Rare daguerreotype offers insight into urban slavery

Rare daguerreotype

On October 11, 2011 the Community Times reported: The rare tintype of Baltimore slave Martha Ann “Patty” Atavis and Alice Lee Whitridge, the young girl she cared for, was probably taken in 1860.

The Maryland Historical Society acquired at auction recently a rare daguerreotype of Baltimore slave, Martha Ann "Patty" Atavis, and a tintype of the same woman holding Alice Lee Whitridge, the daughter of Dr. John Whitridge of Baltimore.

The items are from circa 1845-1860. The photographs and supporting documents illuminate the realities of urban slavery in Baltimore during the Civil War era.

"This acquisition is incredibly important for the Maryland Historical Society and will further help us understand urban slavery in Baltimore," Mark Letzer, of the Maryland Historical Society, said in a statement.

Letzer acquired the images for the museum at the Crocker Farm Auction House in Sparks.

About 5 percent of slaves lived in urban areas at the eve of the Civil War, according to the historical society. In Baltimore, that totaled about 5,000, with two thirds of them being women. Most of the women were in domestic service like Atavis. She stayed in the service of the same family until her death a decade after the abolition of slavery.

The pictures will be on display in the Maryland Historical Society library starting, Wednesday, Oct. 12, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday. (source: The Community Times)

The Daguerreotype

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre invented the daguerreotype process in France. The invention was announced to the public on August 19, 1839 at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. American photographers quickly capitalized on this new invention, which was capable of capturing a "truthful likeness." Daguerreotypists in major cities invited celebrities and political figures to their studios in the hopes of obtaining a likeness for display in their windows and reception areas. They encouraged the public to visit their galleries, which were like museums, in the hope that they would desire to be photographed as well. By 1850, there were over 70 daguerreotype studios in New York City alone.

Popularity of the daguerreotype declined in the late 1850s when the ambrotype, a faster and less expensive photographic process, became available. A few contemporary photographers have revived the process.

The Cameras

The earliest cameras used in the daguerreotype process were made by opticians and instrument makers, or sometimes even by the photographers themselves. The most popular cameras utilized a sliding-box design. The lens was placed in the front box. A second, slightly smaller box, slid into the back of the larger box. The focus was controlled by sliding the rear box forward or backwards. A laterally reversed image would be obtained unless the camera was fitted with a mirror or prism to correct this effect. When the sensitized plate was placed in the camera, the lens cap would be removed to start the exposure.

(source: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/daghtml/dagdag.html)

Beautiful Wilmington, North Carolina Landmarks Built With Slave Labor

Thalian Hall Wilmington, NC

The Star News article"Civil War Anniversary - Traces of slavery still found in Wilmington," by Ben Steelman on 31 August 2011: When North Carolina seceded from the Union in 1861, nearly half of Wilmington's residents weren't consulted on the issue.

Out of a population of 9,552 in the 1860 federal census, 3,777 of those living in Wilmington were slaves. Another 573 were listed as "free persons of color," but African Americans were not allowed to vote in antebellum North Carolina, nor could they hold office.

And how did those slaves live?

Thalian Hall/City Hall, Wilmington, North Carolina

"Well, we can guess they worked long hours," said Gareth Evans, executive director of the Bellamy Mansion Museum at Fifth Avenue and Market Street. "There was lots of scrubbing, lots of emptying chamber pots, lots of toting water."

A century and a half after the Civil War, traces of the legacy of slavery can still be found in Wilmington.

Thalian Hall Wilmington, NC

Many of those traces can be found in some of its most impressive public buildings, such as the Thalian Hall/City Hall complex or the Bellamy Mansion itself.

Both of these structures were largely built by slave and free black labor by skilled craftsmen such as William B. Gould, a plasterer, or Abraham H. Galloway, a bricklayer who pocketed his own wages and paid his owner, Brunswick County planter Thomas Hankins, $15 per month.

Thalian Hall Wilmington, NC

"I remember the bricklayers, they was all colored," a former Wilmington slave recalled in a Depression-era interview for the federal Works Progress Administration and later compiled in George P. Rawick's "American Slave."

