As St. Louis Reparations Commission ends, Black St. Louisans say cash payouts are a must

Riding through the Academy/Sherman Park neighborhood in north St. Louis, some of the Victorian-style homes can be seen in pristine condition. There are manicured lawns behind iron gates, community gardens, new housing developments and recently painted century-old homes. However, there are also a few boarded-up homes and empty lots in the area, similar to other neighborhoods in north St. Louis.

“This neighborhood has been a part of my family for 70 years, and it is a wonderful, thriving neighborhood with a very close-knit community,” Academy/Sherman Park resident Rhonda Jones said. “The people are what’s more important than these buildings.”

Jones has lived in the neighborhood for 24 years. Her grandmother, mother, aunts and cousins all lived there some time ago. The family home needed repair, so she purchased it from her cousin in 2000 and has renovated it multiple times.

The Realtor wants to preserve her family home and help other Black residents hold on to their homes in north St. Louis because it is one way they can create wealth. But as times get hard for families, many Black residents of the area are struggling to stay in their homes because they cannot afford renovations or pay the taxes.

“The vulture investors come in and purchase property for $20,000 or $30,000 and take all of the equity that they could from the families,” Jones said. “As a Realtor, I have been very focused on trying to convince people to do what you can to get as much as you can, if you decide you have to move, because this is our generational wealth.”

Jones was one of many Black people who have attended the St. Louis Reparations Commission’s virtual or in-person meetings since April 2023. In total, 109 residents testified about their experience with racism in St. Louis. At the end of each meeting, Black St. Louisans spoke about generations of housing, employment, health or education injustice and how they want the city to repay them for decades of racial harm.

Reparations commission findings

The eight-member commission will present a draft of its 100-page harm report to residents on Monday at its final meeting. The draft report will include an overview of reparations, the commission’s work, the history of slavery in St. Louis, an outline of issues in the Black community, recommendations and next steps. The key issues that will be highlighted in the report are housing, education, public health, jobs and economy, state violence and neighborhood and built environment. Each issue section will include personal narratives.

Mayor Tishaura Jones commissioned the group in December 2022 to study reparations and the effects of racism on Black St. Louisans. The commission plans to seek feedback from the community and present the final report and recommendations for repayment to Jones on Oct. 5.

“We’re trying to ensure the report gives a structural analysis and historical lens but also gives tangible human accounts for what happened and the consequences of these policies,” Chair Kayla Reed said at the February meeting.

The commission will base its harm report on the reparations parameters set by the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. The group defines reparations as a process of repairing, healing, and restoring people who were injured because of their group identity and in violation of their fundamental human rights by governments, corporations, institutions and families. The commission is also using the United Nations framework on reparations.

“Different people have been injured in different ways, at different levels, so we have to work towards matching the remedy to the injury,” Woullard Lett, co-chair of the national reparations group, said. “That’s what’s required in these various municipalities.”

Scholars have criticized the local and state repair movements, saying the federal government should be the leader of reparations for Black Americans, not municipalities.

Without a federal program in existence, local initiatives will not be enough, said William Darity, economist and author of “The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice.”

Darity said the goal of any reparations project should be to close the racial wealth gap. St. Louis’ median Black household income is about $33,000, while the median white income is about $77,000. He said the national gap is so wide that the only way it can close is if the federal government makes direct cash payments to Black Americans, with local initiatives subsidizing in other ways.

“That would require an expenditure of somewhere in the vicinity of $16 trillion … the total budgets for all states and municipalities in the United States come to less than $5 trillion,” Darity said. “So, whatever they do, is going to fall short of what is actually needed.”

What reparations could look like

Jones said Black families deserve reparations because of how much they lost in their lifetimes. She would like to see repair for people who were harshly sentenced during the 1990s drug epidemic, for Black residents who have faced racism in the health care system and for Black families who were steered to live in certain neighborhoods, which became impoverished and underresourced.

She hopes the commission underscores why white St. Louisans are twice as likely to be homeowners as Black St. Louisans.

“Homeownership can close the racial wealth gap, but everybody doesn’t want to be a homeowner,” Jones said. “If you look at it, there’s been down payment assistance forever, but the homeownership numbers haven’t changed … we need financial planning and preparation.”

Jones and other residents who testified asked for not only housing assistance but for city officials to create more financial investment classes to help Black St. Louisans think about ways to grow their potential reparations payouts.

Other residents support cash payouts as well. Anthony Johnson of the Academy/Sherman Park neighborhood loudly stated on the microphone at one summer meeting that he wanted his reparations in a cash payment of $500,000, because he said his community’s economic growth was intentionally destroyed over the years.

“Go down MLK from Jefferson, all the way down to almost when it ties into St. Charles Rock Road, it looks like a wasteland,” Johnson said. “They do not want us to succeed.”

Denise Otey is the great-granddaughter of Ha’ttie Hand. Mama Hat, as she affectionately called her, lived in the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in the 1950s until she died around 1964. Mama Hat was a community organizer and complained about the horrible conditions of the housing projects to city leaders. Otey told commission members that her great-grandmother suffered mentally and physically from living in a “slum village.”

Otey wants reparations for the racial discrimination her great-grandmother endured for being forced to live in the segregated and poverty-stricken housing project.

“The conditions they had to live in they should receive some type of compensation,” she said. “Just consider the diseases that they caught from inhaling raw sewage — asthma and other diseases … it needs to be paid back monetarily.”

James Gallagher III experienced such harms as well. He was born in the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood in the 1930s. The vibrant Black community once included over 5,000 housing units and hundreds of businesses, and it spanned over 50 city blocks from west of downtown St. Louis to Midtown. Gallagher remembers playing outside with friends, going to beautiful schools, enjoying outdoor entertainment, leaving the doors unlocked at night because the community was safe and spending time with his next-door neighbor, who is now his wife.

However, he cannot visit his former home at 3433 Pine St., except in his mind, since the community was deemed a slum village in the 1950s by Mayor Raymond Tucker and was destroyed due to Urban Renewal. Portions of St. Louis University, the Grand Arts district and CITYPARK soccer stadium sit on parts of the former Mill Creek Valley neighborhood.

Many families who were forced out of Mill Creek Valley, relocated to the Pruitt-Igoe public housing projects, which was also demolished decades later. Gallagher and his relatives were one of the first families living in the housing complex.

Gallagher testified at the July 2023 meeting. He wants reparations for all of the people who once lived in Mill Creek Valley. He said living in that neighborhood caused chronic health problems for him and his family because they lived there when he believes the city sprayed pesticides across the community. He said he believes the spraying caused him to lose 11 of his family members.

“My father passed at 58 years old, my mother passed at 68 years old … and I suffer with the blood cancer today from the spraying that they did over the Mill Creek Valley,” Gallagher said.

He wrote a four-page paper that included this information and his plea for reparations to the committee. He is asking city officials to pay him $1 million per family member that he lost because they were not allowed to fully live out their lives. Gallagher said there is no monetary value that can bring back his family members, but it can help him enjoy the family that he does still have.

“It’s not a lot of value to me at 86 years old, because I don’t have anywhere near as much time in front of me as I have behind me, but I got grandkids, great-grandkids and great, great-grandchildren,” Gallagher said, “They can have a better education, they’ll be able to have a home on their own, they wouldn’t have to struggle so much. Whether they keep it or not, it’s a different story, but they’ll have it.”

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