Health and the Urban Environment

Taylor Desloge, "Sanitized Violence: The Strange Liberal Rebirth of Jim Crow and the Origins of an Urban Renewal Coalition, 1917-1929" 
Abstract: In the fall of 1923, in response to an outbreak of smallpox and a larger panic over public health spurred by the Great Migration, the St. Louis city health department instituted a mandatory vaccination program for Black Migrants at St. Louis’ Union Station. As city health commissioner Max C. Starkloff fought to implement the program, he faced a widespread protest movement from Black St. Louisans, who gathered daily at Union Station to jeer and taunt at the police officers enforcing the quarantine. In time, Starkloff would be forced to the bargaining table—and to eventually abandon his scheme altogether—by a new coalition of interracial reformers. This chapter argues that moments like the 1923 Quarantine, when both disease and Black political dissent threatened the day-to-day operation of the Jim Crow city, were the building blocks of a reconstructed Jim Crow in the interwar era, with profound consequences for 20th century urban policy. As men like Starkloff, and later, city planner Harland Bartholomew sought to implement an aggressive modernization campaign in the name of the public welfare, they quickly discovered that meeting the demands of a growing and increasingly influential bloc of Black St. Louisans was essential to the legitimation of their schemes. In place of a color line that had emerged through decades of violence and dispossession perpetrated against African American St. Louisans, technocrats like Starkloff offered a new, modern Jim Crow that sanitized the violence and neglect of segregation beneath a promise of universal welfare, racial reconciliation and most importantly of all, the democratic consent—real, imagined and sometimes wholly fabricated—of Black St. Louisans themselves. I argue that the interwar reconstruction of Jim Crow in places like St. Louis played a foundational role in the dispossession of Black communities later in the century. As interracial reformers worked out a new vision for 20th century St. Louis,  they tied the long post-emancipation fight for Black health and environmental equity with a newer vision of urban reconstruction that valued the needs of a deeply racialized urban land market over those of residents themselves.
 
Opening comment by Michele Mitchell, NYU