Gawker is on a quest to determine the most racist city in America. Your contributions are vital to the cause. Please add your insights in the discussion system below. Or if you'd like to nominate another city please send an email here. Today...St. Louis, MO.
City: St. Louis, MO
Ethnic Breakdown: 44% White, 49% Black, 2% Asian, 4% Hispanic, 1% Mystery Box
History of Racism:
• The famous Dred Scott case was first filed in St. Louis. The United States Supreme Court eventually rejected Scott's bid for freedom and declared that African Americans could not claim citizenship in the US.
• Former slave William Wells Brown: "Though slavery is thought, by some, to be mild in Missouri, when compared with the cotton, sugar and rice growing states, yet no part of our slave-holding country is more noted for the barbarity of its inhabitants than St. Louis."
• The East St. Louis race riots of 1917, in which "white mobs formed and rampaged through downtown, beating all African Americans who were found. The mobs also stopped trolleys and streetcars, pulling black passengers out and beating them on the streets and sidewalks."
• This story from CharlieL: "I was just shopping when two teenage male African Americans walked behind me and one said to the other 'I hate chinks.'"
• The Manhattan Institute has deemed St. Louis one of the most segregated cities in America.
Police Brutality? Yes.
Hear it from St. Louisians!
It is one of the last segregated cities in America...STL really does have "white" and "black" parts, like a checkerboard, and one does know immediately when one is in a certain "area".
White people in town support the Republicans simply because their greatest fear is the Dems taking away their guns, resulting in hordes of black men invading West County and stealing/shooting anything and everything. When they are with friends, they trade horror stories they supposedly heard from other white people about some terrible thing happening at the hands of a black person, or "City Person" as is the local codeword.
White people avoid North City, black people avoid much of South City, South County, and West County, and that's that. Try being black and driving through a city like Ladue (or even worse St. Charles or some places in Jefferson County). And the fun part is that the metro area just keeps getting more and more spread out as white people move further and further away from the scary black people that populate the city or the inner-ring suburbs.
As a black person who grew up there, fuck that place.
You don't go to South St Louis if you are black. Period.
It's a racist hellhole and it smells like dirty gym socks. Magary, just google Shelley v. Kraemer and the Dred Scott Case. Both of those originated in St. Louis. Oh, also the Fairgrounds Park Riot, where a bunch of whites in St. Louis rioted to keep black kids from swimming in a whites only pool.