Urban Renewal’s Educational Legacy: Black Displacement and School Segregation from Mill Creek to Pruitt-Igoe

By : Amy Shelton, Ph.D. and Dorothy Rohde-Collins

Published On: April 4, 2025

This research was presented at the Mapping Spaces, Embodying Territories 2025 Conference at Saint Louis University on April 4, 2025.

Background

On August 7, 1954, St. Louis Mayor Raymond R. Tucker announced the Mill Creek Valley would be the next section of the city to be redeveloped under a federally-assisted “slum clearance” program. In a front-page article the following day, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described the area as “a jumble of dilapidated dwellings, trash-littered yards, unsightly alleys, vacant stores, lots given over to junk and weeds and industrial plants hemmed in by tenements” and noted the area had been termed “the city’s ‘No. 1 Eyesore.’”

What was once the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood was bounded by Grand Blvd. on the west, Olive St. on the north, 20th St. on the east, and the railroad tracks on the south. It was home to approximately 20,000 people, 95% of whom were Black. Living conditions were often substandard, with one 1962 report finding 80% of structures lacked a private bath and toilet and 67% lacked running water. The report continued, “Tragic fires were commonplace. Thousands of outdoor privies perfumed the air, and rats as large as spaniels were not exceptional.” Yet, not all areas of Mill Creek were in disrepair, and many former residents have fond memories of the close-knit community. In her memoir, former resident Vivian Gibson shares that her “zeal for living a full and authentic life is a direct result of [her] scrappy early years as one of the last children living and learning in Mill Creek Valley” (p. 18). Likewise, John C. Carpenter, a former resident and teacher at Vashon High School, recalled that “one of the most brilliant students ever graduated from Vashon” and “one of the most successful commercial artists who ever wielded a brush or pen in [his] classes” both grew up in Mill Creek.

Missouri Historical Society

Any sub-standard conditions that did exist were due to forced overcrowding and neglect by absentee landlords. Black families moving to St. Louis during the Great Migration were steered into overcrowded Black neighborhoods hemmed in by restrictive housing covenants and industrial zones established to wall off these areas from White neighborhoods. Rather than expanding housing opportunities for Black families in the city or investing in infrastructure, the city allowed the Mill Creek Valley to deteriorate and then targeted it for clearance and redevelopment. As researcher Colin Gordon writes, “There was a persistent mismatch between the definition of the city’s problems and the solutions pursued” (p. 186). The motivation for this “benign neglect” was clear: “The types of redevelopment to which this area logically lends itself should serve to reinforce and stabilize the central business district” (Wilensky, 1954). The Post-Dispatch reported that Saint Louis University was the first redeveloper to express “definite interest” in acquiring some of the cleared land.

Demolition of houses, churches, and community institutions in Mill Creek Valley began in February 1959. By 1962, row houses that had once been home to low-income, Black migrants from southern states such as Mississippi had been replaced with apartment units priced for middle-income families. An estimated 2,400 “very low-income” households were displaced and moved to public housing projects, including the brand new Pruitt-Igoe towers one mile away, or to neighborhoods northwest of Mill Creek. A 1971 report noted this relocation “contributed to the mounting problems of these and other areas of the City which had been fighting blight….and school enrollments increased beyond the capacities of existing facilities.” Below we examine the human cost of these forced relocations on students and schools.

Slum Clearance and School Closures

The Mill Creek Valley was home to three elementary schools–Lincoln, Johnson, and Waring–and was the original location of Vashon High School. All four were segregated Black schools until the end of legal school segregation in 1954. Vivian Gibson writes in The Last Children of Mill Creek that “just about every child that lived in the formerly stately Victorian homes, shabby row houses, or more dilapidated rooming houses from Bernard Street to Locus and from Leffingwell to Twentieth Street had started their elementary education [at Lincoln].” By 1960, Lincoln and Johnson had both been shuttered. Children who remained in the Mill Creek Valley had to “trek all the way to Compton and Market” to attend school at Waring, which had been constructed in 1940 and was spared demolition.[1] Washington Tech closed in 1956, and Vashon High followed Black families moving northwest and relocated to the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood in 1963. Nearby Attucks Elementary closed in 1972.

Forced Relocation, Overcrowding, and Liddell v. Board of Education

In 1954, the St. Louis Board of Education presented a three-stage plan for school desegregation, starting with the Harris and Stowe teachers colleges and finishing with elementary schools. While hailed nationwide for its desegregation efforts, the board made only minor adjustments to school attendance boundaries to integrate some White schools. Black schools remained segregated, as the St. Louis Board of Education’s neighborhood schools policy all but ensured school demographics would continue to reflect neighborhood segregation. Feeder patterns were changed to direct students attending Black elementary schools to Sumner or Vashon for high school. White students zoned to a Black school could transfer out.

