(somber music) - When we last left off, America stood on the brink of civil war.

In Missouri, the war unfolded in a uniquely complex way.

As a slave holding state that chose to remain in the Union, Missouri found itself straddling the divide between North and South.

It became a microcosm of the larger national struggle once again positioned at the crossroads of history.

(somber music) (wind blowing) - There are a lot of ways in which the national fight over slavery and freedom gets crystallized in Missouri, and there are Missourians right next to each other who use all that language.

Some of them will say, "All men are created equal.

We need to eliminate enslavement," that that just seems so obvious, that's in our creed as Americans.

There are other Missourians who will say, "This nation is founded on the right to one's property, the right to make one's own decision, and if one owns slaves, it is not the right of government to take that property from them," and they're people right next to each other.

- During the Civil War and leading up to the Civil War in Missouri, you find that there is a lot of extra military actions that were going on, which actually made Missouri a very, very dangerous place to live, because you just simply didn't know who might have been involved and who wasn't involved with these activities.

And it could have meant that you wanted to stay neutral, but because you didn't know who was aligned with whom, it was nearly impossible to do so.

- Missouri wasn't simply a backdrop to the Civil War, it was a battleground for its most personal conflicts.

In fact, Missouri is the only state that voted on secession and denied it.

As neighbors, families, and entire communities stood divided, the violence spilled far beyond the battlefield.

- In Missouri, it was chaotic, and it was bloody, and it was intense and destructive.

So people talk about the Civil War, but they often talk about it as a war between North and South.

A civil war is a war within one body, and it was a civil war in Missouri.

There were pro-union advocates, there were pro secession advocates in Missouri.

Both of them attempted to form their own governments in Missouri.

And that's a really hard thing to wrap one's head around, because Missouri stays in the Union, but slavery is still legal in Missouri, - Whether you were in St.

Louis or you were out in rural Missouri, out along the Missouri River, the area of the state they called Little Dixie, slavery was the backbone of the economy in Missouri.

And you had all of these politicians who very badly wanted to secede, but they realized it would spell economic disaster for all of their industries they had built.

So they end up voting at the Mercantile Library in St.

Louis on whether the state should actually secede or not, and they vote it down because they realized this would sort of put the nail in the coffin for all of their efforts to try to fight on behalf of slavery in Missouri.

- Most of our focus on the Civil War is what was happening in the east, or farther south.

And so, we will look at Gettysburg, we will look at Shiloh, we will look at Antietam, and you have major monuments to those conflicts, those battles.

And because, I think, there were more skirmishes in Missouri versus major, major battles, and then the focus being on the east, oftentimes, Missouri gets forgotten in terms of its importance.

Missouri plays an extremely important role logistically for both the Confederacy and the Union.

- The Missouri River, with its fertile bottom lands, and numerous slave holding farms and plantations, created a through line in the state that was bookended by Kansas City to the west and St.

Louis to the east.

But the rugged, sparsely populated highlands of the Ozarks were not spared the ravages of war.

- I've heard people argue that Missouri was the worst place to be in the Civil War, and I don't doubt it.

And I would say that inside Missouri, the Ozarks was the worst place to be.

It really devolved into a deadly no man's land by the last two, two and a half years of the war.

What happens is, the authorities back east, whether they're in Richmond or Washington DC, had this bad habit of pulling troops back east of the Mississippi.

And so, by early 1863, you've got the makings of a real no man's land, a real gorilla war.

The Confederacy institutes this thing called the Partisan Ranger Act in early 1862, where they kinda create these little mobile cavalry, semi-gorilla units that are supposed to be very loosely affiliated with the actual army.

And in the absence of any large armies to establish even something as tricky as martial law, civil law, civil society just falls apart, it really does.

And you have a case where lots of people just flee the Ozarks.

And by the end of the Civil War, you've got large pockets of the region that have mostly been unpeopled, if that's a word, they're just empty of human life, and what's left there are really struggles to survive.

I really don't think it's an exaggeration to say the Ozarks becomes the bloodiest no man's land of the American Civil War, anywhere on the North American continent.

(deep somber music) - The war takes shape differently across Missouri and St.

Louis, then the largest city in the nation west of Pittsburgh, emerged as a strategic stronghold for the Union.

The St.

Louis Arsenal was a massive federal installation perched on the Mississippi River.

As secessionist tensions mounted, control of this arsenal became a high stakes subjective.

Union supporters led by Captain Nathaniel Lyon moved swiftly to secure the site, preventing it from falling into the hands of pro-Confederate forces, cementing St.

Louis is a base of Union military operations in the West.

