Since the founding of St. Louis, African Americans have lived in communities throughout the area. Although St. Louis' 1916 "Segregation of the Negro Ordinance" was ruled unconstitutional, African Americans were restricted to certain areas through real estate practices such as steering and red lining. Through legal efforts in the court cases of Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, Jones v. Mayer in 1978, and others, more housing options became available and the population dispersed. Many of the communities began to decline, disappear, or experience urban renewal.

From 1968 to 1972, St. Louis was home to the Black Artists' Group (BAG), a seminal arts collective that nurtured African American experimentalists involved with theater, visual arts, dance, poetry, and jazz. Inspired by the reinvigorated black cultural nationalism of the 1960s, artistic collectives had sprung up around the country in a diffuse outgrowth known as the Black Arts Movement. These impulses resonated with BAG's founders, who sought to raise black consciousness and explore the far reaches of interdisciplinary performance--all while struggling to carve out a place within the context of St. Louis history and culture.A generation of innovative artists--Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, and Emilio Cruz, to name but a few--created a moment of intense and vibrant cultural life in an abandoned industrial building on Washington Avenue, surrounded by the evisceration that typified that decade's "urban crisis." The 1960s upsurge in political art blurred the lines between political involvement and artistic production, and debates over civil rights, black nationalism, and the role of the arts in political and cultural struggles all found form in BAG. This book narrates the group's development against the backdrop of St. Louis spaces and institutions, examines the work of its major artists, and follows its musicians to Paris and on to New York, where they played a dominant role in Lower Manhattan's 1970s "loft jazz" scene. By fusing social concern and artistic innovation, the group significantly reshaped the St. Louis and, by extension, the American arts landscape.

A searing portrait of the racial dynamics that lie inescapably at the heart of our nation, told through the turbulent history of the city of St. Louis. From Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past. St. Louis was a staging post for Indian removal and imperial expansion, and its wealth grew on the backs of its poor black residents, from slavery through redlining and urban renewal. But it was once also America's most radical city, home to anti-capitalist immigrants, the Civil War's first general emancipation, and the nation's first general strike—a legacy of resistance that endures. A blistering history of a city's rise and decline, The Broken Heart of America will forever change how we think about the United States.

Danny "Dog Man" Jones began selling American Bulldogs to the notorious brothers Demetrius "Big Meech" Flenory and his brother Terry "Pauley" Flenory before he was recruited to join the Black Mafia Family's operations in St. Louis, Missouri. He went from selling dogs, rehabbing houses and driving for some of the BMF members to eventually gaining the trust of one of the brothers and had become one of the managers of the organization. His new responsibilities included dropping off hundreds of kilos of cocaine to BMF members, along with maintaining houses in St. Louis for the organization, which warehoused millions of dollars in cash. With brothers Big Meech and Terry indicted and behind bars, life changed for Danny overnight. He was gunned down, surviving seventeen bullets from a .40 caliber semi-automatic weapon, which riddled through numerous parts of his entire body. After several surgeries and regaining consciousness, Danny was determined to even the score. "In reality, I should have been dead" Danny reiterates, "But the Dog Man is alive and the truth must be told" he states. Danny tells his story in this seventeen chapter memoir, each chapter representing the seventeen bullets which could have ended his life.

African Americans have been part of the story of St. Louis since the city's founding in 1764. Unfortunately, most histories of the city have overlooked or ignored their vital role, allowing their influence and accomplishments to go unrecorded or uncollected; that is, until the publication of Discovering African American St. Louis: A Guide to Historic Sites in 1994. A new and updated 2002 edition is now available to take readers on a fascinating tour of nearly four hundred African American landmarks. From the boyhood home of jazz great Miles Davis in East St. Louis, Illinois, to the site of the house that sparked the landmark Shelley v. Kraemer court case, the maps, photographs, and text of Discovering African American St. Louis record a history that has been neglected for too long. The guidebook covers fourteen regions east and west of the Mississippi that represent St. Louis's rich African American heritage. In the words of historian Gary Kremer, "No one who reads this book and visits and contemplates the places and peoples whose stories it recounts will be able to look at St. Louis in the same way ever again."

"This is a theoretically sophisticated and thoroughly documented historical case study of the movements for African American liberation in St. Louis. Through detailed analysis of black working class mobilization from the depression years to the advent of Black Power, award-winning historian Clarence Lang describes how the advances made in earlier decades were undermined by a black middle class agenda that focused on the narrow aims of black capitalists and politicians. The book is a major contribution to our understanding of the black working class insurgency that underpinned the civil rights and Black Power campaigns of the twentieth century." ---V. P. Franklin, University of California, Riverside "A major work of scholarship that will transform historical understanding of the pivotal role that class politics played in both civil rights and Black Power activism in the United States. Clarence Lang's insightful, engagingly written, and well-researched study will prove indispensable to scholars and students of postwar American history." ---Peniel Joseph, Brandeis University Breaking new ground in the field of Black Freedom Studies, Grassroots at the Gateway reveals how urban black working-class communities, cultures, and institutions propelled the major African American social movements in the period between the Great Depression and the end of the Great Society. Using the city of St. Louis in the border state of Missouri as a case study, author Clarence Lang undermines the notion that a unified "black community" engaged in the push for equality, justice, and respect. Instead, black social movements of the working class were distinct from---and at times in conflict with---those of the middle class. This richly researched book delves into African American oral histories, records of activist individuals and organizations, archives of the black advocacy press, and even the records of the St. Louis' economic power brokers whom local black freedom fighters challenged. Grassroots at the Gateway charts the development of this race-class divide, offering an uncommon reading of not only the civil rights movement but also the emergence and consolidation of a black working class. Clarence Lang is Assistant Professor in African American Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Photo courtesy Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri, St. Louis