opening g he ates -...

When the first African American family bought a home on Lewis Place, which runs from Walton to Taylor between Newberry Terrace and MacMillan streets, local whites resorted to moving

a white family into the home under a supposed “verbal” lease. It would take years of legal action to oust them from the home. Other African American home buy-ers were sued in the St. Louis Circuit Court by whites claiming that the racial restrictive covenant on Lewis

Place had been violated. Although the initial findings of the court were in favor of the African American defendants, the suits were renewed. In fact, there was no certainty through 1944 and 1945 that these African American “pioneers” would not eventually be deprived of their properties by the courts. The African American residents of Lewis Place neutralized this concern, how-ever, by buying so many homes in the neighborhood that they were able to take over the home owners’ association in 1945 and open Lewis Place to African Americans for good.

In 1940, the entrance gate to Lewis Place marked a color line in St. Louis. Behind the gate only whites could own homes, while on the other side of the

street was the African American Finney Avenue District. Lithograph by I. Hass Publishing and Engraving Company, 1896. Examples from the Recent Work

of Barnett, Haynes and Barnett, Architects. MHS Library.

Opening

Pickard Fall 2005 | 16

the GatesSegregation, Desegregation, and the Story of Lewis Place

A decade before the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of topEka, kansas

(1954) helped launch the modern civil rights movement, a million African Americans were

fighting overseas for the United States in World War II. In St. Louis, as in other American

cities, their parents, spouses, and children at home were denied access to public accommoda-

tions, equal education, fair pay, and decent housing. The last item was particularly problem-

atic in St. Louis, as its African American population grew rapidly and black neighborhoods

began to burst at the seams. As African Americans of necessity sought housing outside the

restrictive racial barriers set up by the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange and its partners,

legal confrontations between segregationist whites and African Americans in need of homes

became inevitable. This was the case with Lewis Place, a private place near St. Louis’s Central

West End.

by Elizabeth A. Pickard

}

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without fee or payment of any kind to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If this copyrighted material is to be used for purposes that go beyond fair use, permission must be obtained from the copyright owner.

Reprinted with permission from the Fall 2005 issue of Gateway magazine, vol. 26, no. 2. Copyright © 2005 by the Missouri Historical Society.

the Gates

18 | Fall 2005 Opening the Gates

Their actions were a harbinger of things to come. Only a few months later, the African American Shelley family bought a home a few blocks northwest of Lewis Place. As had happened on Lewis Place, white residents of the Marcus Avenue District sued the Shelleys under the terms of a restrictive covenant. Their case, Shelley v. Kraemer, was ultimately argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the Shelleys and ended judicial enforcement of racial restrictive covenants across the nation in 1948.

The Beginnings of Formal Housing Segregation

In order to understand the significance of what happened in St. Louis in 1945, it is useful to look at the continuum of African American housing patterns in the early twentieth century. In the 1890s, when the first homes on Lewis Place were built, there were no formal means of preventing African Americans from moving into any section of the city of St. Louis. While both racism and economic disparities between whites and blacks did separate people, homes were usually built on one lot at a time. There was also no zoning of any sort, so streets and neighborhoods tended to have more mixed uses—with businesses and homes in close proximity to one another. This meant that people of all races, ethnicities, religions, and economic levels lived in closer contact in 1890 than they would in 1940.

As developers began to build on larger tracts of land, they started using protection of the properties from “nui-sances” as a marketing tool to encourage people to move into their subdivisions. While the restrictions initially excluded dirty or smelly businesses like slaughterhouses from being put in proximity to the newly developed areas, developers quickly began to “restrict” their new subdivisions with regard to race and, in some cases, reli-gion as well. Such restrictions did not initially extend to housing that already existed.

There is little evidence that St. Louisans felt the need to restrict existing housing in the earliest years of the twentieth century. However, during the teens, the African American population began to grow rapidly as people moved north in search of industrial jobs and a life outside of the Jim Crow South. Population growth created crowding in the often-deteriorating African American

sections of the city. Inevitably, those who could afford to move into newer homes in better neighborhoods looked for new housing. Of course, most of those homes were in predominantly white neighborhoods. More and more, African Americans who moved into white areas were met with shattered windows and house bombings.