- It's a postage stamp of land 35 acres on the St.

Louis riverfront, but in those 35 acres was the largest store of Union weapons in any slave holding state in the country, 60,000 rifles, more than a million cartridges, 40 cannons, all in this tiny plot of land on the riverfront.

Had that fallen into the hands of Southern sympathizers, they could've instantly armed a nearly invincible army that would've stormed St.

Louis, channeled all of its industrial and economic might for the South.

You can see the situation where, had the arsenal at St.

Louis fallen, the entirety of the Civil War could've turned out quite differently.

- By 1861, you have the State of Missouri trying to decide whether it was going to secede or not.

And at the time, Governor Claiborne Jackson was pushing for secession, and was also eyeing this arsenal to supply the Confederacy.

- From the view of Washington, in Washington DC, the arsenal's tremendously important.

First of all, if pro-Confederate Missourians can get that, they might just succeed in their effort to bring Missouri into the Union.

But also, with a military campaign being fought in the southwest, a lot of it headquartered here in St.

Louis, that arsenal was critical to supplying that part of the war effort.

- Eventually, what would happen is that the materials would be moved out of the arsenal under the cover of night, into Illinois, to prevent the Confederacy from taking over.

- People looked at the arsenal as potentially being a second Fort Sumter.

(tense music) - Luckily, the fort's stores were secured before they could fall into Confederate hands.

At the same time, an ambitious entrepreneur named James Eads was laying the groundwork for a revolutionary new kind of warship, ironclad gunboats that would soon redefine combat on the western rivers, and play a critical role in the Union's strategy along the Mississippi and its tributaries.

(rousing music) - You had the ocean-going ships ready to surround all of the coastal areas of the South, but there was no brown water navy at the ready to take back the lower Mississippi River.

They come to James Eads in St.

Louis and they say, we want you to build us this fleet of ironclad gunboats that we can use to try to force the Confederacy further and further south, ultimately divided in half, with the Mississippi River as this backbone.

So James Eads takes on the effort.

The boats he builds are incredible.

People called them turtles because they sat so low on the water and they had this huge iron shell over top.

These are 600-ton boats.

They had two and a half inch thick plates of iron encasing the entire portion above the water.

We have incredible archival diaries talking about people going down to see tests of the iron that was going on these boats, and cannon balls were exploding when they hit the iron sides of these boats.

He builds seven of these that make up the heart of what is called the Mississippi River Squadron.

From St.

Louis, they battled their way down south, through Cairo, Illinois, down through Memphis, down through Natchez, Mississippi, a series of 10 different battles on the lower Mississippi River that these fight, and every stretch of the way that the union wins, there is no stretch of river that the Confederacy ultimately regains.

(uplifting music) - The gun boats were crucial, not just for the region around St Louis, but also the region further south.

And if you wanna get a sense of why this region mattered so much, it's actually great to look at the two principle Union commanders, because it is in this area that both Ulysses Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman emerge as these genius battlefield leaders, and they rely on the gunboats to cover the transportation of their troops down the Mississippi River.

Grant was from Ohio.

He's from a free state.

He really did not like the slave holding aristocracy of the South, but he married into a slave holding family from Missouri.

And when he left the army and really struggled in business, they gave him land, and there was enslaved labor on that land.

And so, he's really at the middle of all of this.

Meanwhile, William Tecumseh Sherman was leading a military academy in Louisiana at the outbreak of the war.

So he was in the Confederacy right before secession.

And to him it was devastating, it was heartbreaking, because he supported the Union but he was surrounded by all these Southerners.

Both of them end up back in St.

Louis, not only during the war, but after the war.

When Ulysses Grant becomes commander in chief of the United States Army and he needs someone to command in the West, he immediately select Sherman.

Sherman sets up his headquarters here in St.

Louis, and he remained here until he succeeded Grant as the commanding general when Grant himself became president of the US.

- Missouri took the extraordinary step of moving to free its enslaved population before President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation.

It was a bold and surprising move.

And while it might seem logical to assume Lincoln supported this early push toward emancipation, the truth is more complicated and more revealing of the political tightrope that he was walking.

- So across the summer of 1861, when battles are breaking out all over Missouri, General Nathaniel Lyon becomes the first Union general killed in the Civil War.

After that happens, General John Fremont back in St.

Louis jumps into what can only be described as a panic.

He completely bypasses the chain of command and declares martial law in the State of Missouri.

His declaration says that anyone joining the Confederacy would be guilty of an executable offense, any Southern sympathizer in Missouri would have their property immediately confiscated, and that property included enslaved human beings.