"The man that plastered the City Hall was named George Price, he plastered it inside. The men that plastered the City Hall outside, and put those columns up in front, their names was Robert Finey and William Finey, they both was colored. …

Thalian Hall/City Hall

"Yes'm they was slaves, mos' all the fine work 'round Wilmington was done by slaves. They called 'em artisans. None of 'em could read, but give them any plans, and they could follow them to the las' line."

Over at the Bellamy Mansion, now cased in glass, is palpable proof of the contributions. Some years ago, repairs revealed a piece of plaster with the florid signature of William B. Gould, the man who did the work.

Born in 1837, the son of an English father and a slave mother, Gould was a slave belonging to Nicholas Nixon, who owned a large plantation in what is now Porters Neck.

Bellamy Mansion Museum at Fifth Avenue and Market Street

Like many of the Wilmington slaves, however, Gould enjoyed considerably more liberty than slaves who were working on the rice plantations along the Cape Fear River or one of the "turpentine orchards" of the pine forests nearby.

Slaves in the building trades could, in effect, rent themselves out, usually in contracts that ran from the first of the year to the last. They gave their owners a share of what contractors paid them and kept the rest.

In some cases, if a slave was hardworking and lucky enough, he could save enough money to buy his own freedom and that of his family – if his owner would take the payment.

Rear View of the Bellamy Mansion, Wilmington, North Carolina

Still, life was not idyllic, even for these workmen. Slaves were closely scrutinized by the local law. Each night, a bell in the old Market House at the foot of Market Street tolled, signaling the curfew for the slaves.

In 1857, the 20-year-old bricklayer Abraham H. Galloway smuggled himself aboard a ship and sailed to freedom in the North. He could not make his payments to his master, Hankins, and apparently feared he would be shipped off to tougher work or sold to a meaner master, according to his biographer, historian David Cecelski.

Born in 1837 in Smithville (now Southport), Galloway, like Gould, had been the son of a white man, a Brunswick planter's son, and a slave woman. Wilmington would hear from him again.

Bellamy Mansion

In 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, Gould would escape as well. On the night of Sept. 21, he and seven other slaves slipped down to the riverfront, stole a small boat and began to row down the Cape Fear.

On a voyage that took a couple of days, hiding in the swamps by day, the eight slaves made their way down the Cape Fear River and out to sea, where they reached the Navy vessel USS Cambridge, which was part of the blockade of Wilmington.

Gould promptly enlisted in the U.S. Navy, serving for the rest of the war. He kept a journal of his wartime service, later published as "Diary of a Contraband" in 2002 by Stanford University Press. ("Contraband" was a Civil War term for an escaped slave.)

Urban Slave Quarters At The Bellamy Mansion In Wilmington, North Carolina

North Carolina forbade the teaching of slaves to read and write, but the law was widely ignored. Gould probably learned his letters in Sunday school at St. John's Episcopal Church, which he attended, said his great-grandson, William B. Gould IV, who edited the journals.



Not all Wilmington slaves, of course, were builders. At the Bellamy Mansion, Dr. John D. Bellamy and his family kept nine slaves: seven women, who worked as cooks and maids, and two men, Guy the butler and Tony the coachman who doubled as a handyman, according to Evans.



The women lived in a two-story brick dormitory building behind the house, apparently joined from time to time by the slaves of guests. (The slave quarters had a total of 10 privies, Evans noted.) Guy and Tony lived above the Bellamy stable, which is now the museum's visitors' center.

Slave Quarters Interior

The Spartan slave quarters are currently being restored with funding from a federal grant. Evans hopes the project can be completed by the end of the year.



Gould was not the only slave to leave a written account. James Johnson, born in 1847 in Smithville (Southport), was sold to a succession of Brunswick county boat builders and planters. He worked as a hostler (i.e., a stable groom), a field hand and as a coachman.



In a 15-page narrative, he recalled going out on Sundays "into the fields (to) scare the birds from the Indian corn and rice."



Life was tougher on the plantations. Johnson vividly recalled how his master tied him to a tree trunk and "flogged me until the blood streamed down my back, and then ordered some of the other Negroes to wash me in salt and water in order to cure my lacerated back as soon as possible."

