Sam Fox School to host symposium exploring race, segregation in St. Louis
2025-03-07 • Sam Fox School
St. Louis’s City Plan Commission photograph, “Back view of multi-family residences in Mill Creek Valley,” 1956 (Missouri Historical Society).
The Sam Fox School will host a symposium exploring the urban experience of race and segregation in St. Louis April 11-12, 2025. The Material World of Modern Segregation: St. Louis in the Long Era of Ferguson II expands on a research project led by Professor Iver Bernstein in Arts & Sciences and Assistant Professor Heidi Aronson Kolk in the Sam Fox School.
The symposium is the second phase in a research project that began in 2017 with a conference Bernstein and Kolk organized for WashU’s American Culture Studies program. Those conversations grew into a book-length collection of essays from more than a dozen contributors, “The Material World of Modern Segregation: St. Louis in the Long Era of Ferguson,” published by WashU as a special issue of The Common Reader. The book delves into racial histories of specific public sites in St. Louis — the Eads Bridge, Delmar Boulevard, Mill Creek Valley, and more. “We wanted to strike a balance between storytelling, site-based exploration, and serious historical analysis,” Kolk shared in a 2022 interview.
The Material World of Modern Segregation. The cover photograph, by Arthur Witman, depicts the intersection of 19th Street and Division in 1954. Much of the surrounding area was later cleared for public housing.
Following publication, the project was awarded a collaborative seed grant from the university to put towards staging the 2022 symposium and a future edited volume. This second phase aims to explore how segregation plays out behind closed doors and how Black St. Louisans have come to understand their own politics in the private sphere.
The symposium, which is open to the WashU community, will host more than a dozen scholars and guests from collaborating fields, including a keynote address from Rhae Lynn Barnes, assistant professor of American cultural history at Princeton University. Participants will present work-in-progress essays on sites of segregation in St. Louis, followed by group discussion and feedback.
Speakers and sessions will be shared in the coming weeks.