01/26/2024
St. Louis
The Kinloch Barricade
How racism slowly dismantled a once-thriving community.
BY:JACKIE DANA,MAR .3, 2022
Growing up in North St. Louis County in the 1970s, I didn’t have a firm grasp of the different townships that criss-cross the county. I knew I was from St. Louis but that my mailing address was Ferguson (yes, that Ferguson). I heard the names Cool Valley and Kinloch and Berkeley and University City and Clayton, but as a kid, everything blurred together and I had only the vaguest sense of socio-economic and racial disparity in housing and infrastructure.
As I explored last week, I grew up in the Wyndhurst apartment complex, just east of Lambert Field Airport, and immediately south of a creek that separated us from the city of Kinloch. In searching the history of the area, I discovered that directly north of my complex and across the creek, there was a barricade that prevented the Black residents of Kinloch from driving into Ferguson, which was then largely white. After protests in the late 1960s, the two cities worked to remove the barricade, only to have others demand the construction of fences and walls to keep the communities apart—much like the so-called peace walls built in the north of Ireland, or the Israeli West Bank barrier.
looked like. Of course, when it was there, no one, on either side, ever had a reason to go there. It was just a double dead-end street to the residents of both communities. But everyone knew why it was there.
With the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, people in Kinloch started pushing for it to be removed, and to make Suburban a thoroughfare through both communities, while many residents in Ferguson opposed it. After Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, some marchers made a point to breach the barricade in order to reach Zion Lutheran Church in Ferguson.
Until a few weeks ago I had never realized there was so much going on right next door. In the following piece I try to to peel back the history that led to the barricades and how it explains so much about the nature of North St. Louis County even today.
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A brief history of Kinloch
Kinloch, the first Black incorporated city in Missouri, is a tiny city of approximately one square mile wedged between Ferguson and Lambert-St. Louis International Airport.
Arkyan CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
In the late 19th century Kinloch sprung up along the Wabash Railroad. The first residents were white, but some land was set aside for Blacks, many of whom were former slaves who worked in the white households. In 1885 a real estate company sold lots in the area, advertising specifically to Black residents in St. Louis and elsewhere around the country.
Early on, Kinloch was generally regarded as a pleasant area. In 1898 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described Kinloch Park as a “beautiful suburb” and noted, “no suburb around the city has a more attractive location or is growing more rapidly than this one.”
In 1912 President Teddy Roosevelt became the first president to fly at the airstrip at Kinloch Field, an early airport that later gave way Lambert Field, the region’s airport. Upon receiving his invitation, he said, “will visit the field, but under no circumstances will I make a flight.” When he arrived, he changed his mind.
With Black soldiers returning from WWI, and others fleeing racial violence in East St. Louis in 1917, the city grew rapidly in the first few decades of the 20th century. By 1920 the population of Kinloch was nearly 2000, and as people moved in, neighbors helped each other build homes, often from salvaged lumber. By 1940 the population was 3607, and by 1949, there was a population that hit 5100. Many residents worked in white homes or took jobs at the steel mills and automotive plants in the area. The little town didn’t have a lot of amenities, but it did have an elementary school, a few shops, churches, and at one point, even a movie theater.
Duke’s store in Kinloch. State Historical Society of Missouri / Research Center-St. Louis
William H. Gillespie, who documented much of the history of Kinloch, called the city “a very tight community with a family and religious orientation.”
The city was eventually incorporated in 1948.
The boundary wall
By the 1960s, Kinloch was home to over 6000 people, while neighboring Ferguson to the east and south was a much larger (and at the time, largely white) city of 28,000 residents. And despite sharing a sizeable border, only two streets connected the two towns—and one of them was intentionally unusable for decades.
Long-time Kinloch resident Larman Williams described how Kinloch was different from Ferguson from the beginning. As the LA Times recounted,
People were poor, sure, but they worked hard. The problem was that other than the airport, all the businesses — and so, the tax base — were based in Ferguson. Black people from Kinloch could cross into Ferguson during the day to work as maids or factory men. But they had to be back across the border by sunset, when the gates closed.
From the earliest days of Kinloch, a train and then a streetcar ran along Suburban Avenue through Ferguson and into Kinloch. The right-of-way was owned by the St. Louis Public Service Co. When the streetcars were discontinued, the company relinquished the land in 1948.
Although the road was used for traffic for a while, it wasn’t in good repair. Eventually, in the late 40s or early 50s Ferguson built steel barricades blocking off the street, which according to Ferguson Mayor John G. Brawley were considered “safety measures.”
While the barricade may not have been specifically constructed to keep people out (I was unable to find any documentation on this, but will continue to investigate), the lack of political will on Ferguson’s part to rehabilitate the road—and as we’ll see, ongoing resistance to having Suburban Ave. open to through traffic—certainly could be construed as such.
