Tag: Long Form

Inside the Missouri Tribe That Has Made White People Millions

Before the $300 million national scandal, the civil rights lawsuit and the accusations of fraud, the Northern Cherokee Nation meant something in St. Louis. It used to mean money.

Instead, it is March 14, and some 200 miles west of the city, just outside the rural town of Clinton, the blue roof of the Northern Cherokee Nation’s headquarters appears on the horizon like a colorful aberration amid the green farmland. A sign proclaims the tribe’s purported founding date: March, 1755.

Cars and trucks pull into the gravel parking lot at the tribal complex. Some of these tribal citizens have driven hundreds of miles to attend the council meeting. They arrive in regalia, dressed in ribbon shirts, feathers, beads and bone; their hair is braided, their wrists decorated with wampum.

Kenn “Grey Elk” Descombes, the tribe’s chief, greets each arrival in a booming voice as they sign the guest book. His ribbon shirt is a rich and dense pattern of purple, and he wears multiple necklaces of bone and dangled ornaments.

Descombes is a large man with a large presence. Surrounded by his citizens, the chief conjures a seemingly endless stream of tribal stories, tangents and legends about his people’s travails in Missouri.

As the small crowd mingles, Descombes leads me toward a back office that’s almost as large as the main meeting hall. We come to a wall lined with file cabinets.

Inside each drawer, he says, are “hundreds of pounds” of documents, themselves only a portion of the “thousands of pounds” of secret genealogical records scattered across vaults. He says files prove — despite denouncements from federally recognized Cherokee tribes and genealogy experts — that the citizens of Northern Cherokee Nation descend from groups which had once covered what is now the southeastern states, the same bands that were forcibly removed from their land, marched through the Trail of Tears and resettled in Oklahoma.

Only, according to the Northern Cherokee Nation, not all the Cherokee went to Oklahoma. These “lost” Cherokee chose to stay in Missouri, where they hid from government census-takers and refused to sign the registries created by later commissions.

As Descombes narrates, a tribal member comes into the office to tell him that the council meeting is nearly ready to start. She clips a long feather to the braid of graying hair that hangs to the center of his back.

“Now, your civilized people, they don’t believe in this kind of thing anymore,” he says. “They assimilate. They want to be quiet.”

Despite the circumstances, there are some aspects of civilization that Descombes and the Northern Cherokee have embraced. He acknowledges as much with a laugh.

“We’re going to have a modern government thing going on here,” he says as we exit the office. “Now, let’s go play white.”

DANNY WICENTOWSKI

Based in Clinton, the Northern Cherokee Nation claims that it is officially recognized in Missouri as a Native American tribe. It isn’t.

What are the circumstances of the Northern Cherokee Nation?

To hear Descombes explain it, the tribe has maintained “an unbroken line of chiefs” since the 1820s. He claims his own ancestry derives from Chickamauga Cherokee, a warrior clan which settled in Missouri and Arkansas and sided with the British during the American Revolutionary War.

But in the world of government contracts, the Northern Cherokee’s history isn’t nearly as important as its potential dollar value — one not derived from Northern Cherokee’s assets, or tradition, or historical authenticity, but from the access it supplies to companies seeking certification for lucrative “set aside” contracts reserved for minority-owned companies.

The potential earnings are enormous. Like a vault key, a Native American certification opens the door to local and state contracts. On the federal level, 5 percent of the government’s multibillion-dollar contractor budget is reserved for businesses owned by eligible minorities.

For years, that category included tribes such as the Northern Cherokee. Millions of dollars flowed to companies whose owners had merely supplied their tribal ID cards and claimed they’d encountered discrimination because of their minority status.

The web of money stretched coast to coast. In its unraveling, the first tug came from a pair of investigative reporters from the Los Angeles Times chasing a possible political scandal: In late 2018, they reported that William Wages, the brother-in-law of then-House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, had received more than $7 million in no-bid federal contracts for his California-based construction company — contracts he’d been awarded because the U.S. Small Business Administration certified his company as a minority-owned enterprise, or MBE, through his citizenship in the Northern Cherokee Nation.

But Wages is white. As reporters Paul Pringle and Adam Elmahrek detailed, “[an] examination of census, birth, death, marriage and other available public records show Wages’ ancestors were identified as white. He is listed as white on his birth certificate.”

