It was the end of the “Roaring 20’s.”
It was a time when streetcars clanged noisily down St. Louis streets and downtown was a destination for work and shopping.
It was a time when taxicab lined Union Station and passenger trains loaded thousands of commuters a day, carrying them to all points across America.
It was the year after Babe Ruth hit 7- home runs for the World Champion New York Yankees and the year before the notorious St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago. Mobster Bugsy Malone was quoted saying, “Only (Al) Capone kills like that, about the machine gun slaghter of seven of his hoods.
It was a decade after the end of the First World War and Black veterans were no closer to winning their freedom at home than they had been before they left. Life for the average Black person in St. Louis still consisted of menial jobs with some kind of “hustle” on the side. The few professionals in existence led the “good life” inside the walls of segregation.
It was the year after “Luck Lindy” hopped across the Atlantic “all by his lonesome,” and the year before the stock market crash that sent some robber barons hopping out of high-rise windows, their fortunes gone.
The year was 1928. Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic.
She was halied as the world’s greatest Aviatrix. Two years earlier, America’s first African-American female pilot Bessie Coleman died in a stunt crash. Queen Bess, as she was known, already had proven what the U.S. military refused to accept until the Tuskegee experiment: Black people could fly airplanes.
George Washington Carver was 65 years old. The Missouri native was getting many accolades for his incredible work with peanuts, sweet potatoes, soybeans, and pecans. 1928 was the year he became “Doctor Carver” as his alma mater, Simpson College of Indiana, bestowed an honorary degree upon him.
Carver, who could have made millions, mostly accepted praise and awards for his successful inventions. “God gave them to me,” he would say. “How could I sell them to anyone else?” This was a view clearly not shared by his white contemporaries.
A great leap in medicine was made in 1928 when Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in London. Here, the first rumblings of a new “colored” hospital could be heard. Almost a decade later, Homer G. Phillips Hospital for Colored opened in The Ville.
Great strides were being made in technology. Missourian Walt Disney would make the first talking animated movie, Steamboat Willie, introducing the world to Mickey Mouse. The best picture of 1928 was The Broadway Melody. Twenty-six million cars were traveling the roads of America. The first three televisions were sold in 1928. It would be nearly 20 years before the first St. Louis television station, KSD, aired.
In 1928, St. Louis was the jewel of the Midwest – a bustling, thriving industrial city of nearly one million people, filled with smokestacks belching thick black clouds into the air. The putrid smell of slaughtered cattle often drifted through north and south side neighborhoods from the packinghouses that dressed and prepared much of the meat consumed in the Midwest.
Often, poor people, mostly Black, could be found outside the packinghouse, picking through some of the discarded parts of the cows and pigs, looking for food. Sometimes the intestines were thrown out, then recovered, cleaned, cooked, and eaten. Smelling up the neighborhoods – chitlins. If Chicago was the king of packinghouses, St. was certainly a crown prince.
By 1928, St. Louis’ African American community was sizable. A small neighborhood just south of Chouteau and east of Compton know as “Compton Hill” was alive. It was a collection of working-class Black folk.
Just north of there was “Mill Creek,” on its way to becoming a slum that the city would bulldoze as part of its “urban renewal.” This area produced Josephine Baker, who used to dance in front of Tom Turpin’s Booker T. Washington Theatre – among the first in the United States operated by and for Blacks.
On the other side of the city, another community of Black folks was growing. The “Ville” was completing a racial swing that began in 1920 and went from only eight percent African-American to 86 percent African-American. The area was a collection of German and African immigrants and a few African Americans, known as Elleardsville for the man who originally owned the land. As the immigrants moved away, more Black people replaced them. Black businesses and churches sprang up.
The most famous African American living there was Annie Malone, who built her beauty products business there. Malone became a millionaire and contributed generously to the local orphan’s home that bears her name. She also pushed for capital improvements such as paved streets. Sumner High School, Stowe College, Turner and Simmons schools were all in use in the Ville by 1928.
Phone lines and trolley lines crisscrossed the space for white-collar St. Louis. It was more than an even bet that a smiling Black face opened doors, shined shoes or pushed brooms down shining halls. A chorus of Black “Yes, sirs” could be heard each time a white businessman came through a door commenting about the ever-changing St. Louis weather. These faceless “colored’ men and women were, after all, part of American’s “Negro problem.”
