St Louis Reparations Committee

Housing and Neighborhood Development: The legacy of redlining, discriminatory lending practices, and the destruction of Black neighborhoods through urban renewal projects has left many Black residents of St. Louis without access to affordable and safe housing. Public testimony and historical data show that Black families have been systematically denied opportunities to build generational wealth through homeownership. The report also highlights how Black communities were displaced by projects like the Mill Creek Valley urban renewal in the 1950s, which razed a thriving Black neighborhood. The report calls for robust investment in affordable housing, homeownership assistance, and the rebuilding of historically disinvested Black communities to address these long-standing disparities.

In so far as reparations efforts intend to ameliorate cultural and institutional legacies of slavery in St. Louis, consistent with a transitional justice focus on ensuring “non-repetition,” this complex and unique history poses several challenging yet important considerations (Curry, 2007). A large body of social science research indicates that area histories of slavery are predictive of a broad array of subsequent patterns of racialized conflict, violence, and inequality, continuing still today. These studies associate histories of slavery with incidence of lynching in the late 19th and early 20th century, and with homicide, hate crime, incarceration, capital punishment, heart disease, infant mortality, residential segregation, white political conservatism, and other outcomes today. Several studies associate legacies of slavery with persistent white population support of repressive criminal legal system policies and practices (e.g., incarceration and capital punishment). In Missouri, such policies are more consistently supported in deeply conservative rural areas where slavery was more concentrated, yet disproportionately impact populations in the urban communities like St. Louis. Similarly, though the proportion of the population enslaved in St. Louis was small in comparison to places like the Mississippi Delta, black migration from the Lower Mississippi River Valley in the post-Civil War era likely intensifies legacies of slavery in St. Louis through inter-generational, cross-state transmission of harms originating elsewhere but accumulated here. Finally, several studies of the legacies of slavery and other historical racialized violence have suggested possible strategies for mitigating these intergenerational impacts, and these insights might inform reparations efforts.