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chapter four Grassroots Renewal and the “Heroic” Period, 1956–61 In june 1954, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the St. Louis Board of Education voted to integrate its schools, and a number of historically black institutions, including the Booker T. Washington Vocational School, closed. By June 1953, CORE could boast of thirty-four previously all-white eateries that had ended Jim Crow arrangements. Earlier that year, the American Theatre also desegregated , largely in response to constant picketing. Without formal announcement , the Stix department store opened its eating facilities to all customers, with the exception of its exclusive upstairs tea room. With many professional associations also integrating their memberships, segregated lodging had become a potential obstacle to drawing conferences to the city; beginning in December 1954, many white downtown hotels relaxed their Jim Crow policies.1 At the same time, the ruling precipitated a full-scale white “massive resistance ” rooted in race-conscious appeals to “states rights.” The NAACP, an erstwhile ally against communism, also came under attack, with its operations halted in many southern states. Paradoxically, the association’s repression set into motion both a renewal of black working-class mass action, and a new phase of black social movement activity. In Alabama, it created the space for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of the first major community mobilizations following Brown, and a clear departure from the national NAACP’s strategy of legalistic reform. “[W]hen one considers that 75 percent of the passengers in Montgomery were black men and women who rode the buses to and from work,” writes scholar William H. Harris, “then the picture becomes clearer” that Montgomery’s was a working-class struggle, though not avowedly. To the extent that the Montgomery struggle marked the beginning of a new postwar black mass movement—the “heroic” civil rights period—it also represented a renaissance in the black working-class mass politics initially thwarted by the early Cold War.2 97 This was evident in the reorganization and revival of the St. Louis NAACP in 1956, and the opposition it led against a proposed new city charter in the spring and summer of 1957. The tangle of municipal issues underlying the charter struggle—downtown redevelopment, the black vote, and an ongoing effort to clear Mill Creek Valley—set in motion a local black renaissance in mass-based activity against racial apartheid in employment , public accommodations, housing, and electoral representation. Politically, “jobs” reemerged as the key discourse, and although this activism was cross-class in character, it emanated primarily from the interests of, and derived its leadership and base from, a resurgent historic bloc of working-class interests. Leading the NAACP was a member of the powerful Teamsters Local 688 who brought to the organization’s ranks greater numbers of black trade unionists. But the charter fight, and the black communal struggles that immediately followed it, simultaneously heightened the class-based schisms within St. Louis’s black leadership and constituencies , auguring the growing political salience of class among African Americans in the postwar period.3 Jim Crow in St. Louis circa Brown g Black-white race relations had become the nation’s foremost moral issue by the mid-1950s. By September 1957, President Eisenhower would sign into law the first federal civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, creating the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Still, changes were barely perceptible in many areas of St. Louis’s public life. The downtown YMCA accepted its first black full-fledged members in 1956, but to the chagrin of black parents and YMCA officials, the owners of the steamship Admiral barred African American youth from an all-day river excursion. Some Jim Crow policies presented halfhearted and idiosyncratic steps toward integration. Management at the Forest Park Highlands Amusement Park, for instance, only partially lowered its color bar by admitting black patrons to all rides and restaurants, yet restricting them from the park’s dance pavilion and swimming pool. Several eating establishments had even backpedaled from earlier open-door policies, quietly reinstituting segregationist practices. Harry Pope, the owner of Pope’s Cafeteria chain, a member of the Mayor’s Council on Human Relations, and a self-styled “gradualist” and “moderate,” resigned from the council under fire from the Argus and black activists who pointed out his two large cafeterias continued Jim Crow. As the Argus’s editors reminded members of the council, “moderation” and “gradualism” too often meant inaction.4 The Argus’s...

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