During the early 1970s, residents of St. Louis’s poorest African American neighborhoods mounted a spirited campaign to get city politicians and public health officials to address the epidemic of childhood lead paint poisoning in their communities. This activism was directly connected to aspects of the civil rights and black power movements, but it was also a response to the decline of the city’s physical space. Housing discrimination, disinvestment, deindustrialization, and population loss forced many poor black residents to live in the city’s rapidly decaying housing stock. Activists and residents seized on childhood lead poisoning, caused by the overwhelming use of lead paint, as a tangible manifestation of discrimination and injustice. Although the success of this activism was limited—it raised awareness but did not solve the core problem of inadequate housing—the St. Louis story is an important example of postwar urban environmentalism. During the 1960s and 1970s, poor and working-class urbanites across the country engaged in similar activism to address the physical problems of urban decline. This activism was an important part of the early environmental movement and is the precursor to what would become known as environmental justice.
"Sit-in against Lead Poisoning," St. Louis Globe and Democrat, November 12, 1970.
2.
"Citizens Group Urges Lead Poison Warning," St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 20, 1970; "Judge Won’t ‘Shoot from Hip’ in Poison Suit," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 4, 1970; People’s Coalition on Lead Poisoning, "Chronology of Events Between the Coalition Against Lead Poisoning and the Court System of St. Louis and the State of Missouri," 1971, folder 348, Greater St. Louis Freedom of Residence Committee Addenda, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri- St. Louis (hereafter FOR Addenda).
3.
As Robert Beauregard has pointed out, the early literature on the urban crisis saw it as an environmental problem. Later it became a social, racial, and political problem. See Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (New York: Routledge , 2003), esp. 175.
4.
The reading back of environmental justice into the past occurs in Maureen A. Flanagan, "Environmental Justice in the City: A Theme for Urban Environmental History," Environmental History 5, no. 2 (2000): 159-64; Harold L. Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Sylvia Hood Washington, Packing Them In: An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865-1954 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005); Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005). The study of postwar urban activism has undergone a renaissance in recent years. The goal of much of this work has been to resurrect and recontextualize the "black power" stage of the civil rights movement. See Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Johanna L. del C. Fernandez, "Radicals in the Late 1960s: A History of the Young Lords Party in New York City, 1969-1974" (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2004); Clarence E. Lang, "Between Civil Rights and Black Power in the Gateway City: The Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes (Action) 1964-1975," Journal of Social History 37, no. 3 (2004): 725-54; John H. Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles outside the South, 1940-1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); K. Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). Other work looks at activism in the context of urban change in a specific city. See Wendell E. Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Amanda I. Seligman, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
5.
Much of the literature on the postwar environmental movement is composed of broad surveys. See Samuel P. Hays and Barbara D. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Hal Rothman, The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United States since 1945 (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1998); Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2003). The few specific studies focus on the activism of suburban and middle-class whites. See Scott Dewey, Don’t Breathe the Air: Air Pollution and U.S. Environmental Politics, 1945-1970 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000); Robert Douglas Lifset, "Storm King Mountain and the Emergence of Modern American Environmentalism, 1962-1980" (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2005); Adam Ward Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Important exceptions to this are Matthew Gandy, "Between Borinquen and the Barrio: Environmental Justice and New York City’s Puerto Rican Community, 1969-1972," Antipode 34, no. 4 (2002): 730-61; Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Works on environmental justice focus on urban and minority activism but deal almost exclusively with recent movements. See Eileen Maura McGurty, Transforming Environmentalism: Warren County, Pcbs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007); David N. Pellow, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Julie Sze, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). On the social justice tendencies within environmentalism in the 1970s, see Environmental Action, Earth Day-the Beginning: A Guide for Survival (New York: Bantam, 1970); Christopher J. Bosso, Environment, Inc.: From Grassroots to Beltway (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005); Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring. On the hostility of many black power advocates to environmental issues, see Hurley, Environmental Inequalities.
6.
Wilbur Thomas , "Black Survival in Our Polluted Cities," Proud1, no. 4 (April 1970): 10-13.
7.