So his martial law declaration effectively doubles as the first emancipation proclamation.

Anyone who enslaved someone was defacto a Southern sympathizer.

So he has effectively declared all of the slaves in Missouri free.

- This question about whether enslaved Missourians could be free or not really captures what was at stake in the Civil War and how it played out.

So when the war started, Abraham Lincoln expressly rejected broad reaching emancipation, because his concern was the Union, he himself was ambivalent about racial equality, and I think most importantly, he thought that if he pushed for emancipation, that would get White Southerners just to dig in their heels even deeper and might lose him some support in the North.

So he's just not willing to do it.

And so, when Missourian say, Hey, we're staying in the Union, and let's start working towards emancipation here, Lincoln rejected it because it threatened to completely overturned this delicate balance.

- While we look at this and we think, that's amazing, what incredible braver and foresight, for President Abraham Lincoln, this could not have been a bigger disaster.

He was so badly trying to hold on to keeping Missouri in the Union.

If Missouri had ultimately seceded, it would've been a complete disaster for the President, so he almost immediately rescinds Fremont's martial law order in Missouri.

But the moment really spells out in clear detail, a much bigger point about the Civil War.

This is not going to end in a compromise.

This is either going to be slavery everywhere or slavery nowhere, and this is one of those moments where that is unbelievably clear.

- In the town of Hermann, located in Gasconade County, on the southern bank of the Missouri River, was slave holding farms to the north, and the town itself populated by anti-slavery Germans.

An act of defiance that helped push Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation took place called the Loutre Island Stampede.

Also known as the Gasconade Slave Stampede, a group of enslaved people made their way behind Union lines, four of whom were captured.

(deep soulful music) - The Gasconade Slave Stampede, it takes place in late 1862, near the town of Hermann, Missouri, which is a German town.

You have this anti-slavery community, and for individuals that were adjacent to that county and that area, that was a location that, those enslaved people realized, was an opportunity for freedom.

And so, they were reaching out and trying to cross the Missouri River to get to Gasconade, into that county, and to Hermann.

Well, in accordance to the 1850 fugitive slave laws, slave catchers had a right to go into any area in the country to reclaim their absconded slave property.

And eventually, four individuals were captured and they were placed in jail, in Hermann.

The anti-slavery advocates, once they get wind of this, they began to gather, because they were planning to break these individuals out of jail to help them escape, kind of thwarting, if you will, the slave catchers.

And it led to protests, and eventually, these individuals were released from jail.

So this stampede, it shows that particular side of it, but what it also demonstrates is, how many enslaved people saw the Civil War.

They saw the Union Army as their avenue, their ticket to freedom.

You have thousands of people who were fleeing farms, fleeing plantations, and it creates absolute chaos within the military ranks, because you have hundreds and hundreds, and eventually thousands of people showing up at military camps, and there is no clear policy as to what is supposed to happen.

And so, these military leaders that are on the ground, they're trying to figure out, what are we gonna do with all of these individuals?

And they know that if they release them or if they return these individuals to their enslavers, well, you're just giving the labor force right back to these individuals, which in essence frees up able-bodied Southern men to fight against the Union.

And again, there was no clear cut policy.

I think that it was the military generals that really forced the hand of Abraham Lincoln into signing the Emancipation Proclamation.

(regal music) - The Emancipation Proclamation Act comes, in many ways, at the low point of the war, when on the battlefield, the Union suffered a series of really devastating defeats, and the political support for the war was dwindling.

And so, Lincoln began to reinvent the war.

This isn't just a war about Union, this is a war about the universal principle of freedom.

When Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, that applies only to the states currently in rebellion, that's the term he uses, for the seceding states, for the Confederacy.

Well, Missouri was not in the Confederacy, and so, enslaved Missourians remain enslaved, even as enslaved people in Louisiana, for example, are being freed as early as 1862 and 1863.

As Sherman's army goes marching through the South in 1864 and 1865, and liberating enslaved people all along the way, there are still a lot of Missourians who remain enslaved, and it really won't be until the 13th Amendment that they are fully and formally freed.

And I think that really speaks to just how chaotic, how confusing, and how destructive the Civil War was.

(rousing music) - Even after the cannons fell silent at Appomattox, the Civil War was far from over in the Ozarks.

In this remote region, old wounds festered, and violence lingered for years.

Gorilla warfare and local feuds blurred the line between justice and revenge.

Out of this post-war chaos, a vigilante group known as the Bald Knobbers emerged, claiming to restore order, but leaving a complicated and controversial legacy in their wake.