The reporters went further, even hiring a Cherokee genealogist from the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, the largest of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes. Going back to the early 1800s, Wages’ ancestors didn’t show up on any membership rolls for the recognized Cherokee bands. All evidence showed his ancestry as white.

This first case — involving a company that had made millions on minority contracts, certification through a non-federally recognized tribe, and an owner whose ancestry lacked any documented Cherokee ancestors — led the reporters to chase the story across the country.

It led them to Missouri, where three self-professed Cherokee tribes — including the Northern Cherokee Nation — had accounted for more than $300 million in minority contracts awarded by the federal government and seventeen states.

The door had been opened in Missouri as well. Four companies were located in the greater St. Louis area, the fifth in Union. All had been certified as minority-owned in St. Louis through their memberships in the Northern Cherokee Nation.

There was Premier Demolition, owned by Bill Buell. He had been awarded a $311,000 contract in 2017 for clearing space for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in north city. Replaying the tactic from their first story, the L.A. Times investigative team hired a genealogist through the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma to look at Buell: The search showed his ancestors identified as white in census records.

There was also Global Environmental Inc., whose minority status led to more than $4 million in federal construction contracts. Census and death records showed company owner Vicky Dunn identified as white. Again, a genealogist with the Cherokee Heritage Center found no Cherokee ancestry.

Thanks to the inquiries from the L.A. Times, St. Louis officials saw the scandal coming. On June 6, 2019, the city board that regulates certifications for minority-owned businesses voted unanimously to decertify the five companies certified through the Northern Cherokee. They were CCI Environmental Inc., Global Environmental Inc., Premier Demolition Inc., D.W. Mertzke Excavating & Trucking, Inc. and Union-based Taylor Electrical Service.

Three weeks later, the L.A. Times dropped its bombshell report online. The story’s headline, “Claiming to be Cherokee, contractors with white ancestry got $300 million,” alleged widespread fraud and government incompetence. The story described an abandoned regulation and a system hijacked by minority contractors with white ancestry. The result was “a major failure in the nation’s efforts to help disadvantaged Americans.”

The lead photo of the story showed a man in a ribbon shirt, his neck draped with feathers and beads, and the blue and red crescent of the Northern Cherokee Nation in the background.

That was how Chief Kenn “Grey Elk” Descombes became the face of a fake tribe scandal.

DANNY WICENTOWSKI

The Northern Cherokee Nation’s headquarters are filled with artifacts (like this “Hawaiian War Ax”) and other items that ostensibly support its identity as a Native American tribe.

While the L.A. Times had unraveled a nationwide failure in government oversight, what remained unexplored was a seemingly straightforward question: What did it actually mean to be part of the Northern Cherokee Nation?

Whether its citizens are sincere believers or accomplices to an elaborate fraud, the fact that the answers are tied up in a web of money and alleged tribal identity theft demanded further inquiry.

In a January 2020 phone call, the 68-year-old Descombes — a long-haul trucker by trade — dispenses scorn on the L.A. Times and dismisses the seriousness of the recent news coverage, which he calls “less than a little flattering.”

Despite the chief’s recent impression of “disparaging” reporters, he invites me to attend the next tribal council meeting.

And there I am, a couple months later, as Descombes and the six other members of the tribal council assemble before a crowd of seventeen citizens. (Less than a week has passed since Missouri confirmed its first coronavirus case, and I’m told that much of the usual crowd has stayed home amid the burgeoning pandemic.)

Just as Descombes suggested in the back office, the council meeting is a “modern government” sort of operation. It begins with the chief explaining the procedures of swearing in a new council speaker. Motions are made and seconded. Minutes are read.

Then, the attendees are asked to stand and remove their hats.

Descombes is a self-professed expert in the Cherokee language. (During the earlier tour in the office, he described growing up in a Cherokee-speaking home and said he’s spent 40 years translating traditional tribal prayers and rituals. As proof he produced a thick binder, stuffed with pages, which he identified as “the world’s biggest Cherokee dictionary.”)

Descombes addresses the citizenry. “I’ve translated a prayer here into English,” he says. Unfolding a sheet of paper, he begins to read: “My grandfather is a fire, the earth is my mother, the great spirit is my father.”