The forced relocation of Black families from Mill Creek to neighborhoods to the north and west contributed to the overcrowding of Black schools on the north side. From 1962 to 1967, the St. Louis School Board built nine new elementary schools in all-Black neighborhoods and bused some Black children to Black schools near public housing projects, including the four new schools opened near Pruitt-Igoe between 1955 and 1958. The district also implemented “intact busing,” in which students from overcrowded Black schools were bused with their teachers to White schools on the south side. These “intact” classes used a designated classroom, had separate lunch and recess periods from White students, and then were bused back north at the end of the school day. Craton Liddell attended overcrowded schools and participated in intact busing, and these experiences provided some of the impetus for the 1972 civil lawsuit Liddell v. Board of Education, which resulted in the creation of the Voluntary Interdistrict Choice Corporation (VICC) desegregation busing program.

The same year that Minnie Liddell and other Black parents sued the school district for educational neglect, the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe towers began. These towers had once represented the promises of modernity but had not been maintained and fallen into disrepair. Black families were forced to relocate once again, and enrollment declined in all of the elementary schools around Pruitt-Igoe. Between 1970 and 1980, six more elementary schools around Mill Creek and Pruitt-Igoe were closed.

Conclusion

It has been more than sixty years since the Mill Creek Valley was cleared in the name of “urban renewal” and “progress,” but the City of St. Louis has yet to reconcile its lasting impacts on former residents, their descendants, and the city as a whole. The policies that permitted the forced relocation of residents, enabled negligent landlords, and encouraged benign neglect left entire swaths of the city to deteriorate and left residents without equitable access to city services, including public schools.

These patterns did not end with the urban renewal programs of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. As the city’s population continues to decline, more public schools close, often those that primarily enroll Black students. By learning more about the shifts in demographics, population, and school enrollment following the clearing of Mill Creek Valley and the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe, we can better understand how existing disparities in housing and education came to be. This increases the likelihood that policy makers can develop and implement solutions that address the problems they are trying to solve rather than perpetuate the policy-solution mismatches that created scenarios like Mill Creek.

Appendix

Enrollment in Historically Black Schools, 1950-1978

These schools opened before 1954 and are designated as “Negro” in historical school district records. Year indicates the fall of the school year. This data was compiled from historical school district records and may have minor inaccuracies due to name and location changes during our period of study.

Enrollment in Post-Brown Elementary Schools Opened in the Mill Creek Relocation Area, 1950-1978

These schools opened after 1954 and were officially integrated, though many opened in Black neighborhoods and likely primarily enrolled Black students. Year indicates the fall of the school year. This data was compiled from historical school district records and may have minor inaccuracies due to name and location changes during our period of study.

Footnotes

[1] Today, SLU’s Chaifetz Arena occupies the location that was once Waring School.

Sources & Further Reading

Carpenter, J. C. (1961, August 3). The Ghosts of Mill Creek. The St. Louis American, p. 2

City of St. Louis Reparations Commission. (2024). City of St. Louis Reparations Committee Report. https://www.stlcityreparations.com/

Fagerstrom, R. (2000). Mill Creek Valley: A Soul of St. Louis. 

Gibson, V. (2020). The last children of Mill Creek. Belt Publishing.

Gordon, C. (2008). Mapping decline: St. Louis and the fate of the American city. University of Pennsylvania Press. 

Heaney, G., & Uchitelle, S. (2004). Unending struggle: The long road to an equal education in St. Louis. Reedy Press. 

Johnson, W. (2020). The broken heart of America: St. Louis and the violent history of the United States. Basic Books.

Jones, F. A. (1952, May 16). Blighted areas and maladjustment. The St. Louis Argus.

Missouri Historical Society.

Rothstein, R. (2014). The making of Ferguson: Public policies at the root of its troubles. Economic Policy Institute. https://www.epi.org/publication/making-ferguson/

Ruff, C. (2021). 30,000 St. Louis properties have racial covenants in their deeds. Your home could be one. St. Louis Public Radio. https://www.stlpr.org/culture-history/2021-11-18/30-000-st-louis-properties-have-racial-covenants-in-their-deeds-your-home-could-be-one 

St. Louis Development Program. (1971). History of renewal. Report for the St. Louis City Plan Commission.

St. Louis Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority (LCRA). Redevelopment Plan for Mill Creek Valley Project. 

St. Louis Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority (LCRA). (1962). Facts about urban renewal.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (1959, January 30). Board to close two Mill Creek schools. A7.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (1958, January 12). Winning the fight against decay. Special progress section.

Wells, A. S., & Crain, R. L. (1997). Stepping over the color line: African-American students in White suburban schools. Yale University Press.

Wilensky, H. (1954, August 8). Market Street area next site for slum clearance, industrial redevelopment is major purpose. St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 

Wright, J. A. (2005). Disappearing Black communities. Black America Series. Arcadia Publishing.

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