(water flowing) - One of the things about the Ozarks is, the Civil War really doesn't end in 1865.

They can do whatever they want to at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, but out here in the Ozarks, people had other ideas.

And so, you have, really, this kind of sporadic continuation of guerrilla warfare.

The last gasp of the Civil War was the Bald Knobber affair in southwest Missouri.

It was very much a holdover or a hangover from the Civil War.

You had old Unionists on one side, you had old Confederates on the other, and then their offspring, because it's 20 years after the war has ended.

In Christian County, just south of Springfield, the Bald Knobbers movement basically comes to its end when a group of these kind of law and order, moralizing Bald Knobbers end up murdering a couple people.

It just, it really gets grizzly down there, and it makes national headline.

The Bald Knobbers are really kind of the rest of the nation's first introduction to the stereotypical wild Ozarks.

That's when people in New York and Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles and wherever, that's when they're really starting to read about this place called the Ozarks that a lot of people had never heard of before, and it's because of this sensationalized Bald Knobber story.

But by the end of the 1880s, that has come to an end and, I think, you can finally put the Civil War to rest.

(tranquil music) (birds chirping) - After the destruction of the Civil War, the government's focus turns to reconstruction, but it's not only looking south, it's also looking west, at areas that were still largely governed by Native Americans.

- The war must end.

So, Sherman's time in St.

Louis is a very telling one, because the Civil War resolves once and for all whether states can leave the Union, it resolves once and for all whether African-American enslavement will continue in the United States, sort of settles all of that.

Well, then there's another matter that the federal government wants to settle.

They face opposition to their authority in one other area, and that's in the West, where Native Americans have successfully resisted efforts by the US to claim their land, to govern their land, and to assert control over it.

So much of this is land the US in some cases had claimed since 1803.

The US claims it had bought that land through the Louisiana purchase, the same purchase that brought St.

Louis.

But if you went to what is now North and South Dakota, the people who governed that region were all Native Americans.

And the US says, we're gonna settle this once and for all.

And it takes this army that it had created to win the Civil War and it sends it west, and the person in command of that mission is William Tecumseh Sherman, in St.

Louis.

He selects some of his most trusted subordinates, people like Phil Sheridan, who he dispatches to the northern plains to conquer the Indians.

He sends really ambitious young officers, like George Armstrong Custer, into the northern plains to conquer the Indians.

So even though many people know that at the end of the Civil War, the United States engaged in a really substantial demobilization, it still preserved the core of its army, which by then was trained, it was fully equipped with the most modern technologies of warfare, and the bulk of that army is sent into the West.

- So while Sherman is based in St.

Louis, managing the government's efforts to gain control over Western territories, the rest of the state is grappling with how to heal the wounds created during the Civil War, how to move forward as a society where slavery is now illegal and a new social order must emerge.

(tranquil music) - People that were in the Confederacy, the supporters of the Confederacy, the individuals that were slave holders, they lost everything.

And I think that after the war, there are just a lot of bitter feelings.

And politically, with the state being under Republican control, you now have more than 115,000 individuals that were enslaved that are now free.

They're free to walk around, free to be themselves and no longer have to defer to their enslavers.

That was a very difficult thing for many former slaveholders to swallow.

- There was this back and forth between abolitionist forces and, of course, people that were upholding enslavement.

And even within the anti-slavery movement, there was tension between those two groups about which way should go forward with this group of Black people that were going to become free.

Some of the anti-slavery forces said, well, I want them to be free, but I want them gone, send them back to Africa.

And of course, there were the other forces that said, no, no strings attached.

Emancipationists they were called.

"This is what we want."

They were called the Charcoals.

So we had always had this tension between these two forces here.

(somber music) - One of the other ways that the Civil War plays out in Missouri, one of the distinctive ways, is that the Civil War ends and Missourians can say, we remained part of the Union, but that does not mean it was a state premised on racial equality.

It emerges from the war, with enslavement gone, but it remains a state where racial supremacy is in place.

It becomes a state that quickly signs on to segregation as a new and seemingly modern mechanism of racial supremacy.

- Reconstruction would officially last until 1877 when President Rutherford B. Hayes would strike a deal with Democrats in the Southern states to end it and end military occupation of the Southern region.

Then you have the implementation of Jim Crow segregation, which southern states pretty quickly began to implement measures to curtail any rights gained during the reconstruction period for enslaved individuals, and also to push Republicans out of the Southern states.

- Segregation now seems like this throwback, it seems like people looking to the past, and from our perspective now, it is.

From the perspective of the 1870s and 80s, it was this modern system of racial supremacy, and segregation established a lot of rules that would remain in place for close to a century.