Joseph Heathcott and Maire Agnes Murphy, "Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal: Industry, Planning and Policy in the Making of Metropolitan St. Louis, 1940-1980," Journal of Urban History 31, no. 2 (2005): 151-89; James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764-1980 (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1998); Henry J. Schmandt, George D. Wendel, and A. Allen Tomey, Federal Aid to St. Louis (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1983).
8.
This interpretation of civil rights activism in St. Louis comes primarily from Clarence E. Lang, "Community and Resistance in the Gateway City: Black National Consciousness, Working-Class Formation, and Social Movements in St. Louis, Missouri, 1941-1964" (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004).
9.
Charles A. Liebert, "The Role of the Middleman in the Housing Market," in The Politics of Housing in Older Urban Areas, ed. Robert Eugene Quinn and Michael A. Mendelson (New York: Praeger, 1976), 93-119; Washington University Institute for Urban and Regional Studies, Urban Decay in St. Louis (St. Louis, 1972); Robert Eugene Quinn and Michael A. Mendelson, The Decline of an Urban Housing Entrepreneur: Congratulations or Condolences? (Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, Center for Urban and Environmental Research and Services, 1977); Primm, Lion of the Valley; Heathcott and Murphy, "Corridors of Flight." On Pruitt-Igoe, see Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum (Chicago: Aldine, 1970).
10.
Charles Kimball Cummings , "Rent Strike in St. Louis: The Making of Conflict in Modern Society" (PhD diss., Washington University in St. Louis, 1975).
11.
Lana Stein, St. Louis Politics: The Triumph of Tradition (St. Louis : Missouri Historical Society Press, 2002); Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1990); William Paul Locke, "A History and Analysis of the Origin and Development of the Human Development Corporation of Metropolitan St. Louis, Missouri, 1962-1970" (St. Louis University, 1974); Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty ( New York: Free Press, 1969).
12.
Most of the information on Perry comes from George Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition ( Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). Lipsitz devoted one chapter of his biography to Perry’s lead poisoning activism, and that material has become the standard narrative for lead activism in St. Louis. See esp. the documentary by Kriss Avery and Jim Rothwell, Ivory Perry: Pioneer in the Struggle against Lead Poisoning (St. Louis: Rainbow Sound, 2006).
13.
See esp. Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (New York: Knopf, 1971); Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA : MIT, 2007); Thomas, "Black Survival, 13."
14.
Freddie Mae Brown and the St. Louis Metropolitan Black Survival Committee, "Black Survival: A Collage of Skits," in Earth Day-the Beginning: A Guide for Survival, ed. Environmental Action (New York: Bantam, 1970), 95-105.
15.
Thomas, "Black Survival , 13."
16.
The two best overviews of lead poisoning in the twentieth-century United States are Christian Warren, Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and Gerald E. Markowitz and David Rosner, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). On the shifting epidemiology of lead in the postwar period, see Elizabeth Fee, "Public Health in Baltimore: Childhood Lead Paint Poisoning, 1930 to 1970," Maryland Historical Magazine 87, no. 3 (1992): 267-93; Robert C. Griggs, Irving Sunshine, Vaun A. Newill, Burritt W. Newton, Stuart Buchanan, and Cleo A. Rasch, "Environmental Factors in Childhood Lead Poisoning," Journal of the American Medical Association 187, no. 10 (1964): 703-7; Clair Patterson and Joseph Salvia, "Lead in Our Modern Environment: How Much Is Natural?" Scientist and Citizen 10, no. 3 (April 1968): 66-79; Ann Koppelman Simon, "Citizens vs. Lead in Three Environments," Scientist and Citizen 10, no. 3 (April 1968): 58-59; Jane S. Lin-Fu, Childhood Lead Poisoning, an Eradicable Disease (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1970); Jane Lin-Fu, "Modern History of Lead Poisoning: A Century of Discovery and Rediscovery," in Human Lead Exposure, ed. Herbert Needleman (London: CRC Press, 1992), 23-44; Warren, Brush with Death, 178-244.
17.
Stein, St. LouisPolitics; Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle, 174-75.
18.