Plantation Slave Quarters

As the Civil War broke out, Johnson noted that food grew more scarce. In the summer of 1862, like Gould, Johnson and some of his friends stole a boat and made their way to the Union blockader USS Stars and Stripes.

He made his way to England, working as a sailor and a boxer until he underwent a religious conversion. Later he traveled as an evangelist, leaving a written account of his life that Cecelski and Alex Meekins discovered in archives in Oldham, England.

After the war, Gould moved to Massachusetts, where he prospered as a building contractor and became active in the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans' organization. He died in 1923, having seen all six of his sons serve in the armed forces in the Spanish-American War or World War I.

Bellamy Mansion Negro House c. 1859

Galloway's life was perhaps the most amazing. During the Civil War, he returned to North Carolina. Based in Union-occupied New Bern, he served as a Union spy and as a sometime recruiter of ex-slaves for the Union Army. After the war, he returned to Wilmington, where he became active in the Republican Party. He represented New Hanover County in the state's 1868 constitutional convention, then served in the state Senate until his death in 1870. Cecelski is currently writing a full-length biography of Galloway for the University of North Carolina Press, due for publication in 2012. (source: Star News, Ben Steelman, 31 Aug. 2011)

Sundown Towns, USA

The Washington Post article,"Darkness at the Edge of Town," by Laura Wexler, author of "Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America." reviews James Loewen's book Sundown Towns. Laura Wexler writes: In Oct. 2001, James W. Loewen stopped at a convenience store in the small Illinois town of Anna -- a name that, as a store clerk confirmed, stands for "Ain't No Niggers Allowed."

On Nov. 8, 1909, nearly a century before Loewen stepped into the store, a mob of angry white citizens drove out Anna's 40 or so black families following the lynching in a nearby town of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Anna became all-white literally overnight, Loewen reports, and embraced racial exclusiveness for the long haul. According to the 2000 census, just one family with a black member lives among Anna's 7,000 residents.

Anna is far from unique, as Loewen, a sociologist, argues in his powerful and important new book, Sundown Towns . On the contrary, Loewen reports that -- beginning in roughly 1890 with the end of Reconstruction and continuing until the fair-housing legislation of the late 1960s -- whites in America created thousands of whites-only towns, commonly known as "sundown towns" owing to the signs often posted at their city limits that warned, as one did in Hawthorne, Calif., in the 1930s: "Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Set On YOU In Hawthorne." In fact, Loewen claims that, during that 70-year period, outside the traditional South, "probably a majority of all incorporated places [in the United States] kept out African Americans."

Such a bold claim would seem to require an exact count of sundown towns to back it up. But Loewen admits that the challenges of uncovering and confirming the existence of each sundown town -- when everything from census figures to local histories proved misleading -- limited his ability to nail down an exact figure. Instead, he writes, "I believe at least 3,000 and perhaps as many as 15,000 independent towns went sundown in the United States, mostly between 1890 and about 1930."

This vagueness, along with Loewen's almost evangelical passion for his material, raises questions of credibility -- or at least of potential overstatement. But Loewen expertly dodges those accusations. He devotes almost an entire chapter to explaining his research -- detailing his rationale for defining sundown towns, laying out his statistical methods and revealing how he triangulated oral history, written sources and census data to arrive at a "confirmation." So when he reports that he's personally verified the existence of roughly 1,000 sundown towns between 1890 and 1930, you believe him. And because he pairs that finding with an analysis of the history, causes and patterns of sundown towns that shows that they were, in many ways, as logical -- and often as violent -- an outgrowth of American racism as lynching, he ultimately makes a strong case that sundown towns were a significant feature of the American landscape. As is often the case when the subject is race, the relative lack of hard evidence ultimately becomes part of the story, rather than a hindrance to it.

As in Anna, whites in about 50 towns used mob violence to expel and keep out African Americans, and many more relied on the threat of violence, Loewen reports. Some towns, he writes, passed "legal" ordinances banning hiring blacks or renting or selling them homes; others relied on citizens to pay informal visits to warn visiting African Americans that they "must not remain in the town." In 1960, the press reported that realtors in Grosse Pointe, Mich., had conceived of an altogether more clinical way to insure racial exclusivity: a "point system" used to assess a potential buyer's eligibility that included a rating for swarthiness.

