Dramaturgy

History of Redlining and Urban Black Geographies in St. Louis

Between the 1930s and 1950s, President Roosevelt’s New Deal, which included public housing projects, continued to predispose Black communities to racist housing policies and zone them into poor living conditions. These public housing projects sprung from the horrors of Jim Crow, where racial segregation after slavery was embedded into the fabric of the U.S. legal system. This haunted legal system from the 18th and 19th centuries advanced racist-spatial policies well into the latter half of the 20th century. In the context of contemporary global U.S. cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, this included the creation of all-white neighborhoods and outer suburbs where white people, including some ethnic European minorities, who the state began to realize as full U.S. citizens, had the opportunity to settle in and establish their lives. On the other hand, Indigenous communities and Black populations continued to be zoned out of space–whether it be through legalized occupation by white communities or the creation of antiblack housing ordinances.

While Change Gon’ Come does not specify a metropolitan area, these notes would be incomplete without a discussion of St. Louis. Still one of the most segregated cities in the U.S., St. Louis, has had a specific relationship with race and anti-Blackness, and a few moments in this city’s history are significant to highlight. In St. Louis, redlining, or the matrix of systemic policies that exacerbate racial segregation, began early in the 20th century.

In 1917, when the U.S. Supreme Court passed Buchanan v. Warley , city planners and real estate owners began to implement extrajudicial policies that prevented Black residents from moving into specific neighborhoods. Also that year, a race riot happened in East St. Louis, Illinois, where whites beat and lynched Black residents. While many Black East St. Louisans fled to the Missouri side and never returned, East. St. Louis demographically has remained predominantly Black. Furthermore, Harland Bartholomew, a St. Louis city planner from 1919 to 1950, used segregationist ideas to racially spatialize the city well into the 20th century. In 1928, for instance, Bartholomew’s vision for a downtown monument sprung the demolition of Black renters and their residencies, where the Gateway Arch was finally built in 1965. In 1947, Bartholomew proposed a city plan that would construct superhighways that dilapidated preexisting Black neighborhoods. During this time, white St. Louisians engaged in white flight away from the city, as they migrated along with the highways and interstates that expanded west, settling into the suburbs and municipalities of St. Louis County.

In the 1950s, the City marketed the area to the north of Delmar and south of Natural Bridge Road to Black residents, where many Black communities still reside contemporarily (e.g., the “Delmar Divide”). After the latter half of the 20th century, while many forms of geographic racism manifested, a prominent incident of racial terror to note is the complete demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects, completed by 1975. PruittIgoe exposed Black St. Louisans to horrible living conditions and predatory research studies from social scientists who have sought to pathologize urban Black life. Overall, the postindustrial demolition of Pruitt-Igoe exemplifies another avenue that Black people were continuously stuck within a matrix of segregation, divestment, and displacement.

Manifestations of Structural Racism in the Contemporary City Spatialized racism, and all its structural manifestations, has forced contemporary Black communities, as film theorist Kara Keeling would claim, “out of time.” On August 9, 2014, 18-yearold Michael Brown was shot by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, a municipality in North County. Historian Walter Johnson notes that terms like “structural racism” became more popularized into the lexicon of academics and activists after the Ferguson Uprising in 2014. What Michael’s unfortunate death began to exemplify, similar to that of Tamir Rice and Sakia Gunn, is how geography still predisposes Black youth to fatal violence, inflicted by the carceral state or otherwise.

A study completed by Stanford sociologists in 2020 shows how gentrification, the process when more affluent residents and newer businesses infiltrate an existing community, potentially raising the property prices and displacing the current residents, disproportionately impacts Black people. In cities like Philadelphia, when Black people face gentrification in their communities, they are forced to move to other neighborhoods with even less resources for health and education. Additionally, homeownership, a key driver of gentrification, presents its own disparities. A 2022 study from the U.S. Department of Treasury shows that Black people have the lowest rates of homeownership compared to other racial groups. Gentrification and homeownership practices continue to zone Black people not only out of specific geographic enclaves in their respective cities, but also from opportunities in education and healthcare access.

Locally in St. Louis, recent research has illustrated the ongoing effects of environmental racism. WashU Law’s Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic published a 2019 study, finding that Black kids are 10 times more likely to have emergency room visits for asthma; Black residents are twice as likely to live in food deserts; building demolitions with lead and asbestos mostly occur in majority-Black neighborhoods; majority-Black neighborhoods experience the most illegal trash dumping and are located by a large inventory of vacant properties. These forms of environmental racism can provide one way to understand why Jason Purnell et al discerned that Black families’ life expectancy can be reduced 18 years by living in North County.

The Power of Performance: Moving Toward a Black “Right to the City”

While studying the historic and ongoing ways that Black people are geographically oppressed through white supremacy, geographers Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods claim that Black people “can trouble…modes of thought and allow us to consider alternative ways of imagining the world.” Essentially, the Black diaspora has used forms of activism and art to claim their rights to the communities. WashU students in Black Anthology, now in our 34th year, have attempted to showcase these performative engagements that Black people have with their environments and conditions.

Change Gon’ Come represents just one realistic fictional story of many Black experiences in the contemporary city, stricken by gentrification, white flight, and the pressures of late capitalism.

Change Gon’ Come engages not only with Black life in the city, but also a Black “Right to the City.” This theoretical concept of “The Right to the City” was first foregrounded by geographers Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, both of whom expressed that lower-income/minority communities living within urban places impacted by structural inequities possessed the potential to transform the cities that they lived in. While many scholars have critiqued and expanded from Lefebvre and Harvey to consider the intersectional nuances of race, gender, sexuality, religion, and class, their original notes on “The Right to the City” are significant nonetheless.

We should highlight the historically powerful work of Black Power activism and organizing that took place in U.S. cities like Oakland and Chicago in the 1970s, as a response to ongoing urban inequalities. Thus, performance, art, and activism that have long centered Black community life in the city have attempted to work against the idea that Black life is “out of time.” As scholars Habiba Ibrahim and Badia Ahad have argued, “Black culture…has challenged linear conceptions of temporality by demonstrating how Blackness operates on an alternative temporal register.” These “alternative registers” of time that Black Anthology has attempted to display with this production are not utopic nor provide comprehensive answers to ongoing anti-Black geographic and structural violence. Rather, questions to ponder while viewing Change Gon’ Come include but are not limited to: How can Black communities organize against structural violence in their cities to claim their rights to quality and safe living conditions? What is the political efficacy behind writing and protest? How are family, intergenerational kinship, and community central to transcending structural barriers? How do we challenge false notions of linear “progress” at social and political levels? What do we do when the violent state actors attempt to drive Black communities “out of time?” Regardless of your identities, what is your position in a community and how can you contribute to positive change?

Hopelessness is an obstacle that we need to overcome. Our creativity as Black people, our love, our ideas, and our strength will provide us with the willpower and the tools we need to stand up for the lives and the future we know we deserve. As long as we keep that in mind, Change Gon’ Come .