Albert Nerviani to A. J. Wilson, May 20, 1971, box 42, Lead Poisoning April 1970 folder, Alfonso J. Cervantes Papers, Washington University Archives, St. Louis, Missouri (hereafter Cervantes Papers); Charles Copley, "Lead Poisoning Prevention in St. Louis," in Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention and Control: A Public Health Approach to an Environmental Disease, ed. Flora Finch Cherry (New Or-leans: Department of Health and Human Resources, 1981), 61-72. New York City had similar problems in grafting a lead poisoning program onto an existing municipal bureaucracy. See Diana Gordon, City Limits: Barriers to Change in Urban Government (New York: Charterhouse, 1973), 17-62.
19.
"Robert Knickmeyer," Obituary, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 3, 1996.
20.
"Lead-Poison Foes Plan Strike," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 22, 1970; "Rent Strike Being Organized in Wake of Lead Poisoning Cases," St. Louis Globe-Democrat, December 22, 1970.
21.
William C. Banton to Judith Casilly, April 22, 1971, box 42 Lead Poisoning April 1970 folder, Cervantes Papers; "Lack Of Funds Reported in Fight on Poison Paint," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 3, 1971; Legal Task Force Subcommittee, "An Analysis of the St. Louis Lead Abatement Process: Some Comments and Directions," Get the Lead Out Conference, 1971, folder 348, FOR Addenda; "City of St. Louis Lead Poisoning Statistics and Projects," Lead Poisoning Control Service, City of St. Louis, 1971, box 42, Lead Poisoning April 1970 folder, Cervantes Papers; "Tenant Groups Seeks Funds to Fight Lead Poisoning," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 21, 1971.
22.
Charlie Staples , "City Officials Named in Lead Poisoning Suit ," St. Louis Globe-Democrat, February 4, 1971 .
23.
Heathcott and Murphy, "Corridors of Flight"; George E. Curry, "Seeking Funds for Lead Fight," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 25, 1975; Editorial, "The Convention Center," KMOX, November 1, 1972, box 19, Convention Center folder, Cervantes Papers; Spencer Allen, "Reply to Kmox Editorial on the Convention Center," KMOX, November 3, 1972, box 19, Convention Center folder, Cervantes Papers; Sally Thran, "Center Could Boost Revenues," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 30, 1972.
24.
Ad Hoc Committee on Lead Poisoning, "Statement of the Ad Hoc Committee on Lead Poisoning," January 13, 1971, box 42, Lead Poisoning April 1970 folder, Cervantes Papers.
25.
"Charges City Is Apathetic on Lead-Poison Problem," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 8, 1971.
26.
Wilbur Thomas, "Lead Poisoning in St. Louis" Proud 1, no. 5 (May 1970): 17.
27.
Madeline Oliver , Minutes of the Housing Task Force on Lead Poisoning, Get the Lead Out Conference, March 30, 1971 , folder 499, FOR Addenda.
28.
Housing Task Force, "Housing Task Force Report on the National Housing Crisis," 1971, folder 348, FOR Addenda; Cummings, "Rent Strike in St. Louis"; Harry Edward Berndt, The Community Development Corporation as a Response to Poverty (PhD diss., Washington University in St. Louis, 1975).
29.
Albert Nerviani to A. J. Wilson, May 20, 1971, box 42, Lead Poisoning April 1970 folder, Cervantes Papers; Sheila Bixby Defty, "Inaction Protested in Lead Poison Case," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 9, 1972; People’s Coalition Against Lead Poisoning, "Injunctions to Save the Children," November 13, 1972, folder 288, Committee for Environmental Information Records, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri-St. Louis (hereafter CEI Papers).
30.
"Citizen Group Blames City for Laxity in Lead Poisoning Cases," St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 27, 1972.
31.
Law Enforcement Committee of the People’s Coalition Against Lead Poisoning to Robert McNicholas, October 4, 1972, box 42, Lead Poisoning April 1970 folder, Cervantes Papers; Marguerite Shepard, "Children and the Agony of Lead Poisoning," St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 9, 1972; Defty, "Inaction Protested"; "City’s Agreement to Enforce Anti-Lead Law Ends Sit-In," St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 17, 1972; People’s Coalition Against Lead Poisoning, "Injunctions to Save the Children"; People’s Coalition Against Lead Poisoning to Helen Bruce, November 16, 1972, box 42, Lead Poisoning April 1970 folder, Cervantes Papers.