Often, Sundown Towns argues, a community used a variety of methods in order to remain all-white through the years. To demonstrate this, Loewen charts the course of segregation in Wyandotte, Mich.: In the early 1870s, whites there drove out a black barber; in 1881 and 1888, they expelled the town's black hotel workers; in 1907, four white men beat and robbed a black man at the train station; nine years later, a mob of white townspeople "bombarded" a boardinghouse, driving out all the African Americans and killing one. "In the 1940s," Loewen writes, "police arrested or warned African Americans for 'loitering suspiciously in the business district' or being in the park, and white children stoned African American children in front of Roosevelt High School." In the early 1950s, a University of Pennsylvania professor who grew up in Wyandotte told him, all the members of a black family who moved into town ended up dead.

If Loewen's first priority is to unveil what he calls the "hidden history" of sundown towns, his second is to debunk the widely held idea that when the issue is race, the South is always "the scene of the crime," as James Baldwin famously wrote. The incidence of sundown communities in the South, Loewen reports, was actually far lower than it was in a Midwestern state such as Illinois, in which roughly 70 percent of towns were sundown towns in 1970. "This does not make whites in the traditional South less racist than [those] in . . . other regions of the country," he suggests.

With the rise of the automobile, among other things, came the birth of sundown suburbs. In 1909, Loewen reports, Chevy Chase, Md., became one of the nation's first after the owner of the Chevy Chase Land Company sued a developer to whom it had sold a parcel of land because of rumors that he planned to build affordable housing for African American workers. The company ultimately prevented the development, and the land sat vacant for decades before becoming home to Saks Fifth Avenue, its current resident. No doubt, the owner of the Chevy Chase Land Company would approve of the suburb's current racial makeup; in 2000, Loewen writes, "its 6,183 residents included just 18 people living in families with at least one African American householder." But even that isn't white enough anymore, Loewen charges: Whites are increasingly fleeing nearly all-white suburbs for lily-white exurbs, adding sprawl to the already numerous economic, psychological and sociological tolls of residential segregation.

Much has been written about the history of segregation within American cities, but this is the first full-length study of places that sought to exclude African Americans entirely. Loewen's desire to be exhaustive is therefore understandable. But in this case, exhaustive sometimes means exhausting. The book would have been more enjoyable to read had Loewen focused in depth on a few representative sundown towns, teasing out the history and sociology of the phenomenon in a more narrative, less textbook-like form.

That said, for its meticulous research and passionate chronicling of the complex and often shocking history of whites-only communities, Sundown Towns deserves to become an instant classic in the fields of American race relations, urban studies and cultural geography. After reading it, you'll view your own community, and the whole of the American landscape, more suspiciously -- and rightly so.

*source: Washington Post, by Laura Wexler is the author of "Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America.")

Click here to watch on CSPAN TV

James Loewen talked about his book Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, published by New Press. The book chronicled the history of towns and neighborhood that were closed to African-Americans. The author pointed out that most of these towns outside of the traditional South in the states of Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. Professor Loewen explained that "Sundown Towns" used policemen, fire, bricks, and signs to force blacks out of the suburbs and into the ghettos. He asserted that although the tactics to exclude blacks may not be as blatant, these towns are still very much in existence. Following his presentation, Professor Loewen responded to questions and comments from members of the audience.

SUNDOWN TOWNS

A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

By James W. Loewen

New Press. 562 pp. $29.95

Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit

The Origins of the Urban Crisis:Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, by Thomas J. Sugrue from ("The Origins of the Urban Crisis," Thomas J. Sugrue, 2005)