“The world stopped at my birth and lay itself at my feet.”

“I shall swallow the earth whole when I die.”

The prayer continues, moving through various objects of reverence. It hails the earth and fire, earth and wind, parents and grandparents, and finally the great spirit:

“Oh, great spirit, giver of my life,” Descombes intones, “please accept this humble offering of prayer, this offering of praise, this honest reverence of my love for you.”

The prayer concludes, and the meeting turns back to the tasks of modern government: There’s an update about the remaining payments left on the tribal complex, details of an upcoming visit by a Boy Scout troop and plans for the annual powwow scheduled for October, the centerpiece of the tribe’s calendar. There’s a call for donations to buy a Missouri state flag and solar lights. Mostly, it feels like a small-town city council meeting.

Weeks later, I type the words “My grandfather is a fire, the earth is my mother” into Google, and hit enter. I find the entire prayer, verbatim, in Facebook and Pinterest posts, as well as the first chapter of a 2014 romance novel titled Apache Moon available for purchase on Amazon. The same text appears on spirituality websites under the title “An Indian Prayer” as far back as 2001.

09/09/2020
Inside the Afterlife of South St. Louis Bars

By the time I taught my last class at Webster University in the summer of 2014, my burnout level had achieved an advanced stage. I was that French fry at the bottom of the container, a once-robust potato product now reduced to a sliver of darkened, crispy mystery. Somewhere in the course of seventeen years, things had gone very wrong, and it was time to change things up. That interior renewal came in the form of an email received earlier that year, as a civically well-connected neighbor told me of a bar that would be for sale soon, located on the corner of Magnolia and Arkansas avenues.

The place had long intrigued me, having been a longtime programmer at KDHX, which was then just a stone’s throw from the tavern. Before the place shut down in 1994, I slipped in a few times before an on-air shift and could well remember the basics of the place: a darkened tavern with a wooden hood over the backbar, a pool table on the small mezzanine level and an orange glow throughout. A basic workingman’s vibe was the memory, with the feeling of a spot that was well geared toward regulars and not young tourists.

Since bussing tables as a teen at O’Connell’s Pub in the 1980s, I’d spotted in bar and restaurant work alongside journalism and teaching. Once the latter “career” hit the end days by 2014, the appeal of a locked-away bar seven blocks from my house was too much. A small team was assembled, a pair of buildings were bought by one of the team members, and the spot opened after what felt like a forever wait of eight months. And only then did the real education in operating a bar begin. And it never let up.

With the last call of December 31, 2019, I planned to slide into a role at another bar being brought back from the dead in south city — this time as a manager rather than a co-owner. The idea was to open that place, then move on as operator to yet another dead bar, conveniently located next door. Dismissed from said project(s) about 75 minutes before signing HR paperwork, I began a nearly immediate, sometimes spastic search to find a new spot to hang my hat.

As any garden variety, life-changing experience can go, I’ve spent most of 2020 in a combination of excitement, education and anxiety; my factory setting comes with a default to over analysis. So, a quarter of the time, I long for my own space, while another quarter is wondering if I should just take on a job-job with another operation. The rest of my brain is an equal split between moving to New Orleans or wishing for a crack in the earth to emerge under my feet, delivering me to the nearest corner bar in the netherworld. Honestly, after touring well over a dozen buildings, researching as many more, cold-calling places, adapting thoughts on the fly and talking to potential investors, pop-up chefs and the generally curious, I’m kinda open to any of those four outcomes.

What follows is part travelogue, part nostalgia trip, part social experiment, part actual search for the perfect venue within the confines of the south side, from Highway 44 to the city limits, from South Broadway to Hampton Avenue.

In this process, I’ve realized that as a south citian for the majority of life, now a full three decades into being a legal-aged drinker, I’ve hit a lot of places over the years. A lot.

