Keep fighting for St. Louis

About five years ago, I got in the habit of taking myself on extended driving tours of St. Louis. It was, at the time, an antidote to my pandemic cabin fever. But I soon discovered these drives offered their own independent pleasures beyond the relief from Covid containment. They were a way of getting a more global orientation to the city, carving a maze from north to south, east to west, and back again. I was born and raised in St. Louis and have been a city resident since I moved back in 2015, so it’s not as if I was exploring new terrain. But it’s a different experience when you travel in a single sitting from one edge of the city to the other, taking in the aesthetic transitions as you go.

We see a multigenerational ruling-class assault on Black existence in our city, with hollowed-out neighborhoods and familial inheritances lost forever. We see a politics of greed and neglect disguising itself in the language of “progress,” “growth,” and “basic services.” We see the redemption of a political coalition built around an unabashed faith in police force and corporate power. And we wonder why so many others cannot see this, or, worse, do not care.

I took another of these vehicular treks recently amidst all the dueling post-election takes. Whether by car, bus, or bike, I highly recommend it. It will deepen your appreciation for the multilayered richness and beauty of St. Louis. And it will remind you of the indescribable divergence between life in one corner of the city and another.

This divergence is the omnipresent backdrop of all politics in St. Louis. It’s also the backdrop reflected in two maps that tell the story of this latest political chapter.

The first is the map of 2025 voting patterns across the city. There are a few versions that display the data in different ways, but they all reflect the same basic facts: strong support for Black incumbents in the northern half of the city (and small majority-Black pockets of southeast St. Louis); strong support for white candidates—widely viewed as more “moderate”—in the city’s southern half.

It’s an old story: draw a line at Delmar and it’ll take you a long way to a solid election prediction.

A map that has received less attention, but is equally striking in this context, is one of “Neighborhood Transformation Investments” released by the now-former Mayor Tishaura Jones and her Community Development Administration in late February. The administration described this map as a visualization of a $250 million investment in economic justice, with categories such as housing, vacancy interventions, community assets, and transportation.

Place this image side-by-side with that of the city’s voting patterns and one conclusion is inescapable: it’s the same map. Those economically distressed, majority-Black neighborhoods receiving unprecedented investment voted to continue on that path. More prosperous, whiter neighborhoods that were watching those investments flow elsewhere voted to change course.

On one side, a demand for leveling the playing field. On the other, a preference that their side of the field remain pristine, no matter the cost.

And there’s always a cost. In this election, that cost included a newsworthy infusion of cash behind the effort to remove St. Louis’ sitting Black leadership. Headline after headline told the story of candidate Cara Spencer’s fundraising advantage to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, fueled by high-profile developers and corporate leaders. Unsurprisingly, it worked. Money doesn’t always win, but it certainly helps.

In a classic appeal to “civility,” some commentators have taken issue with what they characterize as angry attacks on Spencer and her campaign funders. This is an emotional misdiagnosis, or at least an oversimplification. It is not, at its core, anger, but rather a kind of sorrow expressing itself through frustration and critique. We see a multigenerational ruling-class assault on Black existence in our city, with hollowed-out neighborhoods and familial inheritances lost forever. We see a politics of greed and neglect disguising itself in the language of “progress,” “growth,” and “basic services.” We see the redemption of a political coalition built around an unabashed faith in police force and corporate power. And we wonder why so many others cannot see this, or, worse, do not care.

Short-lived as it was, we were very recently making different choices as a city. We chose Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner on an explicit promise to be a check on police corruption. We chose Congresswoman Cori Bush who pledged to turn over the table and fight for the forgotten people and communities of St. Louis. We chose to remake and reconstitute the Board of Aldermen under the leadership of democratic socialist President of the Board Megan Green. And we chose St. Louis’s first Black woman mayor, Tishaura Jones, whose clearest and most consistent commitment was to rebuild and revitalize the city’s long-neglected and economically abandoned Northside.

We did that. The politically elite and powerful—the legacy media, corporate bosses, and police unions—were never onboard with that plan. But we did it anyway, because we understood that the crisis was real and a fundamental reorientation was needed.

And now, it seems, we’re pretending things really weren’t so bad after all.

To hear the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial board tell it, the real problem is that all the social justice nonsense got in the way:

“[T]hat failure was definitely emblematic of a mayor who was so fixated on expanding the role of the city into areas normally handled by charities and social workers that day-to-day municipal functionality suffered.

Removing snow. Filling potholes. Collecting garbage. Controlling traffic. Answering 911 calls. These and too many other basic city functions have too often felt back-burnered by a mayoral administration that was quick to pass out $500 apiece to poor families, to fund residents’ kids’ higher education and even to consider lending money to residents to bring their automobile registration tags current.”

It’s telling that these are the things they find so grating: assistance programs for poor people trying to do things like drive, go to college, and pay bills, things which they dismiss as the province of “charities and social workers.”

They even take offense to what they call “attempt[s] to blatantly racialize the election.” It’s a stunningly ignorant grasp at racial absolution. Even if we didn’t have voting maps that look like a Black-and-white breakdown of St. Louis, we’d have common sense.

Just try taking a drive around town. Note the conditions and infrastructure—a physical manifestation of “basic city functions,” one might say—in communities that most embraced this supposed change agenda. Then note the conditions in those areas that most soundly rejected it. I would love to hear a coherent explanation for this alignment that has nothing to do with race.

Nobody has one. There isn’t one. It’s just impolite to point that out.

Undoubtedly, part of what we see reflected in the changing city leadership is a steep decline in Black population in recent years. For the first time since the early 1990s, St. Louis is unambiguously a plurality-white city, placing racial equity and structural transformation lower on the list of public policy priorities. Through this lens, we simply see the interests of an oppressed minority defeated by the will of a favored majority. Such a dynamic is hardly new.

Occasionally, someone who disagrees with a particular political opinion of mine will earnestly assert—as if they have stumbled upon a stash of rhetorical kryptonite—that I don’t reflect the majority view in whatever geographic or demographic group suits them most. And I have to politely remind them that I am a Black, queer, abolitionist, anti-capitalist living in the American Midwest; the minority is home for me.

St. Louis, likewise, is home—for me and many like me who feel the pull toward status quo. We will continue to fight for it, because we must. We will keep fighting to free people from cages, to close jails, to put a roof over every head, to place care and support above police and punishment, to invest in the people and places that have been left behind, and to offer a promising future to every child in every neighborhood and on every block. In that sense, our mandate will not change.

And if our streets will never again be plagued by the evils of trash, potholes, or snow, that’ll be nice, too.

Blake Strode is a civil rights lawyer and advocate in St. Louis, Missouri.