FOR DIGNITY AND POWER: Black Women’s Political Leadership in Postwar St. Louis

Abstract

Abstract St. Louis was not only one of the most segregated cities in the twentieth century, but it was also a major hub of organized resistance led especially by Black women. The Gateway City was a crucible for the emergence of Black women’s leadership in the post-World War II period. A mid-sized border city, St. Louis was a point of regional confluence. Its relatively small Black population, rigid lines of racial demarcation in jobs and housing, and the local Black freedom movement that centered on working-class interests all factored into Black women’s formal political leadership of mainstream civil rights institutions in St. Louis, where they held considerable public voice. From the 1940s to early 1980s in St. Louis, Pearl S. Maddox, Marian Oldham, DeVerne Calloway, Jean King, and Ora Lee Malone fought locally to expose and ameliorate the structural causes of racialized poverty. Leading campaigns for jobs, decent working conditions, affordable housing, state-based economic protections, living wages, welfare rights, and unfettered Black access to urban space and the consumer marketplace, women activists were key architects of freedom agendas. They pushed political progress not only in civil rights organizations but also in unions and state government, as they addressed the compounding impact of urban inequality in postwar America.