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CCoRDING To HISToRIAN MICHAEL BENNETT, postwar prosperity and the GI Bill brought about a “relandscaping of America.” With college educations and good jobs, many veterans moved their families from congested cities to suburban areas with green lawns and safe streets. Other people, many of whom were poor and black, migrated to the cities. But the flight to the suburbs gained momentum; urban populations declined, and inner-city streets became more desolate and dangerous . The story of Charles “Sonny” Liston, the well-known prize fighter, is emblematic of St. Louis in the postwar era.1 In 1946, Liston, a black teenager, left the Arkansas cotton fields and followed his mother, Helen Baskin, to St. Louis, where she had found work in a shoe factory. After several days of searching, he found her living in two rooms in a house at 1017 O’Fallon Street, near the waterfront. She tried sending him to school, but he felt out of place because he was so big for his age and so far behind the other students. Within a year or two, he fell in with a group of young men who committed strong-arm robberies, and by 1950, when he was seventeen years old, he was in serious trouble with the law. After a service-station robbery, during which two people were beaten up, he was sent to the Missouri State Penitentiary, where a chaplain gave him a pair of boxing gloves.2 Frank W. Mitchell, owner of the St. Louis Argus, successfully campaigned for Liston’s release and financed his boxing career. Mitchell was a gifted newspaper publisher and promoter, but he also was a racketeer with Chapter Ten Youth and the Changing City Streets The place you live is awfully important. It can give you a chance to grow, or it can twist you. . . . When I was in school, they used to teach us that evolution made men out of animals. They forgot to tell us it can also make animals out of men. —sidney Kingsley, Dead End A 117 118 THE DEAD END KIDS oF ST. LoUIS a record of arrests for gambling and counterfeiting. As Liston’s boxing career began to take off, his rap sheet continued to grow. Liston had just finished a stint in the Work House when he married Geraldine Chambers in 1957. One year later, he left St. Louis for good and went on to become the heavyweight champion of the world.3 Even at the height of his career, Liston’s past weighed him down. In 1962, when he entered the ring for a championship fight, the audience booed him. In the world of boxing, he was the “bad guy,” the angry outcast , the ex-convict, the gangster. Bad guys were supposed to lose, but Liston won the fight against the much more popular Floyd Patterson. The press was brutal to Liston. Look magazine once described him as the “King of the Beasts,” and a columnist for the New York Mirror called him a “sinister creature, full of hatred for the world.” A sympathetic biographer characterized him as the “Champ Nobody Wanted.” He lost his title in 1964, when he quit in his corner before the start of the seventh round in his fight with Cassius Clay (who would later be called Muhammad Ali). In 1965, Liston went down less than two minutes into a rematch with Ali. His short life ended abruptly in 1971, when his wife returned from visiting her mother in St. Louis and found him dead at their Las Vegas home. There was marijuana in his pocket and heroin in the kitchen. Police concluded that there was no foul play and attributed his death to a drug overdose. He was thirty-eight years old.4 Nobody knows what would have happened to Sonny Liston if he had never come to St. Louis and never been influenced by the rough life of the inner-city slums, but by the 1940s there was a growing number of people who believed the slum could take good boys and turn them into criminals . Sidney Kingsley’s play Dead End dramatically made this point. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a great admirer of the play, persuaded her husband to bring the production to the White House. When Senator Robert Wagner proposed a slum-clearance bill in the United States Congress, he specifically mentioned the influence of Kingsley’s play. By 1940, the federal government was investing in the construction of housing projects in blighted areas of...

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