In 1916, St.

Louis passes an ordinance to make segregation a more formal structure, but this was nothing new.

There were already numerous forms of segregation in Missouri.

This is simply an effort to detail exactly how that's going to operate.

And if you asked a Black St Louisan, that person would likely say, this is no big change 'cause this is already how I'm living.

So in the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which is in 1897, the principle determination of that was to legalize the notion of separate but equal, which was to say that governments could segregate so long as they provided equal institutions.

In reality, it never plays out that way.

One of the results of this is that St.

Louis itself will become this home of incredibly strong Black institutions.

This is one of the ways that Black St.

Louisans respond to this state of affairs.

- When talking about segregation and Jim Crow in places like St.

Louis, you have individuals having to make a way out of no way.

And what that meant was that they would have to create their own infrastructure, their own facilities, and to do so with the bare minimum of resources.

That is one of the things about the Black community.

Even though you had those internal dynamics, the individuals also realized that without those avenues, without that infrastructure, without schools, without churches, without businesses, that the entirety of the Black community would collapse in upon itself, and that was also something that they did not want.

They did not want to be reliant upon anyone.

It was almost a sense of, we're gonna prove to you that we can create something.

All you have to do is not get in our way.

- What was formerly known as Elleardsville starts to become the Black neighborhood of The Ville.

It is a center of Black excellence that few other places in any other city around the nation can surpass.

The people, the ideas, the things happening in this neighborhood across the first part of the 20th century are incredible.

By 1875, we have Sumner High School, the first Black high school west of the Mississippi River.

You have Annie Malone, one of the first Black multimillionaires in the nation.

You have individuals like Homer G. Phillips, who was a lawyer who gets Homer G. Phillips Hospital built in The Ville, largest Black hospital in the nation all through the 30s, 40s and 50s.

There was no Black community anywhere in America that did not have at least one Homer G. Phillips trained doctor or nurse somewhere on their staff.

Individuals living in this neighborhood, it it's a who's who of Black St.

Louis.

Tina Turner, Chuck Berry, Arthur Ash, Grace Bumbry, the opera star, all of these fantastic, famous individuals who change American culture come out of this very small area of North St.

Louis.

It is a fascinating look at how, in the wake of all of this racism that is going on around them, Black communities rose above all of that and were able to craft out these incredible spots where excellence was thriving.

- Two women emerged from this period of segregation as powerful entrepreneurs and agents for growth in the Black community.

Annie Malone and Madam C.J.

Walker's stories resonate as examples of resilience and brilliant business acumen.

- Annie Malone was originally from Illinois.

That's where she started her first business.

She was into haircare.

Of course, her empire expanded.

Started off with haircare, but she was a beauty culturist, as we would say.

And so, in 1902, she decided she was gonna move her business to St.

Louis, because of the World's Fair, which attracted a lot of African Americans at the time.

- Anybody who would've seen Annie Malone walking door to door in St.

Louis's Mill Creek Valley neighborhood in 1902 would've certainly been forgiven for looking right past her.

Here's another traveling salesman trying to pitch something, and wouldn't really be much about her that you would think this is a person who's gonna make it.

But 15 years later, nobody would've thought that when Annie Malone became one of the first Black multimillionaires in the nation.

Annie Malone's a fascinating figure.

Her parents die when she is very young.

She has 11 siblings.

She starts tinkering with things in her house, building these different chemical compounds, trying to build beauty products that she can test out on her siblings and herself.

And it's there in her home that she perfects her first product, the wonderful hair grower.

This is what she starts selling door to door in St.

Louis in 1902.

Annie Malone had created this concoction that was specifically made for Black women's hair, and she made a fortune.

She begins franchising her operations and adding a team of saleswomen.

By the early 19 teens, she has made a absolute fortune, and is starting to branch into other cities.

By the time she builds Poro College in 1918, she has more than 75,000 women all across the United States, even in the Caribbean and up in Canada, that she has franchised as part of the Poro sales team.

People are learning not only how to apply the treatments for these Poro products, but how to walk and talk like a saleswoman, how to hold yourself professionally, how to have conversations with clients.

She really believes in this idea of people finding the excellence within themselves and using that to make a better life for themselves.

She's not just a businesswoman.

She becomes a role model for thousands of people.

- She was really an unusual woman, had a deep social consciousness.

She used her money not only to elevate herself, but to elevate others, and to elevate her race.

This was a time when self-help, that whole Booker T. Washington philosophy, was very important, and it was very, very important for Blacks to help elevate the race, to lift the race, to uplift the race.

