SITTING ON THE VERANDA OF THE BOENKER HILL WINERY IN St. Louis County, you can look out and see a slow-rolling image of the end of the world. The winery overlooks the West Lake Landfill, a former limestone quarry where a rogue contractor dumped Manhattan Project–era Mallinckrodt nuclear waste in the 1970s. For decades, radioactive waste leached into the groundwater surrounding the site—uranium-238, which has a half-life of four and a half billion years, and thorium-232, with a half-life of fourteen billion years—as well as into Coldwater Creek, which forms an arc through the northern part of the county. Children of my generation played on the banks of the creek and swam in it during the summertime. Not long ago, at a twentieth reunion at nearby McCluer North High School, a group of alumni realized how many of their classmates were already dead and began to wonder why. They created a Facebook page that now has over twenty thousand members. In the words of one of the investigative journalists who finally brought the contamination of the creek to light, it is an archive of “rare cancers, birth defects, multiple cases of conjoined twins and babies born with one ear and no eyeballs, and instances of infertility, multiple sclerosis and lymphoma, many of them in statistically impossible numbers.” Today an underground trash fire in a landfill in nearby Bridgeton is burning its way toward the nuclear waste buried in West Lake Landfill. No one has figured out how to put it out.1
Many who live in the city today feel a sense of abandonment made more acute by the aftermath of the uprising in Ferguson. Once the television cameras and high-profile activists left the city, they found that little had changed. In September 2017, St. Louis was again rocked by protests against police misconduct, but this time few outside the city were listening. The nation had moved on to the serial melodrama of Trump’s America—the gaffes, scandals, and outrages coming so quickly in succession that there was no time to press Pause and take notice of what was happening in the heart of the country.
The 2017 protests followed the acquittal of former St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley, who was accused of the 2011 murder of Anthony Lamar Smith. After an initial confrontation with Smith in a restaurant parking lot, in which Stockley wielded an AK-47 that he had brought with him to work, Smith fled in a car. During the car chase pursuit that followed, Stockley was recorded by the dashcam in his police cruiser saying, “We’re going to kill this motherfucker,” and minutes later he made good on his promise, firing five shots into Smith’s vehicle after his partner had crashed into it on the street. Stockley was then captured on film searching through a personal duffel bag in the trunk of his cruiser, seemingly tucking something in the front of his pants, entering the car where Anthony Lamar Smith lay dead, and emerging seconds later with a handgun that he claimed to have found in the car but was later revealed to have only the officer’s DNA upon its handgrip. In justifying his decision, the judge in the case noted that Stockley’s promise to kill Smith was made in “the heat of the moment” and, therefore, could not be considered evidence of an intention to do something that he then went on to do minutes later, and that his own experience of thirty years on the bench had made him certain that the gun found in the car must belong to Smith because people like Smith (“urban heroin dealers”) almost always had guns.2
The verdict spurred a monthlong series of protests that revealed more of the same police impunity: police officers sending one another texts looking forward to assaulting protesters under the cover of darkness (“it’s gonna get IGNORANT tonight”) and then heading out to indiscriminately surround and arrest crowds of people, some of them protesters, some journalists, some spectators, some of them simply passers-by, and one of them actually an undercover policeman; punitively and repeatedly Macing and pepper-spraying the same compliant and still-surrounded crowd as they kneeled on the ground, awaiting arrest; responding to peaceful protests with overwhelming force, riot police, snipers on the roofs, helicopters in the skies; trampling an elderly woman who was clearly confused by the orders being given by an advancing line of heavily armed, armored, and shield-bearing police; chanting, “Whose streets, Our streets!” in celebratory mockery of the protesters whose constitutional rights they were violating; mobilizing an auxiliary army of internet trolls and white supremacists by posting protesters’ names and addresses online following their arrest and calling for the boycott of a pizza place owned by an actually pretty moderate man who dared to say some sympathetic things about the protesters.3