Not all the resistance was violent, but the institu-tional resistance was perhaps, in the long run, more dam-aging and insidious than a brick through the living room window. In 1911, the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange banded together with neighborhood improvement associations to form the United Welfare Association. Together, they proposed a city ordinance that would restrict the occupancy of a neighborhood based on the race of 75 percent of its residents. Although their rheto-ric often argued that such zoning would protect African Americans from violence, the effect was to close most of the newest and most modern housing to blacks. Areas where African Americans could live, with the exception of middle-class areas like the Ville, were in the poorest and oldest sections of the city. The racial zoning law, condemned by some newspapers and vigorously opposed by the citizens’ committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Knights of Pythias, was initially voted down by twenty-one of the twenty-eight city aldermen and by Mayor Henry Kiel. However, charter reforms allowed the restrictions listed under the title “Ordinance to Prevent Ill Feeling, Conflict and Collisions Between the White and Colored Races, and to Preserve the Public Peace” to be brought directly to the voters via a referendum. It passed overwhelmingly, in large part due to an aggres-sive propaganda campaign by the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange and other groups insisting on the fiction that African Americans, merely by their presence as home owners, ruined property values and therefore threatened white St. Louisans’ investments in their homes.

At the time that the St. Louis zoning ordinance was passed in 1916, African Americans in search of better housing were moving into the western blocks of streets like Cook and West Belle Place. In fact, one of the blocks of West Belle Place immediately southeast of Lewis Place proper was featured in the infamous Look! campaign run in order to stir up anti-black sentiment and support of the 1916 ordinance. Although these blocks of West Belle Place had been predominantly white in 1910, by 1916


they were becoming part of the Finney Avenue District, an African American neighborhood bounded by Page, Delmar, Vandeventer, and Taylor.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court overturned St. Louis’s racial zoning ordinance within a few years, restric-tive covenants soon took zoning’s place. Restrictive cov-enants were private agreements that generally had terms of twenty to fifty years, in which all of the home owners in a neighborhood signed a document promising never to sell or rent their property to African Americans and Asians. The covenants sometimes also prohibited sales to Jews and Catholics. The covenants were then supposed to be attached to deeds in order to ensure that the covenant remained in force. The courts initially upheld such cov-enants because they were technically private agreements. The result was that even though city ordinances that cre-ated ghettos by race were declared unconstitutional, the race lines drawn in 1916 tended to become firmer and harder to cross in the 1920s and 1930s. Thus it was that in 1940 Lewis Place’s beautiful Taylor Avenue arch stood directly on the St. Louis color line. East of the gate was the African American Finney Avenue District, west of the gate was a whites-only neighborhood.

At least one white resident, Dr. Eli Mayfield, moved from West Belle Place, where he lived in 1910, to Lewis Place during the teens. He purchased number 2 sometime before 1920. Although he died before the restrictive cov-

enant was drawn up for Lewis Place in 1928, his wife, Ida Mayfield, did sign it. She may have done so because, in her eyes, the covenant would maintain the value of her home, keeping it safe from what was called in real estate industry propaganda the “Negro invasion.” The text of the restrictive covenant itself certainly spoke to such fears, saying:

Whereas it is to the mutual benefit and advan-tage of all of the parties of the First Part to pre-serve the character of the said neighborhood as a desirable place of residence for persons of the Caucasian race and to maintain the values of their respective properties, and to that end they desire to restrict the use and disposition of their several said parcels of land for the benefit of all parties of the first Part their heirs, successors and assigns, in the manner hereinafter set forth.

The document went on to require that the signato-ries agree, first, to not allow “slaughter house, junk shop or rag picking establishments” to be erected or run on their property. The second requirement was that prop-erty could not be sold, conveyed, or leased to “negroes, no matter how the right to occupancy or title shall be attempted to be acquired.”

