Acts of Love and Resistance

Segregation has shaped St. Louis as surely as the waters of the Mississippi River. Its course can be followed through physical traces, oral histories, fragmented communities, and continuing grassroot struggles.

But “what we call ‘segregation’ was hardly inevitable or certain,” write Iver Bernstein and Heidi Kolk of Washington University in St. Louis, in their introduction to The Material World of Modern Segregation: St. Louis in the Long Era of Ferguson. Indeed, as an ideological project, the maintenance of segregation “constantly required the beating back and beating down of the alternatives, which were so robust as to frequently threaten to overwhelm it.”

Published as a special issue of The Common Reader, The Material World of Modern Segregation collects 17 essays investigating the racial histories of sites throughout the St. Louis region. These range from local landmarks such as the Eads Bridge, Delmar Boulevard, and Powell Symphony Hall to lost African American neighborhoods such as DeSoto-Carr, Howard-Evans Place, and Mill Creek Valley to the now-relocated Confederate monument in Forest Park.

In this Q&A, Bernstein, professor of history, of African and African American studies, and of American culture studies, all in Arts & Sciences; and Kolk, assistant professor in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, discuss the origins of the book, the ethics of memory work, and the tending of community.

Bernstein: This book is designed to contribute to our understanding of how St. Louis engages with its past, particularly its traumatic past. One can read these essays, visit these sites and hopefully look at our city with new eyes.

Kolk: In the wake of Michael Brown’s killing, in 2014, it was clear that academic theories of racial experience had reached their explanatory limits, and that the terms of conversation were going to have to change. As a group, we wanted to think very deeply about what it means to write in the post-Ferguson moment, with care for the community whose experiences we’re documenting.

Bernstein: In a way, we’re trying to sort through the wreckage of conventional liberal understandings of segregation—those which insist on soothing notions of “race relations” and “post-race” without engaging the historical and ongoing realities of war and violence, profound rupture, and unspeakable wounds.

This involves the hard work of listening—of being humble in the presence of our community.

Bernstein: The landscape of segregation can seem naturalized or eternalized, but it was made by a series of decisions. In Wellston, some of these decisions were very specific to the dismantling, in 1966, of St. Louis’ streetcar system. Other decisions, relating to material extraction and rapacious taking by outside forces, are more iterative. That is, they’re constantly being made and remade—for decades.

Today, looking at Wellston’s challenged, tumble-down commercial district, you’d never know that a fierce civil rights struggle played out around the pavilion between roughly 1967 and 1970. For me, one of the revealing moments is a controversy about a racist lawn statue installed by segregationist Mayor Leo J. Hayes.

So often, with monument controversies, the issue is dismissed—either through ignorance or a kind of malignant awareness—as merely symbolic. But the depth of these struggles tells us something about our larger histories, and what we can access by attending to material conditions. The seemingly small but intense controversy over Hayes’ statue, placed in front of Wellston City Hall, was not a symbolic sideshow but a crucial pivot in Black Wellston residents’ historic struggles to access, own, and control the material resources they need to survive and thrive—on the “eve” of the creation of the Wellston of today.

If we can answer the question of how St. Louis got to be this way, perhaps we can find the means to undo it.

Kolk: There’s also something really beautiful that comes to the surface in Iver’s piece, and in many of these essays, about that kind of memory work. The simple tending of community—which is invisible to most people—becomes an act of love and resistance.