And yet for a month, as the protests went on and the police riot continued, the nation looked the other way. After his officers chanted, “Whose streets? Our Streets!” on the night of September 18, St. Louis interim police chief Lawrence O’Toole went on television to proclaim, “We owned tonight.” St. Louis mayor Lyda Krewson’s response to the out-of-control police rampaging through the city she allegedly governed was tepid at best. In response to the officers’ chant, she said, “I wish they wouldn’t have said that.” Asked about O’Toole’s response, she observed what was empirically true, that his comment was “inflammatory,” before reiterating her “confidence in the chief” and canceling town hall events where she was scheduled to meet her supposed constituents. (O’Toole was a finalist for permanent appointment at the end of 2017, but was not hired.) The governor of Missouri, for his part, cheered on the police, posting an image at the top of his Twitter feed of a young man being hog-tied and carried away, facedown, by policemen holding his elbows behind his back. He turned out to be a student at a nearby university who had the temerity to stand between the police and a group of Black protesters when a commanding officer ordered the cops to charge the crowd. For Black protesters, their white allies, and anyone else unlucky enough to be standing nearby, St. Louis in the fall of 2017 represented a fearful image—part fulfillment, part portent—of the world according to Chief Justice Roger Taney: no rights that the white man was bound to respect. In St. Louis, the history of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare upon the living.4
And yet I have never been to a more amazing, hopeful place in my life. St. Louis, as the onetime Washington University student radical, biographer of Ivory Perry, sociologist, and housing rights activist George Lipsitz says, is “the right place for all the wrong reasons.” All over the city, people are finding new ways to live, to connect, to cultivate new sorts of spaces, to grow into new sorts of people. Perhaps they will be too late to change the course of our history. Or perhaps they will be just in time.
In the spring of 2017, St. Louis–based designer and organizer De Nichols collaborated with Chicago-based artists Amanda Williams and Andres Hernandez in a project designed to both honor the past and imagine the future in St. Louis. The site was an old brick warehouse at 3721 Washington Boulevard that was slated for demolition. In the weeks before it was torn down, they invited their friends, neighbors, and anyone else who wanted to come along, or who just stopped to look, to paint the building gold—to honor its past, and that of the city around it, before it was torn down. Once the demolition was complete, they took gold-painted bricks from the building and gave them out to organizations doing visionary work around the city: to the Art House Collective on the Northside, where artists gather to create as well as to provide mental health support and meals for neighborhood residents, and where the bricks were used to create a small event stage; to Perennial, an organization dedicated to repurposing discarded objects and community education; to Solidarity Economy St. Louis and Citizen Carpentry, two organizations that are building and practicing small-scale networks of cooperation and mutual support—actually existing socialism—in the interstices of racial capitalism, which used the bricks to build a spiral pathway on “Tillie’s Corner,” the onetime site of a beloved neighborhood grocery; and to the Granite City Arts and Design Collective on the east side of the river, a group supporting urban gardening and sustainable agriculture.5
If you take the time to look, projects that are similarly visionary and humane can be found all around the city. Near the site of the original Jeff-Vander-Lou project, in among the abandoned houses and broken-down apartment buildings, near the Bethesda Mennonite Church where the pews are still filled on Sundays, Rosie Willis, a veteran of the original JVL project, and a local housing rights activist named Sal Martinez have planted a garden in an abandoned lot. As in most of the city’s neighborhoods, the soil is contaminated, and so the gardeners have built boxes in which the flowers bloom. Martinez got married in the garden. Neighborhood activists use the garden as a place to resolve disputes between young people that might otherwise become violent.6
