by Sandy » Mon Aug 25, 2014 8:06 pm
I was there in the late 70's, and worked in ministry right along the line through the city that separated white neighborhoods from black. The church in which I served had a lot of members who drove back in from the suburbs, and some of them were going through the same things in their suburban neighborhoods that they had encountered in the city, as the black population migrated into the northern suburbs, like Normandy, Berkeley, Overland, Pine Lawn, and began to hit the southern boundary of Ferguson. I think the airport expansion, which took out a lot of neighborhoods just west of Ferguson, landlocked the area, and hastened the increase of the black population. There were frequent eruptions of violence, as police clashed with neighborhood residents, much of it prompted by perceived police brutality toward blacks.
I lived in Hyde Park-Bremen, on the north side, in a flat with one other Baptist missionary, in a four flat building with a Ukrainian family, an inner-city single mom and her 15 year old son who was a promiscuous drug dealer, and a black newlywed couple. The neighborhood was the last remaining mixed area in the almost totally black North St. Louis. I rode the bus back and forth every day, sometimes at night, and never felt threatened, even when passing some of the most notoriously violent and dangerous housing projects in the country at the time. Most of the time, changing buses at Washington and Grand, I was the only white person riding north.
The racism was so thick you could cut it with a knife. The common phrase, that the blacks were "taking over everything" and "look what they've done to the city" were heard frequently. It was quite difficult to minister, attached to an all white, Southern Baptist church, but it was actually one of the few in the city that was willing to at least make an effort, mainly VBS and reaching kids, not adults, and providing a weekly food distribution to the elderly who lived in the housing project up the street. We also had a ministry to people in City Hospital, a charity medical facility, and that is a whole other experience.