Detroit's journey from urban heyday to urban crisis has been mirrored in other cities across the nation. Scenes of devastation and poverty are disturbingly familiar to anyone who has traveled through the streets of America's Rust Belt, the northeastern and midwestern cities that formed the backbone of American industrial might a half-century ago. The urban crisis is jarringly visible in the the shattered storefronts and fire-scarred apartments of Chicago's South and West Sides; the rubble-strewn lots of New York's Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and South Bronx; the surreal vistas of abandoned factories along the waterfronts and railways of Cleveland, Gary, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Saint Louis; the boarded-up and graffiti-covered houses of Camden, Baltimore, and Newark. Rates of poverty among black residents of these cities all range from 25 to 40 percent. With a few exceptions, all have witnessed a tremendous loss in manufacturing jobs and the emergence of a low-wage service sector. Almost all of these cities, as Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton have argued, "have large ghettos characterized by extreme segregation and spatial isolation." The faces that appear in the rundown houses, homeless shelters, and social agencies in these urban wastelands are predictably familiar. Almost all are people of color.2 ("The Origins of the Urban Crisis," Thomas J. Sugrue, 2005)

Central-city residence, race, joblessness, and poverty have become inextricably intertwined in postindustrial urban America. In the post-World War II period, patterns of class and racial segregation in large northern cities have persisted and hardened. Poor people have become increasingly isolated in neighborhoods with large numbers of other poor people. A growing number of urban residents, especially young African Americans, find themselves detached from the mainstream economy, often outside the labor market altogether. Unemployment and poverty are certainly not new features of American urban life.

The bleak depictions of life in turn-of-the-century America offered by observers such as Jacob Riis and Robert Hunter offer powerful reminders of a troubled past. But the forms and distribution of postindustrial urban poverty are novel. In previous periods of American history, poverty and unemployment were endemic, but poor people did not experience the same degree of segregation and isolation as exists today. And in the past, most poor people were active, if irregular, participants in the labor market.3 ("The Origins of the Urban Crisis," Thomas J. Sugrue, 2005)

Why the transformation of Detroit and other major Northern cities from magnets of opportunity to reservations for the poor? What was it that turned America's former industrial centers into economic backwaters, abandoned by manufacturers? What explains the high rates of joblessness among the urban poor? Why has discrimination by race persisted in both urban neighborhoods and workplaces? What explains the emergence of persistent, concentrated, racialized poverty in Rust Belt cities? Explanations abound for these questions, particularly in the large literature on the urban "under-class," the most influential body of scholarship to emerge on urban problems in twenty-five years. The "underclass" debate has moved in three--sometimes overlapping--directions. The first, and most influential, focuses on the behavior and values of the poor, and the role of federal social programs in fostering a culture of joblessness and dependency in inner cities.

A variant, going back to the work of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and E. Franklin Frazier, emphasizes the role of family structure and unwed pregnancy in perpetuating inequality.4 A second offers structural explanations for inequality and urban poverty. Proponents of structural explanations tend to divide among those who point to the effects of economic restructuring (following William Julius Wilson) and those who emphasize the continuing significance of racial discrimination (following Gary Orfield and Douglas Massey).5 A third explanation focuses on politics, emphasizing the marginalization of cities in American social policy, particularly in the aftermath of the urban unrest and racial conflict of the 1960s. The "excesses" of Black Power and the rise of affirmative action fueled white suburbanization and justified a newfound white backlash against the urban poor. Implicit in this analysis is a contrast between the booming postwar years and the troubled post-1960s years, urban heyday versus urban crisis.6 ("The Origins of the Urban Crisis," Thomas J. Sugrue, 2005)

Recent scholarship has identified important elements of the contemporary urban crisis. But what is largely missing from the "underclass" debate is the perspective of history. My examination of Detroit in the quarter-century after World War II suggests that the origins of the urban crisis are much earlier than social scientists have recognized, its roots deeper, more tangled, and perhaps more intractable.

No one social program or policy, no single force, whether housing segregation, social welfare programs, or deindustrialization, could have driven Detroit and other cities like it from their positions of economic and political dominance; there is no simple explanation for the inequality and marginality that beset the urban poor. It is only through the complex and interwoven histories of race, residence, and work in the postwar era that the state of today's cities and their impoverished residents can be fully understood and confronted.7 ("The Origins of the Urban Crisis," Thomas J. Sugrue, 2005)