- So it's this huge success story that almost never really gets mentioned a whole lot, and that's probably one of the biggest slights that Annie Malone has faced in her story of her legacy, is that people don't really remember her too often, but they remember one of her proteges quite well.

In 1903, Annie Malone hired a young agent named Sarah Breedlove.

People know her much better by the name of Madam C.J.

Walker.

Sarah Breedlove, just like Annie Malone, her own hair had started falling out.

So she started trying to create beauty concoctions in her home the same way.

Annie Malone takes her under her wing and shows her how to run a business, how to make these things, how to make sales.

She takes all this knowledge and goes and starts her own company and becomes unbelievably successful.

(tranquil music) - Across the nation, neighborhoods like The Ville in St.

Louis and 18th and Vine in Kansas City began to fragment after the passage of the Fair Housing Act.

But before its enactment, redlining and racially restricted covenants were common tools of segregation.

It was a landmark lawsuit filed in Missouri, ultimately reaching the Supreme Court, that made it illegal nationwide to bar someone from living where they chose based on race.

- In the early 20th century, with the outbreak of World War I in the 1910s, you have this huge industrial push, all of these factories in industrial centers like St.

Louis, and Chicago, and Detroit are ramping up production.

All of these individuals living in the South, they end up heading North looking for jobs in these industrial centers.

It's a movement that becomes known as the Great Migration.

Concurrently, and because of that, in places like St.

Louis, you see this huge rise in racism.

In 1916, the city of St.

Louis takes a very drastic step and tries to legally write segregation into the very fabric of the city.

The city's 1916 segregation ordinance, which passed by a very wide margin, would've made it illegal for anyone in the city, Black or White, to move onto a block more than 75% occupied by another race.

St.

Louisans voted this in, but it never actually goes into effect because a similar law that was passed in Louisville, Kentucky is being challenged in the US Supreme Court at that exact same time.

Even though this never happened, the segregation ordinance took effect, St.

Louisans still spoke very loud and clear about what they wanted.

The first restrictive housing covenants start showing up in St.

Louis around 1904.

Instead of the city actually dictating segregation, this was individual private property owners writing into the deeds of their homes, this home can never be sold to a Black person, an Asian person, a Jewish person.

From a handful of houses in the early 1900s that have these restrictive covenants, by the 1940s, there are more than a hundred thousand homes in the St.

Louis region that have them.

It starts as this sort of urban thing, but it's really the suburbs where this practice takes deepest root.

The suburbs of Southern Kansas City in some places had more than 95% of the houses with restrictive covenants on them.

In St.

Louis, you had neighborhoods like University City, a place now prized for its diversity, was almost entirely restricted from anybody but White people living in those houses when they were first built.

So by the 1940s, there are really very few opportunities for Black people to actually find a house of their own.

J.D.

and Ethel Shelley moved to St.

Louis from Mississippi.

They did everything right.

They wanted the same thing any other family wants.

They wanted a house to raise their six children in, a place where they could grow up together as a family.

They saved their money.

They were able to find a house that they could buy, or at least use a white straw party to buy.

The way things worked then, a Black family would probably not be able to get a bank loan because banks engaged in this practice called redlining where they would literally decide who they would give a mortgage to or not.

And so, they used their pastor at their church, who was a White man.

He bought the house on their behalf, and then transferred the deed to them sort of in secret as a way to get around some of the racist restrictions that were happening at the time.

The house at 4,600 Labadie was perfect for this family.

Two family, flacked, sturdy brick house, had plenty of room for all of their children, but there was one huge problem.

The immediate neighborhood in 1911 had put a restrictive covenant on the property and the surrounding blocks, and two months after the Shelley's move into the house, the neighborhood sued them.

The neighborhood chose Fern and Lewis Kraemer because Fern Kraemer's parents had been one of the original signatories on the restrictive covenant in 1911.

The Shelleys won their case in St.

Louis, lost it in the Missouri Supreme Court appeal, and then it went to the US Supreme Court, where it became one of the most significant court cases in US history.

- His lawyer was George Vaughn, and they decided that this was a great case, and they were gonna argue this case.

George Vaughn was a Black attorney, a civil rights attorney, very prominent in the Democratic Party, which was unusual at that time, 'cause most Blacks were Republicans and he was a Democrat for quite some time.

So, yes, he was a very prominent attorney, very well known.

What the Supreme Court said when they ruled on the Shelley v. Kraemer case was, okay, you can have all the restrictive covenants you want, they're unenforceable.

In other words, you cannot use the state to enforce those restrictive covenants, because before, the state would intervene, issue injunctions, would not allow a person to move into that house.