Both the language of the restrictive covenants and the propaganda of the real estate industry were engi-neered to create fear among whites. Clement E. Vose, a noted scholar of the Shelley v. Kraemer case, described the situation in this way:

Real estate dealers and property owners formed protective associations which pledged them-selves to do everything possible to prevent the renting and selling of homes to Negroes in white areas.… In carrying out their program, they resorted to vilification, ridicule and disparage-ment of Negroes, accusing them of destroying property values and robbing white people of their homes.

World War II and the Need for Housing

World War II created many defense industry jobs in northern cities like St. Louis; Baltimore, Maryland; and Detroit, Michigan, as thousands of African Americans

“Look at These Homes Now! Save Your Home! Vote for Segregation!” The infamous Look! campaign sought to stir up anti-black sentiment in support of a 1916 city ordinance seeking to restrict neighborhood occupancy based on race. Flier, 1916. MHS Archives.


moved out of the Deep South in the hope of higher wages and less discrimination. Restrictive covenants created problems for this new population in two ways: There were few homes of any description available to them to rent or buy, and what was available usually rented or sold at a higher price than a white buyer would pay for the same dwelling because of the high level of demand. In 1944, the St. Louis Argus highlighted the problem, run-ning the headline “Vet’s Wife Unable to Rent Home for Self and Children.” It told the story of Mrs. Mattie Harris and her four children, who could not find a place to live, even with the help of the American Red Cross.

The lack of housing inevitably led to overcrowding. George L. Vaughn, in his 1948 arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in the Shelley v. Kraemer case, noted that there were in St. Louis “117,000 people living in an area meant for 43,000.” He argued that the crowding, accom-panied by the fact that the vast majority of housing avail-able to African Americans could be classified as slums, was dangerous to the physical, mental, and moral health

of African Americans. In the 1950s, when St. Louis’s crowded Mill Creek Valley neighborhood was cleared, the area accounted for more than half of the infant mor-tality in the city. Such conditions also meant that people who had the means began to seek housing outside of the areas to which they were restricted.

African Americans responded to that pressure by circumventing restrictive covenants. The most common method of doing so was to have a white or very light-skinned person act as a straw man or straw party who would buy a home and then transfer the deed to the actual African American buyer. This broke the chain of ownership and could prevent the restrictive covenant from appearing on the deed to the African American buyer. This meant that it could not be argued that the African American had violated the contract by his or her presence in the home, nor could it be argued that the white home seller was at fault. The burden to sue under the restrictive covenant was borne by the neighborhood whites who had signed it, a burden and expense they occasionally elected not to bear. It should be noted that white home owners were often eager to sell to African Americans because they could ask a higher price from blacks in desperate need of housing than from other whites. This potential for selling at an excellent price helped promote the turnover of Lewis Place to African Americans in 1945.

World War II and the Fight for Civil Rights

The need to break restrictive covenants in St. Louis coin-cided with a new flowering of the civil rights movement. Invigorated by the success of the March on Washington movement, which had threatened to (but didn’t have to) march on the capital to force Franklin Roosevelt to eliminate discrimination in defense industry jobs, African Americans began to push not only for desegregated housing, but also for desegregated public accommoda-tions. In St. Louis, African American teachers orga-nized to demand pay equal to their white counterparts. Pearl Maddox, at the head of the Citizens’ Civil Rights Committee, led silent protests at local department store lunch counters with women carrying signs reading, for example, “Fox holes are democratic. Are you?” and “I invested five sons in the invasion.” The local NAACP

“Back to the Slave Quarters! Vote No on Segregation Feb. 29.” St. Louis’s segregation ordinance passed overwhelm-ingly but was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court a few years later. Handbill by Jeff Smith, 1916. MHS Archives.


along with the national organization continued work on voting rights, employment, and housing discrimination. The 1940s also saw the creation of St. Louis’s Lincoln University Law School and the beginnings of suits to desegregate Washington University in St. Louis as well as the University of Missouri system. It was in the context of this hopeful, activist atmosphere that African Americans undertook the effort to move to Lewis Place.

