corporate Housing, “Property #6050: The Orion Apartments,” https://oasiscorporatehousing.com/Property-Details/6050; Patrick Tuohey and Michael Highsmith, “Tax-Increment Financing in St. Louis,” Show-Me Institute Working Paper, September 22, 2017, https://showmeinstitute.org/publication/subsidies/tax-increment-financing-saint-louis.
37. Jacob Barker, “Tax Abatement Cost St. Louis, Schools $31 Million in Uncollected Revenue Last Year,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 22, 2019; see also Tim Logan, “As City’s TIF Tab Grows, More Are Asking for Limits, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 4, 2014; Sarah Fenske, “St. Louis Gave Away $950K in Tax Incentives for Every New Central Corridor Resident,” Riverfront Times, October 31, 2016.
38. Kae M. Petrin, “Once Promised for Rehab, Vacant Buildings Owned by Developer Paul McKee Now Scar City’s North Side,” St. Louis Public Radio, December 30, 2018; Jacob Barker, “McKee Got $2.5 Million in Tax Credits for a St. Louis Building He Didn’t Pay For,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 16, 2018.
39. It is indicative of the dimensions of the issue that on the very day I wrote this paragraph, St. Louis County executive Steve Stenger was indicted on federal charges for a pay-to-play scandal, with a piece of land-banked property in impoverished Wellston at its core. See Jacob Barker, “Stenger Influenced Wellston Land Sale to Donor, Former Partnership Employee Alleges,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 29, 2018; Jacob Barker, “Key Events Detailed in the Federal Indictment of St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 30, 2019.
40. Robert H. Teuscher, “The Payday Loan Industry in Missouri: A Study of the Laws, the Lenders, the Borrowers, and the Legislation,” Better Business Bureau, July 2009, www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/files/pdfs/community%20development/paydayloanreport09color.pdf.
41. See “Debt, Inc.: Lending and Collecting in America” (series), ProPublica, www.propublica.org/series/debt-inc.
42. Richard Weaver, State of Missouri Division of Finance, letter to Governor Jay Dixon, January 14, 2009, https://finance.mo.gov/Contribute%20Documents/2009PaydayLendersSurvey.pdf; Woods v. QC Fin. Servs., Inc., 280 S.W.3d 90 (2009); Teuscher, “The Payday Loan Industry in Missouri”; Rogers, Ferguson Is America, 2.
43. Brewer v. Missouri Title Loans, 364 S.W.3d 486 (2012).
44. Hollins v. Capital Sols. Investments, Inc., 477 S.W.3d 19, 21 (Mo. Ct. App. 2015).
45. Richard Rothstein, “The Making of Ferguson: Public Policies at the Root of Its Troubles,” Economic Policy Institute, October 15, 2014; Mary Delach Leonard, “The Great Recession: 10 Year Later,” St. Louis Public Radio, May 23, 2018; Caitlin Lee and Clark Randall, “Foreclosures Devastated South St. Louis. Nathan Cooper Saw Opportunity,” Riverfront Times, July 26, 2017. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profits: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019) arrived while my own book was in production; it will surely be the new starting point for the discussion of this aspect of racial capitalist dispossession.
46. Rogers, Ferguson Is America; Gordon, Citizen Brown.
47. www.emerson.com/en-US/newsroom/news-releases/emerson-financial-news/Pages/Emerson-Reports-Q3Y14-Earnings.aspx.
48. Thomas Harvey, John McAnnar, Michael-John Voss, Megan Conn, Sean Janda, and Sophia Keskey, “ArchCity Defenders: Municipal Courts White Paper,” updated November 23, 2014, 12, www.archcitydefenders.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/ArchCity-Defenders-Municipal-Courts-Whitepaper.pdf; Radley Balko, “How Municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo. Profit from Poverty,” Washington Post, September 3, 2014.
49. For “driving while Black,” see Boyles, Race, Place, and Suburban Policing, 18, 36, 37, 84, 88, 112, 115, 129.
50. City of Ferguson, Missouri, Annual Operating Budget, Fiscal Year 2013–2014, www.fergusoncity.com/DocumentCenter/View/1609/2014-COFM-Budget-Final?bidId=page iii.
51. Christine Byers, “No Charges Against St. Louis Officer Who Killed VonDerrit Myers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 18, 2015; Boyles, Race, Place, and Suburban Policing, 101–103. See also Gerald Early, from Daughters: On Family and Fatherhood, in Early, Ain’t but a Place, 244–255.
52. On this and all that follows, see Jodi Rios, “Racial States of Municipal Governance: Policing Bodies and Space for Revenue in North St. Louis County, MO,” Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice 37, no. 2 (June 2019); and Jodi Rios “Everyday Racialization: Contesting Space and Identity in Suburban St. Louis,” in Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America, ed. John Archer, Paul Sandul, and Kate Solomonson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 185–207.
53. “Ferguson Sets Broad Changes for City Courts,” New York Times, September 8, 2014; Harvey et al., “ArchCity Defenders: Municipal Courts White Paper,” 7, 16–17, 24, 31.
