Black Life in St. Louis During Reconstruction

Reconstruction was the effort to rebuild the nation after the Civil War. Three constitutional amendments expanded citizenship and voting rights for Black Americans — yet Black St. Louisans still met discrimination in public spaces, and fought it.

Streetcars: protest nearly a century before Rosa Parks

Many students know Rosa Parks's protest on an Alabama bus in 1955. St. Louis saw such protests nearly 100 years earlier.

• The rule: the city's horse-drawn streetcars did not let Black riders sit inside.
• Caroline Williams, pregnant and holding a baby, tried to take a seat inside a Bellefontaine Railway Company car. The conductor refused her, and she was thrown off and injured. She sued in 1867 and won — but the jury awarded her just $1.
• The ban ignored: segregation on St. Louis streetcars was outlawed the next year, but conductors regularly disregarded it.
• The boycott: in 1870, civil rights leader Charlton Tandy led an organized boycott of the streetcars. Once, he stopped a car and held the horse's reins until every Black passenger was allowed a seat inside.

The Exodusters

Four unidentified Exodusters at an early homestead near Nicodemus, Kansas. Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress.

White violence and indifference defeated Reconstruction's civil rights efforts. By 1879, many Black Southerners saw no future at home and moved north and west, many hoping to build self-sustaining Black communities in Kansas — "Exodusters," for their exodus from the South.

• Through St. Louis: about 20,000 arrived in the city in 1879 and 1880. Some chose to stay, but many were stranded, because White steamboat operators would not carry them up the Missouri River — and the city did little to help.
• Black St. Louis stepped in: Reverend John Turner's "Committee of Twenty-Five" raised money for food, shelter and clothing, and Charlton Tandy helped run the "Colored Refugee Relief Board" for the same purpose.

James Milton Turner

James Milton Turner. State Historical Society of Missouri.

James Milton Turner (1839 or 1840–1915) championed public education in Missouri.

• Early life: born enslaved in Kirkwood, he was a gifted student, and at just fourteen briefly attended Oberlin College in Ohio, the first college in the country to admit Black students.
• Schools: in 1865, as Governor Thomas Fletcher's Assistant Superintendent of Schools, he worked to found schools for Black Missourians across the state, and a normal school to train teachers.
• The vote: he co-founded the Missouri Equal Rights League. A gifted speaker, he told a convention of Black leaders in St. Louis that the vote "rightfully and logically belongs to us as freedmen" who had supported the Union.
• Diplomat: in 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant made him Minister to Liberia — the second Black politician to serve as a U.S. minister abroad. He brokered a peace treaty with the Grebo, an Indigenous people, bringing some stability to the region.
• Later: he aided Exodusters through his Colored Emigration Aid Association. After his death in 1915, he was buried at Father Dickson Cemetery in South St. Louis County.

Sumner High School

Girls in a cooking class at Sumner High School in the 1880s. Missouri Historical Society.

• A slow start: the Missouri legislature required school districts to educate Black children in 1865, but St. Louis took another ten years to open a Black high school.
• A first: Sumner High School, named for Charles Sumner, the White antislavery senator from Massachusetts, was the first high school for Black students west of the Mississippi, and St. Louis's only Black high school until 1927.
• A better site: Tandy and others protested that its first home on 11th Street was surrounded by industrial pollution and noise; in the 1880s it moved to 15th and Walnut.
• Community: students raised money for victims of the St. Louis tornado of 1896 and mounted a large exhibit at the 1904 World's Fair in Forest Park.
• Today: still open at 4248 Cottage Avenue. Alumni include Arthur Ashe, Chuck Berry, Tina Turner, opera singers Robert McFerrin and Grace Bumbry, and Dick Gregory.

"The First Vote," by A. R. Waud: in the nineteenth century, voting was done in public. Library of Congress.

Part of the NPS series The History of Slavery in St. Louis. Previous: The Civil War and Emancipation in St. Louis. Next: Reckoning with Slavery's Legacy in St. Louis.

Sources

Based on "Black Life in St. Louis During Reconstruction," Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The Exodusters photograph is the uncolorized original in the Historic American Buildings Survey; the streetcar photograph, credited to the National Museum of Transportation, is left out.