Nearby, in the Old North neighborhood, Sylvester Brown Jr. runs the Sweet Potato Project. Brown grew up in the city and got his first job at Laclede Gas—“Percy Green got me my first job,” he says. After a career in journalism, he founded a nonprofit that turns vacant lots into urban farms planted, tended, and harvested by neighborhood children. They started with sweet potatoes, which are hard to kill and easy to harvest. With the help of a nutrition professor at St. Louis University, they make the potatoes into flour and bake them into cookies, which they package and sell throughout the city and online (http://sweetpotatoprojectstl.org/). “People say we’re poor, but we’re rich,” Brown said. “Look at our children.” Brown is one of the intellectual architects of the North City Food Hub, also supported by St. Louis University, a state-of-the-art industrial kitchen where urban gardeners can sell their produce to cooks without a kitchen—entry-level restaurateurs who use the common kitchen to make meals for delivery, takeout, storefront service in a nearby dining room, or food truck sales. Aspiring cooks can sign up to work food prep shifts for pay and learn the trade.7
Not too far from the Pruitt-Igoe site and across the street from where the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is building the largest surveillance site on the continent, Lois Conley takes care of the collection at the Griot Museum of Black History and Culture, which she founded in 1997. Beginning with the slave trade and continuing through the history of the city—Madame C. J. Walker, Josephine Baker, Percy Green, Macler Shepard—the museum represents the history of Black St. Louis, which is almost completely unmemorialized elsewhere in the city, through a series of wax figures beloved by St. Louis schoolchildren. The museum is cash-strapped and a labor of love, but it keeps up a schedule of cutting-edge rotating exhibits and events—on displaced African American neighborhoods like Mill Creek Valley; photography and the Ferguson uprising; or the little-known story of the Black St. Louis teenager Robert Rayford, who was the first American to contract the HIV virus (fifteen years before Patient Zero), and the history of the racial representation (and misrepresentation) of AIDS.8
A little bit to the south of the Griot, in midcity, longtime organizer and writer Jamala Rogers—known as “Mama Jamala” among the younger generation of activists to whom she has served as a model and mentor—keeps up the fight at the Organization for Black Struggle. OBS was among the first organizations on the ground in Ferguson. For nearly forty years, OBS has been a training ground, helping to shape many of the young people whose voices and vision influenced the uprising and remade America. In the years since Donald Trump was elected president, Rogers has renewed connections with white activists in rural Missouri that were first created during Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign. Where others see only differences, Rogers, like Macler Shepard and the Mennonites in JVL, sees similarities: lives, urban and rural, Black and white, made precarious by the disappearance of good work and the inaccessibility of basic social support, the criminal neglect of young minds, and the imperial tragedy of hometowns where military enlistment provides the most reliable road out of town.9
In the aftermath of the Ferguson uprising, when many of the out-of-town activists left town to carry the struggle to larger stages, Tef Poe stayed behind in St. Louis, where he and several other activists founded Hands Up United. They created a “books and breakfast” program that meets biweekly at various sites around the city, bringing together kids and adults—mostly Black, but also a few whites—for food, fellowship, and free books. They created a small park on an empty lot in the rapidly gentrifying Cherokee Street neighborhood, put up a basketball hoop, and called it “the Love Bank”—a place where anyone can come to withdraw a little love. Working on a shoestring, Poe is dedicated to increasing the visibility of the artists of Black St. Louis: he cohosts an annual art show, raises money to create a fellowship program for young photographers in the city, and supports the documentation and celebration of the hard beauty of life in the city. Poe thinks that seeing their lives reflected back to them as art helps young people in St. Louis—the young people who faced the riot police and got tear-gassed in Ferguson—to feel less lonely, like they have not been forgotten. He dreams of taking over an abandoned police station on the Northside and building an arts collective where the artistic talent in the city will be celebrated and supported, not squandered.10
Among those on the streets in Ferguson were two kids from Kirkwood, each shaped in his own way by the 2008 shootings at city hall, and each committed to using art to visualize the history of St. Louis. One is the young journalist and photographer Clark Randall; his work documents the separation of Meacham Park and Kirkwood, and he has turned his activist energy to the ongoing struggle to close the St. Louis Workhouse, the central lockup and debtors’ prison where those too poor to pay bail await trial on often trivial charges, sometimes for years. The other is Mark Loehrer, a white kid from Kirkwood who creates photomontages that blur past and present, bringing back to life the city that once was by superimposing historic images onto the street scenes from Google Maps. He has colorized old photos of Mill Creek Valley in the 1930s and ’40s and can describe that neighborhood as if it were still there and he had walked its streets.11
