Description

This is the first of three books of short stories about The Ville to be published by author Jean McDaniels-Hughes. The trilogy is expected to be completed in 2020. The Ville, once a prosperous entrepreneurial, educational, and professional community from 1910-1950, was racially segregated, a “boxed-in” community of sorts as the result of restrictive housing agreements signed by whites who lived in neighborhoods that bordered The Ville.  African-Americans were prevented legally, sometimes dissuaded forcibly, from renting or buying property in those neighborhoods due to such agreements. The 1948 US Supreme Court ban on such agreements opened the flood gates for professional and middle-class Negroes to leave The Ville for better housing, services and living opportunities outside its “perimeter.”  Once it started in the late 1950s, the stream of “Black Flight” to other neighborhoods moving toward St. Louis County helped ravish the cohesiveness of Negro life and property in The Ville (and the Greater The Ville) as individuals, families, churches and businesses experienced growing confusion, frustration and the loss of control that led to destabilization for the next forty years. Today, in 2018, there are small signs of revitalization but The Ville for many years has been referred to as the ”ghetto,” the slums, and St. Louis, Missouri as one of the lost urban cities in America. But for the past twenty years, since 2000, there are encouraging signs of revitalization.