St. Louis Story Stitchers
Contributors to The Why Of My City gather on a Grand Center rooftop to record a podcast highlighting life in a particular neighborhood of St. Louis.
As Emeara Burns sat on the roof of a Grand Center building one sunny day last summer, she received a history lesson that had her hanging on every word.
She and five others gathered atop the .ZACK performing arts venue to record a podcast about St. Louis neighborhood the Ville. They sat in a socially distanced circle, speaking into microphones through their masks.
Emmy-winning storyteller Bobby Norfolk and longtime political activist Percy Green II traded tales about having shrimp at the Sarah Lou Cafe amid the vibrant nightlife of a Friday evening in the 1960s.
Activist Percy Green (top) climbs the under-construction St. Louis Arch in 1964 to protest the lack of Black workers hired for the construction crew. Paul Okrassa, St. Louis Globe-Democrat / From the collections of the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri St. Louis
When the St. Louis Arch was being built in 1964, no Black workers had been hired for the construction crew.
That didn’t sit well with Black activist Percy Green, who wanted to let the world know that a federally funded national monument was guilty of racial discrimination. To protest, he climbed the halfway-constructed arch.
Green’s employer, the aerospace company McDonnell Douglas, was not happy about his ascent and laid off Green – the only Black research technician – due to budget cuts. Later the company listed a job opening for Green s former position. So Green, equipped with the recently passed Civil Rights Act, took the corporation to court for his job.
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