Across the river, Larry Giles tends his museum of dismantled buildings—the National Building Arts Center. Along with the seven warehouses that hold the architectural history of St. Louis, he collects industrial periodicals documenting the best practices of a host of lost arts—Iron Age, Brass Age, and so on—and the fragile record of the history of radical St. Louis. The museum sits on low ground in Sauget, Illinois, the town once known as Monsanto, hard by the chemical plant and off a narrow strip of highway lined by gas stations and strip clubs. There, near the site of the ancient city of Cahokia, he curates a shadow city of forgotten designs and forsaken objects.12
Nearby, in Centreville, Illinois, two young Black woman lawyers, Kalila Jackson of the Equal Housing Opportunity Council (who grew up in Black Jack and remembers visiting the Griot as a child) and Nicole Nelson of Equity Legal Services in St. Clair County, Illinois, are beginning a battle to roll back decades of municipal disregard and corporate malfeasance that have culminated in chronic flooding and water and soil contamination. Situated in the low-lying bottomland near the Mississippi, Centreville spends several weeks underwater every year. Not just when the river floods and the rising waters make the national news, but whenever there is a heavy rain. The networks of ditches and pumping stations that once drained the city have fallen into disrepair, and so the mostly poor, mostly elderly, almost entirely Black residents’ houses are gradually falling in, their foundations undermined by the water, their furnaces and water heaters shorted out by the floods. The stormwater interacts with the failing sewer system—some residents have small geysers of raw sewage running up into their yards twenty-four hours a day—to create toxic floods. Homes that the residents purchased for $25,000 or $30,000 in the 1980s and 1990s are now worth one-fifth of that—making it impossible for them to get home improvement loans to try to stem the tide, even if they thought they could, which they can’t.
But beginning with the frustration of one of the residents, Walter Byrd, a former sewer worker himself, who uses a flatboat to help his neighbors move around during high water, the residents began to organize and eventually found their way to Jackson and Nelson. They’ve been joined in their work by a group of students who are trying to imagine a new way for universities to engage with the world. Instead of coming in with the same old peer-reviewed solutions that never work out as well on the street as they do in the seminar room, they are listening and trying to work in service and solidarity with the frontline actors and eyewitnesses in the city. Gradually Jackson and Nelson have built a coalition that is threatening to become a movement to try to roll back the toxic flood tide of racist neglect.13
Maybe these seem like small efforts—too insignificant to measure up against the creeping North County apocalypse, the murders, and the heavy pull of the violent history of empire and white supremacy. But look again and you will see that these ordinary people are doing something beautiful and profound. They are imagining new ways to live in the city, to connect with and care for one another, to be human. They are doing what marginal and radical people in St. Louis have always done: getting on with it and pointing the way forward for a nation that has not yet learned to listen.
On the track behind Normandy High School, Camille Curtis coaches the RC Striders track team, named for her father, Reverend Richard Curtis, who died in 1994. She remembers him as a man who lived for the kids in his neighborhood, taking them around to events in an old work van with the kids sitting on overturned buckets in the back. She started the team in 2008 as a memorial to him, a way of keeping his spirit alive. The runners are mostly kids from the Northside of the city and the North County suburbs near the high school. A lot of them have tough lives—drugs and guns in their neighborhoods, relatives in jail. The team doesn’t go into the neighborhoods to recruit; the kids just start showing up one day and are welcomed, or they linger, watching from outside the chain-link fence for a while before accepting an invitation to join. Curtis’s own son was shot to death by a police officer in January 2017. Even in the immediate aftermath of his death, she kept coaching the kids. “He should be breathing, and so with my every breath I try to put something positive into the air for these kids,” she said. Of the fifty or so kids who form the core of the team, almost half qualified for the Junior Olympics in the summer of 2019. They fly around the track in the fading light, little kids taking impossibly long strides.14