College theses and books have been written on this unique American “problem.” Black newspapers like the Kansas City Call, Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender described the treatment of colored peole. The Communist Party was courting disgruntled intellectuals with promises of socal equality.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League both sought compromise on integration. The “Negro problem” was a dilemma for Black and whites, social and political. More than a quarter of the way through the 20th century and the nation was a long way from solving it.
It was a decade after the end of the First World War and Black veterans were no closer to winning their freedom at home than they had been before they left. Life for the average Black person in St. Louis still consisted of menial jobs with some kind of “hustle” on the side. The few professionals in existence led the “good life” inside the walls of segregation.
However, Black businesses flourished and the nightlife was good. St. Louisan Josephine Baker had already fled to Europe, but the talented writers, artists, and performers flourished in a place calls Harlem. Black music was being played loudly, and hip whites were diggin’ it. Louis Armstrong formed his band. Bessie Smith sang the blues and Duke Ellington released “Black Beauty” and “Swampy River.”
The Harlem Renaissance was still in its heyday. Langston Hughs, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson and Countee Cullen were telling the world of the joys and sorrows of being a Black American. The arts flourished, but the end was approaching rapidly. Claude McKay published his Home to Harlem — at the time, the most popular novel by a Black author. Harlem became synonymous with Black people, and every Black section in every American city had some business called the Harlem something-or-other. And while 20-year-old white Bellville native Buddy Ebsen debuted on Broadway in 1928. Miss Baker was in Europe because Broadway wouldn’t touch her.
On April 4 in 1928, Marguerite Johnson was born in Arkansas, moved to St. Louis and later made her mark as poet, novelist, autobiographer and actress Maya Angelou.
Ten Black men were lynched in the South in 1928. Lynching was, to some white people, one solution to the “Negro problem.” That year, civil rights legend Ida B. Wells wrote in her autobiography, Crusade of Justice, “I was convinced that the Southerner had never gotten over his resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income.”
So blatant were the illegal lynchings of Black men in America and so visible was the Ku Klux Klan that distinguished Americans began to speak out against the lynchings and the Klan.
It all came to a head in 1928 when the Klan, incensed by the president candidacy of Catholic Alfred E. Smith, added Catholics and Jews to its list of targeted groups. More than five million Klansmen were parading in hoods and carrying fiery crosses through 45 of American’s 48 states in the name of “Protestant morality.” Out of this year of hate-mongering came the first effort to unite divergent groups – The National Conference of Christians and Jews.
In 1928, the St. Louis Cardinals won the National League flag for the second time in three years, but more important to African American was “Cool Papa” – he won a Negro League penant and married Clara Belle Thompson.
St. Louis for years has been one of the leaders in brewing beer, in making shoes, in producing coal, steel, and lead.
Rock quarries were common work sites in north and south St. Louis. The beer barons though, were driven underground or into the soft drink business because of prohibition.
Unskilled Black laborers found work in the foundries and steel mills. There were the janitors and the street cleaners. Many held these jobs proudly unaware that they would soon lose them to the looming depression because “honest white men” needed jobs.
This was the world in 1928 that prompted a Baltimore newpaperman. A.N. Johnson to join St. Louis businessman John L. Procope, feature writer Nathan B. Young, and Lincoln University grauduate Nathaniel Sweets to create The St. Louis American newspaper.
The paper focused on the issues of the time. Civil rights, lynching, mob influences, Black veterans, jobs, education, and baseball’s color line were all frequent topics.
The American became the social register for St. Louis’ Black society as well.
Weddings, meetings, church events, entertainement events all found their way into the pages of the American. Names like Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, Quincy Trouppe, James “Cool Papa” Bell, Homer G. Phillips and Annie Malone were frequently on the pages.
This tiny paper filled in the sizable gap left by the mainstream newspapers – the Post Dispatch, the Globe-Democrat, and the Star-Times. It made no pretense about its purpose: News about Blacks, for Blacks, in a paper owned by Blacks. That is still the American‘s mission — 95 years later.
See the entire St. Louis American’s 95th Anniversary Special section.