32.
George Curry, "To Seek Writ in Lead Case," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 26, 1972; George Curry, "Landlord Has Not Removed Leaded Paint Despite Court Order," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 5, 1973; "Lead Paint Coalition Calls Brune’s Reprimand Inadequate," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 13, 1973.
33.
Ibid.; Curry, "Lead Paint Coalition."
34.
Walter Stradal, press release, St. Louis Board of Real Estate, November 15, 1970, box 42, Lead Poisoning April 1970 folder, Cervantes Papers.
35.
Most of the information for this paragraph comes from Quinn and Mendelson, Decline of an Urban Housing Entrepreneur. The report is a short business biography of Brune written when he retired and sold all of his property at auction. Quinn and Mendelson use the sparse attendance and lack of bidding at the auction as an assessment of how much the city real estate market has floundered since the 1950s.
36.
Larry Black and Robert Knickmeyer to Dean Wochner, April 26, 1973, box 26, Health Division Lead Paint folder, April 1973, John H. Poelker Papers, Washington University Archives, St. Louis (hereafter Poelker Papers); John T. Magidson, "Half-Step Forward," Environment 13, no. 5 (June 1971): 10-13
37.
Magidson, "Half-Step Forward"; "City Agency Blamed in Lead Poisoning Case," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 27, 1972.
38.
George Curry, "Lead Poison Crash Drive Is Urged," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 19, 1973. The polio comparison was common among lead activists across the country. See Warren, Brush with Death, 195; Jack Newfield, "Let Them Eat Paint Chips," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 3, 1972.
39.
Robert McNicholas to Anoise Seymour, November 24, 1972, box 42, Lead Poisoning April 1970 folder, Cervantes Papers.
40.
"Lead Paint Problems Are Stressed," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 12, 1973.
41.
Larry Black and Sharon Hollander to Helen Bruce, March 21, 1974, box 26, Health Division Lead Paint folder, April 1973, Poelker Papers; Helen Bruce to Larry Black and Sharon Hollander, April 8, 1974, box 26, Health Division Lead Paint folder, April 1973, Poelker Papers.
42.
Ibid.; Helen Bruce to Robert Karsh, December 4, 1975, folder 288, CEI Papers.
43.
ARCH Environmental Health Planning Task Force, City of St. Louis, July 1, 1975, folder 288, CEI Papers. In the transcript of that meeting, the health board member is identified only as "Mr. Grist." Michael A. Mendelson and Robert Eugene Quinn, The Feasibility of Lead Paint Removal in St. Louis Rental Housing (Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, Center for Urban and Environmental Research and Services, 1978), 13, 30-31. Although Copley estimated that 5 percent of properties were abandoned because of lead paint problems, that number is deceiving. As real estate values plummeted, abandoned property was becoming a huge problem in St. Louis. Lead paint problems were often just the last straw for property owners rather than the primary cause of abandonment.
44.
Curry, "Seeking Funds"; Department of Community Medicine, "Let Them Eat Paint," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 17, 1977.
45.
"Get the Lead Out: Conference Report," May 22, 1971, box 42 Lead Poisoning April 1970 folder, Cervantes Papers; "Robert Knickmeyer," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 3, 1996; Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle; Warren, Brush with Death, 224-43.
46.
After 1968, more than four thousand African American families were leaving the city for the suburbs every years, while the city averaged an equal number of home demolitions a year during the 1970s. See Schmandt et al., Federal Aid, 2-4; George Lipsitz, "Ivory Perry and the Fight against Lead Poisoning in St. Louis," Synthesis/Regeneration 41 (Fall 2006): 16-17.
47.
On the lack of literature that connects the built environment to grassroots activism, see Robert O. Self and Thomas Sugrue, "The Power of Place: Race, Political Economy and Identity in the Postwar Metropolis," in Blackwell Companions to American History, ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 20-43.
