from Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (1991) by Jonathan Kozol
“East of anywhere,” writes a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “often evokes the other side of the tracks. But, for a first-time visitor suddenly deposited on its eerily empty streets, East St. Louis might suggest another world.” The city, which is 98 percent black, has no obstetric services, no regular trash collection, and few jobs. Nearly a third of its families live on less than $7,500 a year; 75 percent of its population lives on welfare of some form. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development describes it as “the most distressed small city in America.”
Only three of the 13 buildings on Missouri Avenue, one of the city’s major thoroughfares, are occupied. A 13-story office building, tallest in the city, has been boarded up. Outside, on the sidewalk, a pile of garbage fills a ten-foot crater.
The city, which by day and night is clouded by the fumes that pour from vents and smokestacks at the Pfizer and Monsanto chemical plants, has one of the highest rates of child asthma in America.
It is, according to a teacher at the University of Southern Illinois, “a repository for a nonwhite population that is now regarded as expendable.” The Post-Dispatch describes it as “America’s Soweto.”…
Two auto bridges cross the Mississippi River to St. Louis. To the south is the Poplar Street Bridge. The bridge to the north is named for Martin Luther King. “It takes three minutes to cross the bridge,” says Ahmed. “For white people in St. Louis, it could be a thousand miles long.”…
“The chemical plants do not pay taxes here. They have created small incorporated towns which are self-governed and exempt from health agencies in East St. Louis… Basically there’s nobody living in some of these so-called towns. Alorton is a sizable town. Sauget, on the other hand, isn’t much more than a legal fiction. It provides tax shelter and immunity from jurisdiction of authorities in East St. Louis….
“Nobody in East St. Louis,” Ahmed says, “has ever had the clout to raise a protest. Why Americans permit this is so hard for somebody like me, who grew up in the real Third World, to understand….
“I’m from India. In Calcutta this would be explicable, perhaps. I keep thinking to myself, ‘My God! This is the United States!’”…
“The ultimate terror for white people,” Ahmed says, “is to leave the highway by mistake and find themselves in East St. Louis as a nightmare. The nightmare to me is that they never leave that highway so they never know what life is like for all the children here. They ought to get off that highway. The nightmare isn’t in their heads. It’s a real place. There are children living here.”…
“The land between the two main bridges and along the river is regarded as prime real estate by white developers. Given the fantastic view of the St. Louis skyline and the Gateway Arch, the land would be immensely valuable if its black residents could be removed. When people ask, ‘What should we do with East St. Louis?’ they don’t speak about the people. They are speaking of the land.”…
In very few cases, in discussing the immiseration of this city, do Illinois officials openly address the central fact, the basic evil, of its racial isolation. With more efficient local governance, East St. Louis might become a better managed ghetto, a less ravaged racial settlement, but the soil would remain contaminated and the schools would still resemble relics of the South post-Reconstruction. They might be a trifle cleaner and they might perhaps provide their children with a dozen more computers or typewriters, better stoves for cooking classes, or a better shop for training future gas station mechanics; but the children would still be poisoned in their bodies and disfigured in their spirits.
Now and then the possiblity is raised by somebody in East St. Louis that the state may someday try to end the isolation of the city as an all-black entity. This is something, however, that no one with power in the state has ever contemplated. Certainly, no one in government proposes bussing 16,000 children from this city to the nearby schools of Bellevue, Fairview Heights or Collinsville; and no one intends to force these towns to open up their neighborhoods to racially desegregated and low-income housing. So there is, in fact, no exit for these children. East St. Louis will likely be left just as it is for a good many years to come: a scar of sorts, an ugly metaphor of filth and overspill and chemical effusions, a place for blacks to live and die within, a place for other people to avoid when they are heading for St. Louis.