54. Loïc Wacquant, Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of Neoliberal Penalty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 265; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Missouri Department of Corrections, “Institution Facilities,” https://doc.mo.gov/facilities/adult-institutions/address-listing; Prison Policy Initiative, “Missouri Profile,” www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/MO.html.
55. US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, March 4, 2015, www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf.
56. See, for example, “Emerson Opens New Corporate Data Center in St. Louis,” Data Center Dynamics, July 25, 2009.
57. St. Louis County, GIS Service Center, “Property Lookup,” http://maps.stlouisco.com/propertyview/. Emerson Electric’s Ferguson campus is tract 12H320060; Emerson’s personal property taxes are coded with that identifier.
58. Mark Polzin, personal communication with the author, March 30, 2015.
59. City of Ferguson, Missouri, Annual Operating Budget, Fiscal Year 2013–2014.
60. Mark Polzin, personal communication with the author, March 30, 2015; St. Louis County, GIS Service Center, “Property Lookup”; Mark Polzin, personal communication with the author, March 30, 2015; Harvey et al., “ArchCity Defenders: Municipal Courts White Paper,” 32. The city does not publicly report Judge Ronald C. Brockmeyer’s salary, but the budget for thirty-six sessions of court staffed by three full-time and three part-time employees is $318,300.
61. I am indebted to Sarah Coffin at St. Louis University’s Center for Sustainability for helping me understand tax increment financing and for answering many elementary questions about a field in which she has long been doing advanced work.
62. City of Ferguson, Missouri, Annual Operating Budget for 2013–2014, 40, 102.
63. Urban Land Institute St. Louis, “Panel Recommendations to the Cities of Ferguson and Cool Valley,” November 2012, www.fergusoncity.com/documentcenter/view/1087, 3.
64. City of Ferguson, Missouri, Annual Operating Budget for 2013–2014.
65. I am particularly grateful to Gerald Frug for helping me think through the limitations of this commonsense notion of “economic development.”
66. City of Ferguson, Missouri, Annual Operating Budget for 2013–2014, i, 24, 25, CIP-24, vi, 13. The raises were 2 percent in fiscal year 2012–2013 and 6 percent in fiscal year 2013–2014—slightly over 8 percent over the course of the two years.
67. City of Ferguson, Missouri, Annual Operating Budget for 2013–2014, CIP-10. These acquisitions were in addition to the fantastic array of federal-surplus military hardware deployed on West Florissant Avenue in the aftermath of the shooting to “keep the peace.”
68. City of Ferguson, Missouri, Annual Operating Budget for 2013–2014, 87, 110. Parks are funded by sales tax revenue legally designated for that purpose. The city has budgeted between $250,000 and $500,000 a year from this designated Parks Fund to actually spend on the parks, an amount that was enhanced in 2014 by a pair of onetime grants from St. Louis County.
69. Rogers, Ferguson Is America; Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation; Wesley Lowery, They Can’t Kill Us All: The Story of Black Lives Matter (New York: Penguin, 2017); Tef Poe, Rebel to America (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., forthcoming).
1. Ray Hartman, “We Wrote About Poisons in Coldwater Creek Thirty-Seven Years Ago. Guess What the Feds Just Confirmed?,” Riverfront Times, May 15, 2019; “Post-Dispatch Coverage of the West Lake and Bridgeton Landfills,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 7, 2019, www.stltoday.com/news/archives/post-dispatch-coverage-of-the-west-lake-and-bridgeton-landfills/collection_f524db66-ffa9-54df-a131-b759a94ec3dd.html#utm_source=stltoday.com&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=login_blueconic_incognito.
2. “Read the Verdict in the Jason Stockley Murder Case,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 15, 2017. Stockley, as was his right under Missouri law, had requested that his case be tried before a single judge rather than a jury.
3. Danny Wicentowski, “4 St. Louis Officers Charged in Undercover Officer’s Beating During Jason Stockley Protests,” Riverfront Times, November 29, 2018.
4. Brenden O’Brien, “After Protests, St. Louis Mayor Says Address Racism,” Reuters, September 19, 2017.
5. “A Way, Away (Listen While I Say),” www.awayaway.site/.
6. City of St. Louis, “Rosie Willis,” www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/sldc/project-connect/nga/history/interviews/rosie-willis.cfm.
7. Sylvester Brown, interview with the author, March 28, 2018; North City Food Hub, www.northcityfoodhub.com.
8. Griot Museum of Black History and Culture, www.thegriotmuseum.com/.
9. Organization for Black Struggle, www.obs-stl.org/.
10. Hands Up United, www.handsupunited.org.
11. Close the Workhouse, “What Is Close the Workhouse?,” www.closetheworkhouse.org/.
12. National Building Arts Center, http://web.nationalbuildingarts.org/.
13. St. Louis Equal Housing and Opportunity Council, https://ehocstl.org/; Equity Legal Services, Inc., www.equitylegalservices.org/; Harvard University, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, “The Commonwealth Project,” https://warrencenter.fas.harvard.edu/commonwealth-project.
14. Camille Curtis, interview with the author, Normandy High School, St. Louis, Missouri, July 8, 2019.