That couldn't happen anymore.

Didn't mean the segregation ended, but that was not a tool that they could use in their arsenal to maintain segregation.

- The US Supreme Court ultimately rules that restrictive covenants violate the 14th Amendment rights of Black families just trying to own a home, and they strike down restrictive covenants across the nation.

A single family trying to buy themselves a house suddenly becomes the ruling that fundamentally changes the real estate practices of the entire country.

Obviously racism still exists in the coming decades in terms of the real estate market, but this is one huge step towards the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which finally declares, you cannot discriminate in real estate transactions whatsoever.

- So let's rewind a bit.

Missouri stands at the crossroads of the nation's civil rights history as it relates to the Black experience, but it's also where the fight for women's suffrage began to take root.

- So the first Women's suffrage society formed in St.

Louis.

I still don't know entirely why, but to me that's secondary.

I think what it really does is take the way we tend to think about our nation's history and turn it on its head.

So, we often get this story about women's political activism in the 19th century that's all about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and these figures who emerge mostly out of the Northeast.

What that story says is that women's political activism is going on all over the country in different ways.

So by the 1830s and 40s, women are already trying to carve out a political role for themselves, a public role.

There are three reconstruction amendments, 13th Amendment, which ended slavery, 14th Amendment, which guaranteed equal protection under the law for all citizens, the 15th Amendment, which extended the right to vote, and I say extended the right to vote because it was really written with formerly enslaved men in mind.

It says, race cannot be the basis for voting, and operated from the assumption that of course women weren't supposed to vote.

Well, that's not what Virginia Minor thought.

- So Virginia Minor, in 1869, she comes up with this idea called the New Departure.

If the 14th Amendment declares that women are citizens, we're people, therefore we're citizens, we already have the right to vote.

We don't have to win that right.

We just need to go exercise the civil disobedience necessary to force that right to be given to us by a court.

So at the presidential election in 1872, in St.

Louis, if you had been standing there next to the old courthouse where people were lining up to vote, you'd have seen thousands of suits and one dress, Virginia Minor standing in that line, getting ready to ask for her ballot to vote for President of the United States.

When she gets up to the front of the line, predictably, she is denied that ballot simply because she is a woman, and immediately launches a lawsuit, declaring that her 14th amendment rights had been violated.

Her husband actually has to file the suit on her behalf, because as a married woman in Missouri, in 1872, she could not file her own court case.

She loses all three of her appeals in St.

Louis, in the Missouri Supreme Court, and in the US Supreme Court.

All of the courts essentially dodge the question.

They get around this issue of is voting a fundamental right of being a citizen by declaring, it is up to the states to decide which of their citizens would have the right to vote.

It's not a fundamental right.

States get to decide.

Virginia Minor loses this case, but obviously this galvanizes an incredible amount of action.

Susan B. Anthony is another person who tries this in the wake of Virginia Minor, trying to go vote and win in a court case.

If you were gonna read about the suffrage movement today, you'd probably hear a lot about the 1910s into the 1920s, but this is half a century earlier people are trying to make this happen, they're doing these really radical things.

I can only imagine the bravery it would've taken to be standing in that line amongst all those other men looking at you, wondering what the hell you're doing here, and to stand there and actually go through with that.

It's an incredible story.

- So far, we've looked at Missouri through the lens of civil rights and political milestones, but the state's influence goes beyond individual action.

Major government projects rooted here helped shape the very landscape of modern America.

Think about it.

Can you imagine life without highways, without the interstate system?

Even the humble gas station, once a roadside novelty, became a symbol of mobility and American progress, and it all ties back to innovations that took shape right here in Missouri.

- It's hard to imagine today, there are more than 150,000 gas stations on the American roadside, that just a century ago, that was a totally foreign concept.

If you owned a car in early 1900s St.

Louis, to fill up that car with gas, you had to stop and get out and go to a hardware store, carry in gas jugs with you.

You'd go around back, fill them up, and then take them out to your car and actually have to put the gas in yourself.

In 1905 in St.

Louis, two guys came up with a better way, and completely revolutionized how we fill up our cars today.

Laessig and Grenner owned a small plot of land on Theresa Street in midtown St.

Louis.

Armed with nothing more than gravity and a garden hose, they built this gas station where you could actually drive your car up next to this tank that was elevated up in the air.

They put the garden hose in your car's tank, filled you up for 19 cents a gallon, in 1905, and you were on your way.

This was an incredible revolutionary idea, one that seems obvious to us today, but that's only because we've had it for a hundred plus years of living with cars.

