The Soldier... and other tales from The Ville
$15.00
This book contains eleven short stories based on events witnessed or imagined by the author in The Ville of the 1950s. The characters are fictionalized from the personalities, charms and behaviors that reflected members of the St. Ferdinand community and around the Poro Hotel that existed in The Ville of the 1960s and the 1970s.
About the Book
This is the second book in a trilogy about The Ville published by author Jean McDaniels-Hughes. The collection 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, the result of restrictive housing covenants 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 housing 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.” The stream of “Black Flight” to other neighborhoods when it started in the late 1950s, helped ravish the cohesiveness of Negro life and property in The Ville (and the Greater The Ville) as individuals, families, and businesses experienced disorientation, lack of services, and the loss of control that gradually destabilized the community. The Ville for the next forty years had been referred to as a "ghetto" and slum and St. Louis, Missouri as one of the lost urban cities in America. Since 2000, there are signs of revitalization as the merging of local hospitals and expansion of universities repurpose abandoned neighborhoods.