The Longest Day

The Fairgrounds Park race riot of 1949 has been forgotten, just as racism in St. Louis continues to be denied

A A A Comments (0) By Eddie Silva Wednesday, Mar 20 2002

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The summer after the Fairgrounds Park riot, 1950, a federal court ordered St. Louis pools to integrate. Newspaper photos show African-Americans again being trailed by a mob of whites, but this time a troop of policemen follow every step of the way. Don Clooney remembers that things settled down after a while and, by the end of the summer, blacks and whites swam together at Fairgrounds Park without incident.

The joys of that summer were short-lived, though, as the underlying forces of racism pulled people apart, leaving a city abandoned, a people divided.

Craig LaRotonda

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"Whites moved out," says Seay matter-of-factly -- and they took the dream of integration with them.

More than 50 years ago, in the wake of the Fairgrounds Park race riot, the Star-Timespublished an editorial: "The older middle-class white families move to the county. Negroes move in. The frontier of contact between whites and Negroes spreads. If this frontier is not made a training ground for fair living together, it will become a battleground for racial conflict."