So by 1909, they had opened three other gas stations.

By the time they actually sell to Shell Oil Corporation in 1929, they had 10 gas stations around St.

Louis, and it helped spark a roadside revolution.

(tranquil music) - That roadside revolution sparked fundamental shifts in American life.

The mid 20th century brought sweeping change as the rise of the automobile carved highways through dense urban centers and drew many toward the promise of suburban living.

Now, we've already touched on Shelley versus Kraemer and the Fair Housing Act, but another law would physically reshape American cities just as the interstate system took form.

The 1949 Federal Housing Act empowered governments to declare areas blighted, clearing the way for new development.

One of the nation's first and largest urban renewal projects was the raising of Mill Creek Valley, a predominantly Black neighborhood spanning more than 450 acres.

- Mill Creek was the first big urban renewal project.

It's like one of the biggest in the country.

20,000 people were displaced.

5,000 residences were destroyed, 5,000 buildings.

So it was pretty catastrophic.

And of course, then you had the highway system coming in in 1956.

By the way, this was federal government policy.

People were concerned about the cities.

A lot of urban areas have been neglected because of the war effort.

Then when you have the returning GIs coming back, overcrowding, I've had people telling me, who grew up during this era, they had to live in Quonset huts.

this temporary housing, and it was a real problem, and they wanted to rebuild cities.

And of course, with these urban areas being neglected, and of course, the Black areas are gonna be neglected more than any other area.

And so, they had all these stresses.

So what do you do?

Well, they weren't thinking about, oh, let's take these beautiful buildings and let's renovate them, let's tweak them, let's make it better.

Their idea of renewing was tearing down and building something new, and luring people back into the city.

'Cause there was also a problem, the government's policy also favored suburbanization.

- What you have is this concentration of poor and Black families, immigrant families who are left sort of stranded in the inner city's core.

Meanwhile, all of the White middle class families that are looking for better situations where they have a driveway for their new car, they have a backyard that is theirs, they're moving out to the suburbs with the federally backed mortgages that they're able to secure.

- And I always say, urban renewal was like a speeding train.

And if you get in the way of a speeding train, what happens?

Nobody's gonna get in front of a speed train.

It was gonna happen, and I don't think there was much to do that was going to stop it from happening.

- So you see this huge hollowing out of city centers.

Areas that once had thousands of residents, you come back just a decade later and they're almost completely empty.

- As Black neighborhoods like Mill Creek Valley were cleared and White residents fled to the suburbs, the shape of the American city began to shift, guided in part by a rapidly expanding highway system.

Now, while several states lay claim to building the first interstate, it was Missouri that secured its place in history.

After President Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, two Missouri Road projects became the first officially underway in the national system of interstate and defense highways.

(tranquil music) - By 1940, there are 32 million cars on the American roads.

By 1950, that has doubled to 60 million.

The entire country is sort of groaning under the weight of all of these new cars that are being added to its streets.

You see it in places like St.

Louis.

Before the interstate highways show up, you have immense traffic jams that stretch for miles as people are using city streets to try to get through this increasingly crowded city.

In the mid 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower comes to Congress with a huge ask, a 40,000 mile system of interstate highways that would span the country from coast to coast, connect every major city.

It would be one of the biggest human infrastructure projects in world history, but it would be a fundamental change of life.

In August of 1956, a stretch of Interstate 44 near Lebanon, Missouri becomes the first interstate contract signed in the United States.

Less than two weeks later, a stretch of interstate 70 in St.

Charles County is the first actual construction on an interstate project.

So Missouri is at the cutting edge of this, and both of these projects are proud to pitch themselves as being on the front end of this.

They believe they're bringing the future, and they are.

It's the world we live in now, the world of interstate highways.

(rousing music) - Missouri's story is inseparable from the story of America itself.

From the fierce battles over slavery and civil rights, to the rise of the interstate highway system, the state has stood at the center of some of the nation's most defining conflicts and transformations.

Its landscapes, both physical and cultural, bear the imprint of those moments, from the raised streets of Mill Creek Valley, to the rise of post-war suburbs and the web of concrete highways that followed.

And that is where we'll leave the story for now, at the crossroads of the past and present, where the choices of history still echo in our built environment around us, and we're gonna pick up the narrative in part three.

We're gonna hop on Route 66 and follow the road through Missouri's rich cultural landscapes, from the Ozarks, often called the cradle of country music, to the smoky aroma of Kansas City Barbecue, to the enduring legacy of the Negro Leagues.

The road ahead is full of stories, and Missouri has got miles of them.

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