St. Louis’s City Plan Commission photograph, “Back view of multi-family residences in Mill Creek Valley,” 1956 (Missouri Historical Society).

Building upon the successes of the first installment of The Material World of Modern Segregation (April 2022), which focused on public sites and spaces across the St. Louis region, Phase Two of MWMS will explore manifestations and practices of segregation in the private sphere. While less-frequently-acknowledged, the destruction of the Black private sphere––domestic domains in which community survival and thrival were, and continue to be, nurtured, in places like Robertson/Kinloch, Mill Creek Valley, Howard-Evans, the Ville neighborhood, and elsewhere––has been every bit as devastating as the erasure, by means of razing, extraction, and neglect, of more public spaces, institutions, buildings, and collective memory in African American St. Louis.

Photographs of the destruction of Mill Creek Valley that document Black domestic spaces from the back side, taken on the eve of their destruction, remind us of the routine devaluation of Black public and private life. A right to privacy, and to defend and protect/police an extensive zone of privacy––something many well-to-do white St. Louisans have generally enjoyed––has often been denied the Black citizens of our region.

Likewise, the 2020 controversy over the armed confrontation between the McCloskeys and non-violent Black Lives Matters demonstrators on the porch of their Central West End mansion reveals the ways in which white private and semiprivate spaces—homes, gated communities, whole districts of the city--have been weaponized with the explicit or implicit sanction of governmental authority and public opinion.