An Uneasy Alliance: African American Home Buyers and the Wildcat Real Estate Agents

As has been noted previously, because of the shortage of homes available to African Americans, there was often quite a profit to be made in selling restricted homes to them. Despite the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange’s threat of revoking the licenses of real estate agents who sold restricted properties to African Americans, there were companies that felt it was worth the risk. The Marcus Avenue Improvement Association, the organization that bankrolled first the fight to keep famous African American lawyer Scovel Richardson out of his home on North Market Street and then the Shelleys of Shelley v. Kraemer out of their home on Labadie Avenue, identified several so-called wildcat real estate companies as being of

particular concern. Two of them, H. J. Gannon Co. and John Grether, Co., played a role in selling Lewis Place homes to African Americans.

At a July 1945 NAACP conference on breaking restrictive covenants, David M. Grant, who practiced law with Robert L. Witherspoon of Lewis Place, described the role such real estate agents played in the painfully slow and expensive process of opening restricted areas to African Americans. Someone, whom Grant called an “intrepid, energetic real estate operator,” would buy a few homes using straw parties and then sell the homes to blacks. Once the first African American resident moved in, they would all wait to see what happened. If nothing happened, the process was repeated and the real estate company turned a tidy profit as the neighborhood changed from white to black. Of course, sometimes there were lawsuits, and sometimes the agents were brought before the real estate commission and their licenses were revoked, which prohibited them under Missouri law from selling houses.

There is no doubt, however necessary these wildcat real estate agents were to the covenant breaking process, that many African Americans saw the agents as taking advantage of the inequity of the housing situation for profit and understandably balked at supporting these “profiteers” when lawsuits were brought. However, the

Civil rights protestors demonstrating for fair employment during the Great Depression (detail). Activists demanding equal treatment for blacks during the 1930s and World War II helped pave the way for African American efforts to fight housing segregation. Photograph by Ralph A. Ross, 1931. MHS Photographs and Prints.


pragmatic lawyers present at the NAACP conference saw them as necessary evils; future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall stated, “You can’t expect to break into a neighborhood at the regular rates.”

Regardless of how African Americans felt about wild-cat real estate agents, they often had little choice but to rely on them. In fact, the process Grant described above could well have referred to what had happened on Lewis Place. Of the nine straw parties identified for certain in Lewis Place transactions, three of them, Lois Peters, Helen Cobb, and Jess Allison, appear repeatedly and can be directly linked to either the Gannon or Grether real estate companies. A fourth, Emil Winter, may be a real estate agent listed in the 1920 census, though if so, he would have been extremely elderly. The earliest transac-tions for homes later sold to African Americans were sales to Jess Allison in November 1943. Those homes, numbers 2 and 47, ended up being owned by Richard and Mae Layne and William and Laura Bridges, respec-tively. Helen Cobb was a secretary for Gannon and, in at least one case, Fred and Eliza Pruitt’s purchase of number 4712, the title passed between Cobb and Jess Allison before finally being sold to the Pruitts. Lois Peters was a secretary for John Grether, who listed and sold at least six Lewis Place properties over the course of 1944–1945. These transactions speak strongly to the role that wildcat

real estate agents played in integrating Lewis Place.There is a long-standing tradition on Lewis Place

that fair-skinned African Americans served as straw parties for the new home owners, but it has not been confirmed. There is also some suggestion that progressive Jewish residents circumvented the restrictive covenant, selling directly to African Americans. The only home sale between a Jewish family and an African American family that has been positively identified was the sale of number 4728 from the Becker family to the Miller family in 1944. That particular transaction did include a straw party. Although there isn’t definitive evidence about whether the people selling the houses were Jewish, at least four other homes were sold to African Americans without straw parties before the March 14, 1945, home owners’ meeting where it was decided to no longer seek to uphold the restrictive covenant.