In the midst of these wrenching changes, economic inequality remained largely off the agenda of politicians and scholars. A few astute policymakers, like Senators Paul Douglas of Illinois and Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, recognized the corrosion beneath the facade of postwar prosperity. In the 1950s, they proposed legislation to shore up "depressed areas" of the nation. But their agenda remained on the fringes of postwar economic policy. Critics on the left, like Harvey Swados and C. L. R. James, recorded the travails of industrial workers for the few who cared to listen. The invisibility of economic hardship in the affluent age became visible in the shock that greeted the depictions of skid rows, black inner cities, and poverty-ridden Appalachian hollows in Michael Harrington's 1962 book, The Other America. Harrington and others identified a world that countless Americans already knew, but whose harsh realities barely penetrated the postwar veneer of consensus and civility.10("The Origins of the Urban Crisis," Thomas J. Sugrue, 2005)

Setting the boundaries of debates over the economic changes that beset Detroit and the Rust Belt were several currents in national politics. First, and most important, was antiradicalism. Anticommunists silenced some of the most powerful critics of the postwar economic and social order. Red-baiting discredited and weakened progressive reform efforts. By the 1950s, unions had purged their leftist members and marginalized a powerful critique of postwar capitalism. McCarthyism also put constraints on liberal critics of capitalism. In the enforced consensus of the postwar era, it became "un-American" to criticize business decisions or to interfere with managerial prerogative or to focus on lingering class inequalities in the United States.11("The Origins of the Urban Crisis," Thomas J. Sugrue, 2005)

Further limiting the political vision of policymakers and reformers in the postwar era were the conceptual tools that they used to grapple with questions of political economy. Three interrelated assumptions shaped economic and labor policy after World War II. First was the orthodoxy of neoclassical economics that interpreted the structural changes of the postwar era as temporary dislocations, and looked to national aggregate indicators of economic prosperity rather than to regional variations. Second was the emerging labor relations "manpower" theory that explained unemployment as the result of individual educational or behavioral deficiencies, and deemphasized the structural causes of joblessness. Third was a fundamental optimism about the capacity of the private sector to absorb surplus labor. The reality of rusting cities in the Northeast and Midwest challenged these orthodoxies, but those who bucked mainstream economic and labor market theory, or spoke pessimistically about the economy, remained on the political margins. The result is that urban economic decline in the postwar years has remained largely absent from historical accounts of the 1940s and 1950s.12("The Origins of the Urban Crisis," Thomas J. Sugrue, 2005)

The problems that beset Detroit were not solely economic. The fate of Northern industrial cities was fundamentally entangled with the troubled history of race in twentieth-century America. By 1960, a majority of America's African American population lived in cities, most of them north of the Mason-Dixon line. The steady loss of manufacturing jobs in northeastern and midwestern cities occurred at the same time that millions of African Americans migrated to the urban North, driven from the rural South by disruptions in the agricultural economy and lured by the promise of freedom and opportunity denied to them in Jim Crow's last, desperate days. The complex and pervasive racial discrimination that greeted black laborers in the "land of hope" ensured that they would suffer disproportionately the effects of deindustrialization and urban decline. For a large number of African Americans, the promise of steady, secure, and relatively well-paid employment in the North proved illusory.13("The Origins of the Urban Crisis," Thomas J. Sugrue, 2005)

"Cityscapes" Lecture Series: Thomas Sugrue

Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History

It began as a housing marvel. Two decades later, it ended in rubble. But what happened to those caught in between?

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells the story of the transformation of the American city in the decades after World War II, through the lens of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development and the St. Louis residents who called it home.

At the film’s historical center is an analysis of the massive impact of the national urban renewal program of the 1950s and 1960s, which prompted the process of mass suburbanization and emptied American cities of their residents, businesses, and industries.

Those left behind in the city faced a destitute, rapidly de-industrializing St. Louis , parceled out to downtown interests and increasingly segregated by class and race.

The residents of Pruitt-Igoe were among the hardest hit. Their gripping stories of survival, adaptation, and success are at the emotional heart of the film. The domestic turmoil wrought by punitive public welfare policies; the frustrating interactions with a paternalistic and cash-strapped Housing Authority; and the downward spiral of vacancy, vandalism and crime led to resident protest and action during the 1969 Rent Strike, the first in the history of public housing.

