The Beginnings of Formal Housing Segregation

As developers began to build on larger tracts of land, they started using protection of the properties from “nui- sances” as a marketing tool to encourage people to move into their subdivisions. While the restrictions initially excluded dirty or smelly businesses like slaughterhouses from being put in proximity to the newly developed areas, developers quickly began to “restrict” their new subdivisions with regard to race and, in some cases, reli- gion as well. Such restrictions did not initially extend to housing that already existed.

There is little evidence that St. Louisans felt the need to restrict existing housing in the earliest years of the twentieth century. However, during the teens, the African American population began to grow rapidly as people moved north in search of industrial jobs and a life outside of the Jim Crow South. Population growth created crowding in the often-deteriorating African American sections of the city. Inevitably, those who could afford to move into newer homes in better neighborhoods looked for new housing. Of course, most of those homes were in predominantly white neighborhoods. More and more, African Americans who moved into white areas were met with shattered windows and house bombings.

Not all the resistance was violent, but the institu- tional resistance was perhaps, in the long run, more dam- aging and insidious than a brick through the living room window. In 1911, the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange banded together with neighborhood improvement associations to form the United Welfare Association. Together, they proposed a city ordinance that would restrict the occupancy of a neighborhood based on the race of 75 percent of its residents. Although their rheto- ric often argued that such zoning would protect African Americans from violence, the effect was to close most of the newest and most modern housing to blacks. Areas where African Americans could live, with the exception of middle-class areas like the Ville, were in the poorest and oldest sections of the city. The racial zoning law, condemned by some newspapers and vigorously opposed by the citizens’ committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Knights of Pythias, was initially voted down by twenty-one of the twenty-eight city aldermen and by Mayor Henry Kiel. However, charter reforms allowed the restrictions listed under the title “Ordinance to Prevent Ill Feeling, Conflict and Collisions Between the White and Colored Races, and to Preserve the Public Peace” to be brought directly to the voters via a referendum. It passed overwhelmingly, in large part due to an aggres- sive propaganda campaign by the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange and other groups insisting on the fiction that African Americans, merely by their presence as home owners, ruined property values and therefore threatened white St. Louisans’ investments in their homes.

At the time that the St. Louis zoning ordinance was passed in 1916, African Americans in search of better housing were moving into the western blocks of streets like Cook and West Belle Place. In fact, one of the blocks of West Belle Place immediately southeast of Lewis Place proper was featured in the infamous Look! campaign run in order to stir up anti-black sentiment and support of the 1916 ordinance. Although these blocks of West Belle Place had been predominantly white in 1910, by 1916 they were becoming part of the Finney Avenue District, an African American neighborhood bounded by Page, Delmar, Vandeventer, and Taylor.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court overturned St. Louis’s racial zoning ordinance within a few years, restric- tive covenants soon took zoning’s place. Restrictive cov- enants were private agreements that generally had terms of twenty to fifty years, in which all of the home owners in a neighborhood signed a document promising never to sell or rent their property to African Americans and Asians. The covenants sometimes also prohibited sales to Jews and Catholics. The covenants were then supposed to be attached to deeds in order to ensure that the covenant remained in force. The courts initially upheld such cov- enants because they were technically private agreements. The result was that even though city ordinances that cre- ated ghettos by race were declared unconstitutional, the race lines drawn in 1916 tended to become firmer and harder to cross in the 1920s and 1930s. Thus it was that in 1940 Lewis Place’s beautiful Taylor Avenue arch stood directly on the St. Louis color line. East of the gate was the African American Finney Avenue District, west of the gate was a whites-only neighborhood.

At least one white resident, Dr. Eli Mayfield, moved from West Belle Place, where he lived in 1910, to Lewis Place during the teens. He purchased number 2 sometime before 1920. Although he died before the restrictive cov-

enant was drawn up for Lewis Place in 1928, his wife, Ida Mayfield, did sign it. She may have done so because, in her eyes, the covenant would maintain the value of her home, keeping it safe from what was called in real estate industry propaganda the “Negro invasion.” The text of the restrictive covenant itself certainly spoke to such fears, saying:

Whereas it is to the mutual benefit and advan- tage of all of the parties of the First Part to pre- serve the character of the said neighborhood as a desirable place of residence for persons of the Caucasian race and to maintain the values of their respective properties, and to that end they desire to restrict the use and disposition of their several said parcels of land for the benefit of all parties of the first Part their heirs, successors and assigns, in the manner hereinafter set forth.

The document went on to require that the signato- ries agree, first, to not allow “slaughter house, junk shop or rag picking establishments” to be erected or run on their property. The second requirement was that prop- erty could not be sold, conveyed, or leased to “negroes, no matter how the right to occupancy or title shall be attempted to be acquired.”

Both the language of the restrictive covenants and the propaganda of the real estate industry were engi- neered to create fear among whites. Clement E. Vose, a noted scholar of the Shelley v. Kraemer case, described the situation in this way:

Real estate dealers and property owners formed protective associations which pledged them- selves to do everything possible to prevent the renting and selling of homes to Negroes in white areas.... In carrying out their program, they resorted to vilification, ridicule and disparage- ment of Negroes, accusing them of destroying property values and robbing white people of their homes.