Breaking Restrictive Covenants in the Courts before shEllEy v. kraEmEr

By World War II, the NAACP had hoped for many years to prompt a Supreme Court review of restrictive covenants on constitutional grounds. Unfortunately, the high court had refused to hear any cases since uphold-ing restrictive covenants in 1926. This meant that in

In the 1940s, many African American neighborhoods in St. Louis, such as Mill Creek Valley, were deteriorating, unsafe, and overcrowded. Such pressures led those who could afford to seek housing elsewhere to do so. For many, this meant fighting racially biased housing practices. Photograph, 1956. MHS Photographs and Prints.


St. Louis and elsewhere, lawyers had to try to overturn restrictive covenants on technical grounds in the state courts. Such grounds included “change in character,” meaning that significant numbers of African Americans had already moved into an area; faulty execution of the contract, usually meaning that the terms of the restrictive covenant required all the signatures of a neighborhood’s residents to be in effect, but did not have all the signa-tures; or the restrictive covenant had not actually been attached to the physical deed to a house, meaning that a chain of ownership could not be established where every purchaser of a home could be considered a party to the restrictive covenant. The strategy of invalidating restric-tive covenants on technical grounds could be effective, but since there was often a great deal of white money behind the plaintiffs, the process could be lengthy. When Scovel Richardson purchased a home in the 4600 block of North Market Street in 1941, he, with the help of Silas E. Garner, fought the case for three years before finally winning.

The First Lewis Place Case

In April 1943, while their three sons fought in World War II, Clifford R. Robbins, a chef, and his wife, Carrie, bought 4739 Lewis Place. Four days before the Robbinses were scheduled to move from their previous home at 4428 Evans, a white couple, George and Sylvia Boonshaft, moved into the Lewis Place house, claiming they had a verbal agreement for a one-year renewable lease. The Robbinses spent much of the next year and a half in court, trying to prove that they had made no agreement to rent the house to the Boonshafts and to force them to leave. A judge found in favor of the Robbinses in May 1944, order-ing the Boonshafts to vacate the premises by June 30, 1944.

Unfortunately, October and November 1944 found Mr. and Mrs. Robbins forced to return to court. The Boonshafts were still in possession of the house. Every attempt by the Robbinses to move into their new home was met with more legal firepower than it was likely Mr. Boonshaft, a shoe salesman, could have afforded. It isn’t clear who bank-rolled the fight to keep the Robbinses out of Lewis Place; it is possible that it was the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange, the trustee of the restrictive agreement on Lewis Place. It is also possible that one of the local protective or improve-ment associations was responsible. In any case, even after the court ordered the Boonshafts out of the house, they stayed put, and the Robbinses were prevented from moving into their home for several more months.

The Restrictive Covenant Cases of Lewis Place

Despite the problems of the Robbinses and the restric-tive covenant, other African Americans started buying homes on Lewis Place in 1944. The neighborhood was close to many African American churches and schools and other civic organizations in the adjacent Finney Avenue District and the nearby Ville neighborhood. Judging from the census block data from 1940, the homes on Lewis Place were probably more modern and desir-able than those on other nearby blocks, which appar-ently were already opening to African Americans. This, with the difficulty of finding good homes that African Americans in St. Louis had in the 1940s, probably made Lewis Place an inevitable target for desegregation.

Richard Layne, a dentist, and Mae Layne bought number 2 Lewis Place in February 1944 in Mrs. Layne’s name and moved in soon after that. Mrs. Ollie Lewis bought number 14 in May 1944. Both Mrs. Layne and

“Wildcat” realtors like the H.J. Gannon Real Estate Company made a profit by using straw parties to buy restricted houses and then selling them to African Americans. Advertisement, 1942. MHS Library.


In 1948, the United States Supreme Court ended judicial enforcement of racially restrictive covenants in home sales with the case Shelley v. Kraemer effectively ending housing segregation. Poster, 1988. MHS Photographs and Prints.


