St. Louis, still one of the most segregated cities in America, was, Gordon argues, the product of racial restrictions and failed city policies that isolated and marginalized St. Louis’s black community. Newspapers listed properties for African Americans under a separate section—“for colored.” The “colored” sections of the city shrank, cramming multiple generations into single-family homes. A 1948 real estate manual warned of home buyers likely to instigate blight, lumping together into one category boot-leggers, call girls, and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college
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