And yet, despite this complex history, Pruitt-Igoe has often been stereotyped. The world-famous image of its implosion has helped to perpetuate a myth of failure, a failure that has been used to critique Modernist architecture, attack public assistance programs, and stigmatize public housing residents.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth seeks to set the historical record straight. To examine the interests involved in Pruitt-Igoe’s creation. To re-evaluate the rumors and the stigma. To implode the myth.

Public housing has a bad name.

Although the reasons for this are complex, a few widely publicized housing projects have created a lasting negative impression in the minds of many Americans. One such project is the Pruitt-Igoe public housing development in St. Louis, Missouri. A famous image, circulated worldwide, of the implosion of one of Pruitt-Igoe’s buildings has come to symbolize the failure of government-sponsored housing and, more broadly, government-sponsorship at large.

Completed in 1954, the 33 11-story buildings of Pruitt-Igoe were billed as the solution to the overcrowding and deterioration that plagued inner city St. Louis. Twenty years later, the buildings were leveled, declared unfit for habitation.

What happened in Pruitt-Igoe has fueled a mythology repeated in discussions of many urban high-rise projects. Violence, crime, and drugs, so the story goes, plagued the housing project from nearly the beginning as it became a “dumping ground” for the poorest city residents. According to one standard account, it was quickly torn apart by its residents who could not adapt to high-rise city life.

Widely circulated images of “Pruitt-Igoe” reveal this legacy. Vandalized hallways. Acres of broken windows. A building imploded. These images of destruction are periodically interrupted by images of a different kind: hopeful images of a massive, newly-built housing complex in the mid-fifties, the scale and grandeur of the buildings reflecting the optimistic spirit out of which Pruitt-Igoe came.

The quick, unexamined transition from hope to disillusionment is the standard structure of the Pruitt-Igoe narrative. But there is another Pruitt-Igoe story, another approach.

It is a story of a city and its residents. A city in many ways at the forefront of postwar urban decline. In the years of Pruitt-Igoe, St. Louis lost half of its population and most of its prestige in less than a generation. An analysis of Pruitt-Igoe has to begin in this milieu, and yet it so rarely does.

A more thorough examination of Pruitt-Igoe should take into account the ways in which public housing was used as a tool of racial segregation and as a justification for the clearance of poor and working-class neighborhoods. It should look at the dominant culture of the time, which stressed uniformity and “hygiene” in the domestic sphere, political life, and neighborhood composition. It should question the priorities of the legislation that created large-scale public housing but failed to adequately fund it.

The individual stories of the residents’ struggles and successes have almost universally been ignored; the texture of life in the projects too often reduced to melodrama. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth has, at its heart, the experiences of its residents, adding a human face to a subject that has become so depersonalized.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells of a declining city; a suburbanizing nation; a changing urban economy; a hope for the future; and residents who fought back in their own ways, refusing to be passive victims of these larger forces aligned against them.

The documentary has two goals. One is to inform and enhance the ongoing debate over public housing and government welfare programs. The film uses Pruitt-Igoe as a lens through which a larger story about affordable housing and the changing American city can be viewed. It untangles the various arguments about what went wrong in Pruitt-Igoe and dispels the over-simplifications and stereotypes that turned Pruitt-Igoe into a symbol of failure. Second, the film illustrates how conclusions are dangerously and erroneously drawn when powerful interests control debate.

History is a contested space. .Arguments become flattened, rather than expanded, available evidence discarded, rather than sought.

This is why Pruitt-Igoe matters – why we made this documentary. So much of our collective understanding of cities and government and inequality are tied up in these 33 high-rise buildings, informed by the demolition image. Too much of the context has been overlooked, or willfully ignored, in discussions of public housing, public welfare, and the state of the American city.

Children in a clean tidy kitchen

It’s time to get the facts straight and present the Pruitt-Igoe story in a way that will implode the myths and the stigma. Pruitt-Igoe needs to be remembered and understood in a different way than it has been.

The city will change again, and affordable housing will continue to be an issue. When that happens, the complex lessons of Pruitt-Igoe must be remembered by society and by the architects, developers, and public officials we will task with solving future housing issues.

Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History