Mrs. Lewis were sued under the terms of the restrictive covenant shortly after the families moved in. One of the strategies used by the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange and by the local home owners’ and protective associa-tions was to have African Americans who moved into restricted neighborhoods sued, not by the broader orga-nization, but by individual whites who were signatories to the restrictive covenant. In the Lewis Place cases, the plaintiffs were Clifford P. Cummins of number 4627, J. P. Keller of number 4753, and V. V. Masterson of number 22. They were represented by the appropriately named attorney James Crowe. As with the Robbins-Boonshaft case, it is possible that a local protective association or the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange funded the lawsuits against Mrs. Layne and Mrs. Lewis. This is especially likely because in late 1944, a demurrer was granted in the Layne case. This meant that the judge felt that there was inadequate evidence to continue the suit, or that the evidence presented by attorney Crowe was faulty. The result of this demurrer was that the case essentially had to begin again, at the cost of the plaintiffs. Despite the costs, the plaintiffs did elect to continue the case, and it was still pending in March 1945.

The Layne and Lewis cases highlight some of the weaknesses in the restrictive covenant cases against them. Lewis Place’s restrictive covenant was drawn up in 1928. From the beginning, it does not seem to have been a particularly popular document and may have had as few as fourteen signatories, a mere fraction of the home owners on Lewis Place in 1928. Even those who did sign the covenant seem to have often neglected to attach the restriction to the deeds to their homes, which meant that once the house had passed from a signatory to another owner (whether a straw party or not), the chain of pos-session under the restriction was broken and the sale to African Americans was not prohibited. The lawyer for the Layne and Lewis families, Silas E. Garner, got forty-nine Lewis Place home owners to sign affidavits stating that they wished to remove the restrictive covenant. Fifteen had already sold homes to African Americans by October 1944. All these factors weakened the case against African Americans living on Lewis Place.

The defense also focused on the constitutional issues surrounding restrictive covenants. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution states that everyone, regardless of race, is entitled to equal protection under

the law. Attorney Garner argued that restrictive cov-enants denied African Americans their right to own property and that the courts, by enforcing restrictive covenants, were acting unconstitutionally. Since the Lewis Place home owners decided to no longer enforce the restrictive covenant in March 1945, further appeals on constitutional grounds were unnecessary. Still, this aspect of the case, while not tested by the Layne and Lewis cases, became a central feature of the argument that George Vaughn would place before the Supreme Court of the United States when he argued for the rights of the Shelleys, who bought a home in 1945 on the 4600 block of Labadie.

The Lewis Place owners did not have to wait for the U.S. Supreme Court. The final blow to the restriction of Lewis Place was the remarkably quick buy-up of property in the neighborhood by African Americans. From April to November 1944, “at least twenty” African American families bought homes on Lewis Place. Certainly, wild-cat real estate agents also played a role in selling the first homes to African Americans. But there is also an important and long-standing tradition among residents of Lewis Place that attorney Robert Witherspoon was active in opening the neighborhood to African Americans and that the strategy for doing so was his. Regardless of how it began, by early in 1945 it was clear to everyone that Lewis Place was no longer restricted. On March 16, 1945, the St. Louis Argus reported that there had been “an orderly and harmonious meeting” of all the property owners on Lewis Place, black and white. They voted to dismiss the Layne and Lewis cases and to allow the restrictive covenant on Lewis Place to expire without enforcing it. Richard C. Layne, Harvey V. Tucker, and Harold Gray were then elected to replace the white commissioners of Lewis Place. On May 15, 1945, Cummins, Keller, and Masterson dropped their suits. Ultimately, it is the story of how the cases ended, not how they began or were car-ried out, that makes Lewis Place’s story different from the others. It was not the first street to be desegregated in St. Louis during World War II, nor was it the last. All the cases involved people in need of good homes. Any attempt to break a restrictive covenant started with people who were willing to pay a premium to move into areas that were likely to be hostile at best and violent at worst. Whatever the reaction of the neighbors, an African American family who bought property that was restricted


was likely to be sued. Those suits were backed up with a lot of white segregationist money and often lasted for a long time, at the end of which there was no certainty that African American home owners would be left with their property. What happened on Lewis Place changed that status quo and jerked the rug out from under the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange.

