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NY Times, May 8, 2020
Rivers Merge in St. Louis. So Do Racism, Violence and Exclusion.
By Jennifer Szalai
The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the
United States
By Walter Johnson
Illustrated. 528 pages. Basic Books. $35.
A century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about St. Louis, a city that
“sprawls where mighty rivers meet,” and offered an autopsy of a tragedy.
In the summer of 1917, after a labor dispute at an aluminum plant, black
residents of East St. Louis were chased down, strung up, beaten, burned
and shot. Their white neighbors had turned on them with a viciousness
that was gratuitous and grotesque — a cruelty too extravagant to be
understood as a matter of mere survival. “It was not that the white
American worker was threatened with starvation,” Du Bois wrote, pointing
to the booming wartime economy, “but it was what was, after all, a more
important question — whether or not he should lose his front-room and
Victrola and even the dream of a Ford car.”
The East St. Louis Massacre of 1917 features in “The Broken Heart of
America,” a new book by Walter Johnson, as one particularly horrific
example of how St. Louis figures into the entwined history of white
supremacy, capitalism and violence in the United States. Johnson begins
with the Lewis and Clark expedition of the early 19th century and ends
with the police shooting of an unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.,
in 2014.
A professor at Harvard and the author of two previous books about
slavery, Johnson allows that he has a personal interest in the subject —
not as a victim of racial capitalism but as an unwitting beneficiary of
it. He grew up two hours west of St. Louis, in a white suburb where
people talked about “high property values” and “good schools,” and tried
to distance themselves from the overt racism of their neighbors by
deeming it unseemly. That gave them an “alibi,” he writes, for failing
to recognize how their own privileged lives were built on exclusion.
I’m using the word “built” advisedly: One of Johnson’s arguments is that
racism and inequality don’t just course through the city’s history but
were built into its architecture and even its physical landscape.
Located at the juncture of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, St.
Louis was where the Southern system of slavery met the push for western
expansion. The city functioned as the administrative center for the
policy that became known as Indian Removal; with the Missouri Compromise
of 1820, it became one of the northernmost outposts of slavery in the
Union. The 20th century brought redlining and the destruction of black
neighborhoods. The embodiment of the city’s “urban renewal” policies of
the ’50s and ’60s was the enormous Pruitt-Igoe housing project,
neglected to the point of utter disrepair before it was dynamited into
rubble.
When it comes to the history of racism and exclusion in the United
States, St. Louis wasn’t unique in this regard; what it was, Johnson
says, was more extreme. For a chapter on the 1904 World’s Fair that was
held there, he has chosen the title “The Babylon of the New World”; the
phrase originated from a Gilded Age civic booster who meant it as a
compliment, equating St. Louis with an imperial center for culture and
learning, but Johnson prefers the more ignominious connotations from the
Old Testament — a city that presented itself “in the splendor of its
boundless ambition, but rotten at the core.”
Johnson is a spirited and skillful rhetorician, juggling a profusion of
historical facts while never allowing the flame of his anger to dim.
Sometimes his metaphors can get a little overheated; after describing
how the city of Ferguson levies outrageous fines on its poorest
citizens, effectively harvesting them for operating expenses, he doesn’t
really need to compare another form of revenue extraction to “a junkie
using his kids’ lunch money to fund a bad habit.” He also errs on the
side of rolling, multiclausal explications where a sharper indictment
might sometimes do. But the story he’s telling has so many elements that
it makes sense he would immerse himself in the intricacies of tax
increment financing and municipal bond debt. As he ably shows, so much
exploitation lies in the details.
In “The Broken Heart of America,” St. Louis emerges as a place of
firsts: one of the first recorded lynchings, in 1836; the first city to
pass a residential segregation ordinance by popular referendum, in 1916.
Dred Scott filed his original freedom suit in St. Louis, where he lived;
it eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice
Roger Taney ruled against him, deciding that black men “had no rights
which the white man was bound to respect.”
But solidarity and resistance found a place in St. Louis too. During the
Depression, black and white workers joined together for a series of
“hunger marches” in the city. Around the same time, black women
nutpickers initiated a walkout at Funsten Nuts, white women sorters
joined them and together they forced the company to double their wages.
Eight decades later, the shooting of Michael Brown touched off the Black
Lives Matter movement.
Johnson’s epilogue begins with an alarming image: Just outside St.
Louis, an underground trash fire is burning its way toward a landfill of
buried nuclear waste. But he doesn’t leave it at that. Nine pages later,
he counteracts it with another scene, this time of high school runners
circling a track on the city’s Northside. For many of them, life at home
is rough, but last year more than half the team qualified for the Junior
Olympics. “They fly around in the fading light,” Johnson writes, “little
kids taking impossibly long strides.”
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