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At the same time, they were attracted by the lure of land in the opening West. Migrating to form new black communities, mostly in Kansas, these former slaves arrived in St. Louis penniless on their trek to new lives in the West. African-Americans in antebellum St. Louis needed licenses to live in the city, and were banned from voting or testifying against whites in court. While a "black aristocracy" of merchants and professionals existed here by the late 1850s, their lives were far more restrictive than those of their white counterparts. Blacks were subject to housing restrictions, curfews, bans on education, and prohibition from testifying in court against whites. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, "is the problem of the color line." The words of the great African-American writer on race relations was as much a statement of historical trend as prophecy.
It held but one national convention to nominate a presidential candidate, coming to St. Louis in 1904. William T. Scott of East St. Louis and his running mate W. C. Payne of Warrenton, West Virginia, made scarcely a blip on the political screen in Theodore Roosevelt's landslide victory. Most African-American politicos felt they had better chances at influencing policy by working within the existing party system.
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Blacks in political leadership positions made one last attempt to become more influential Republicans. Charles Turpin became the first black in St. Louis to win public office in 1910 as constable, and re-election in 1914. It helped Walter Moore win election to the Missouri General Assembly in 1920, and Clark as the first black justice of the peace.
By the time those words appeared in The Souls of Black Folk the lines of segregation in America were drawn in thick, bold lines. Racial segregation was institutionalized in St. Louis by intent, accident, or benign neglect throughout its history, effecting the nature of race relations in the city today. Partisan activities among African-Americans had roots in the Missouri Equal Rights League, formed in 1865 at the 8th Avenue Colored Baptist Church. Dedicated to allowing African-Americans to vote, it dissolved after passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870. Creators of the short-lived Liberty Party first met in St. Louis in the 1880s to form a new black national party.
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A second trial ruled in his favor in 1850, but the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the decision two years later, returning Scott to John Sanford, who had since purchased Scott from Emerson's widow. S. Supreme Court ruled against Scott; Chief Justice William Taney ruled that blacks had no rights under the constitution which white people needed to respect. Sanford sold Scott to Taylor Blow, who legally freed the Scotts a year before Dred Scott died in 1858. That same year, St. Louis Public Schools opened a vocational school for black students at 814 North 19th Street. Named Booker T. Washington Technical High School in 1934, it harkened to Washington's model of race relations.
Mill Creek Valley was an African-American district from the mid-1800s through the turn of the century. A mix of homes, tenements, shops, saloons, dance halls, and night clubs gave the area a special character. Its population grew markedly after World War II, as black population in the city surged. The St. Louis electorate passed a bond issue in 1954 to redevelop the area. Some 20,000 people lived from Market and Vandeventer to the Mississippi River, and between 20th and Grand, extending south from Olive to the railroad tracks; 95 percent of them were black. Demolition of the area began in 1959 to make way for Laclede Town, Grand Towers, the Ozark Expressway , and a 22-acre extension by the St. Louis University onto the Civil War-era Camp Jackson site.
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A proponent of "accommodationism," Washington and his Tuskegee Institute emphasized skills-related training for blacks so they could be assimilated, or "accommodated," in white society. It taught skills readily marketed in industrial society and geared to the factory more than the office, rather than the liberal arts curriculum proposed by Washington's chief rival, NAACP co-founder W. St. Louis was not the site of some of the most bitter civil rights confrontations in the United States. Birmingham, Selma, Detroit, and Los Angeles experienced far more violence and destruction. This does not mean that St. Louis was an integrated city, or that such activities were uncommon. In many ways, the experience in St. Louis was typical of most American cities including regular activities, generally peaceful demonstrations, occasional visits from Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
As with many cities, black and white St. Louisans lived in separate parts of town for the most part. African-Americans generally lived north of Delmar by 1970, white residents in the south and southwestern city, with an integrated strip down the central corridor. These housing patterns dictated the racial distribution in schools, creating a de facto segregated education system even after the Supreme Court held that separate schools could never be equal. Some three students in four in St. Louis city schools were African-American in 1980, while white students increasingly attended schools in the county.
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At the time of the Dred Scott case, about one person in twenty living in St. Louis was African-American, two-third of whom were slaves. The percentage of the population with African descent was about five percent until the late 1870s. The end of political Reconstruction in 1877 and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the south compelled southern blacks to migrate north to cities such as St. Louis. Most famous, perhaps, were the Exodusters of 1879, so named for their exodus to what many of them thought was a sort of "promised land." This regular contact with both north and south meant that free blacks and slaves walked the same streets, met the same people, and interacted with one another.
Louis and Ethel Kraemer, a white couple who lived across the street at 4532 Labadie, filed a lawsuit against them to preclude their moving in. The St. Louis Circuit Court refused to recognize the covenant, but the state Supreme Court reversed the decision. S. Supreme Court ruled in its 1948 decision that such covenants limiting access to or ownership of property due to race violated the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. Shelley v. Kraemer remains a landmark case leading to lifting legal restrictions based on race.