The Lessons of Lewis Place

The story of the desegregation of Lewis Place reminds us not only of the evils of Jim Crow, but that the effort to overcome them was begun long before the more storied struggles of the 1950s and 1960s and, in fact, that the triumphs of those years had their foundations in smaller victories during the years of World War II. Nor were those battles fought only by the Martin Luther King Jrs. and Thurgood Marshalls of the world. The desegregation of Lewis Place was accomplished by ordinary men and women—lawyers yes, but also teachers, sleeping car por-ters, doctors, and laborers in search of the basic human right to live, and for some, to raise their families, in a place that was safe and healthy. It was and is a good dream. The first African American children of Lewis Place—those born there or who moved there as young children—remember it as a dream realized. They remem-ber a close-knit and friendly community and a safe and happy place to grow up. They recall, too, a fierce pride in the accomplishment of opening the ornamental gates of Lewis Place to African Americans—gates that once stood fast on St. Louis’s color line.

References

Barfield, Gary. Interview by the author, March 27, 2005.

Boonshaft v. Robbins and Koch. Proceedings of the Circuit Court, City of St. Louis, State of Missouri (MO 22) Cause #69005, 1943.

Buchanan, James. Interview by the author, May 13, 2005.

Clement E. Vose Papers. Marcus Avenue Improvement Association papers, microfilm roll, p. 166. Wesleyan University.

Cummins, Keller & Masterson v. Layne. Proceedings of the Circuit Court, City of St. Louis, State of Missouri (MO 22) Cause #79452, 1944.

Cummins, Keller & Masterson v. Lewis. Proceedings of the Circuit Court, City of St. Louis, State of Missouri (MO 22) Cause #84085, 1944.

Gotham, Kevin Fox. “Urban Space, Restrictive Covenants and the Origins of Racial Residential Segregation in a US City,

1900–50.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24, no. 3 (September 2000): 616–633.

Greene, Lorenzo J. Missouri’s Black Heritage. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993.

Long, Herman H., and Charles L. Johnson. People vs. Property: Racial Restrictive Covenants in Housing. Nashville: Fisk University Press, 1947.

Meyer, Stephen Grant. As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods. New York: Rowan Littlefield Publishers, 2000.

Office of the Recorder of Deeds for the City of St. Louis. Lewis Place Uniform Restriction Agreement. Book 4874, p. 286.

Primm, James Neal. Lion of the Valley. 3rd ed. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1998.

Richardson, Scovel. “Notes and Comments: Some of the Defenses Available in Restrictive Covenants Suits against Colored American Citizens in St. Louis.” National Bar Journal 3, no. 3 (September 1945): 50–56.

St. Louis Argus, vol. 33, no. 14, July 7, 1944; no. 27, October 6, 1944; no. 32, November 4, 1944; no. 34, November 24, 1944; no. 37, December 15, 1944; no. 50, March 16, 1945.

St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Mercantile Library “Civil Rights” clip-pings file, January 25, 1945.

St. Louis Globe-Democrat, February 26, 1916.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 11, 1944; June 24, 1947; June 25, 1944.

St. Louis Republic, February 17, 1912.

U.S. Bureau of the Census. 14th Census of the United States. 1920 Population, City of St. Louis, Missouri, Enumeration District 424, Ward 22, Sheet 15B.

U.S. Bureau of the Census. 16th Census of the United States. 1940 Housing Block Statistics, City of St. Louis, Missouri.

Vose, Clement E. Caucasians Only: The Supreme Court, the NAACP, and the Restrictive Covenant Cases. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Ware, Leland B. “Invisible Walls: An Examination of the Legal Strategy of the Restrictive Covenant Cases.” Washington University Law Quarterly 67, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 737–772.

Elizabeth A. Pickard is a graduate student in the depart-ment of history at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. She wishes to thank the Public Policy Research Center at UMSL for its support on this project, Professor Andrew Hurley for his invaluable guidance and feedback throughout, and the people of Lewis Place.

Ordinary men and women fighting for their rights joined together to open the gates of Lewis Place and

erase the color line it stood on. Photograph by David Schultz, 1993. MHS Photographs and Prints. }

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