STATE STREET BLUES

Driving around offers a weird memory mix. There’s an electric company on Arsenal Street, out near the city limits, found in a little corner space. It used to be a bar called Waves. Why I can’t find my keys on a given morning but know this bit of trivia, I cannot say. There’s an intersection near my house, at Wyoming Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, where four corner bars were said to exist. In the 1990s I visited two of them (Corcoran’s and Miss Blues), and by then a third was shuttered, with signage still in the window. How can a city resident/fan not think about what the world was like when a single corner held that many saloons? And, once upon a time, there was a bar called Dave’s Den, somewhere in what’s now the 20th Ward, which featured an entire bar full of clown art. This doesn’t feel like a figment of the imagination, though I can’t find any quick proof it existed.

Driving the streets, the bars keep coming. There’s the old Frederick’s Music Lounge. Bernard’s Pub. The Foundry. Mom Pop’s. Big Drink #1. Space. Rock Island. Sandrina’s. AMP. Your Bar. The Office. Club Paladora. The Other Place. Frank’s First Alarm. Little Gam’s. The Blue Pearl. Somer’s. Mary’s Fine Food. The Double Bogey. And dozens more. It’s not a small list, with some empty and abandoned, some adapted into new uses, some flattened. To drive, bike or walk by them is to have a little shock of recognition, of a memorable night somewhere along the line.

TRENTON ALMGREN-DAVIS

There are new plans for The Outpost, last known as the Indian food pop-up Baba Xavi.

YEBBIT, YEBBIT, YEBBIT

When Mike Martz was the head coach of the St. Louis Rams, one of his more memorable press conferences had him dueling with the media, with Martz saying “yebbit, yebbit, yebbit” in response to repetitive questions, a play on the phrase “yeah, but.” For a lot of intents and purposes, the phrase “yeah, but” could be applied to any situation involving development in St. Louis. The phrase is almost a constant when it comes to businesses involving food, drink and nightlife.

Top Golf is considering a facility in midtown? “Yeah, but there’ll be light pollution.” The Foundry’s going to open? “Yeah, but it’ll just pull people from other, already operating locations.” There are some interesting bars for sale on Gravois? “Yeah, but cars travel too fast down that road, and no one would ever stop for a drink there.” Too much parking, a lack of parking, poor signage, a downward trajectory of a neighborhood, the presence of a rough or racist clientele — all of these things and more can cause stress and second guessing. (Let’s call it stress-guessing.)

Let’s loop back to Gravois Avenue. Three St. Louis taverns were featured in 2016 on Bar Rescue, one of the barrel-scraping reality shows of recent vintage, and one of the taverns would be renamed The Beechwood. It’s an impressive space, really, on the edge of Fox Park on Gravois. Going through the space, what is obvious is the cleanliness of it and the sheer size. There is a main barroom, a secondary bar behind a set of doors and a third bar in the basement. The show’s refurbishing of the rooms left a larger-than-normal kitchen, seating for dozens, large walk-ins for both food and drink … essentially, all the elements are in place. The “pro” side of the ledger felt fantastic, but a good-sized lease number had to be balanced against the hopes of a daily draw.

Toward the end, The Beechwood (closed for a couple years, save for a short-lived relaunch under new management in 2019) was like a lot of its south side kin: a day bar for the workingman. There are plenty of those types in and around south city. But this one’s bigger than most, brighter than most, newer than most. The systems, the barstools, the parking lot. So much tipping the “pro” side of the ledger that it sounds like someone is going to bite on a good opportunity.

My own internal “yebbit” was calling out. Gravois isn’t a walking block. Is the clientele from the nearby NexCore co-working space enough to provide a base of regulars? Can a bar so decorated in, quite literally, beechwood provide a more relaxed feel?

Sometimes you can’t help but have “yebbit” in your brain. It’s a St. Louis thing, doncha know?

03/04/2020
Weatherman Bob Richards’ Suicide 25 Years Ago Rocked St. Louis

Karen Foss was a little surprised. She’d just finished her usual 10 p.m. newscast on KSDK when the station’s chief meteorologist, Bob Richards, asked her to stop by the weather station.

“That was unusual,” Foss recalls. “And I was already very, very concerned about his demeanor — just the vibe he was giving off. He was obviously very upset and angry. But I’d seen him upset before; I’d seen him angry before.”

Richards had come to Foss in the past to discuss both personal and work issues, but they weren’t exactly close. A group dinner once, perhaps, but they didn’t socialize outside of work.

She went over to Richards’ workstation to talk. “I know there’ve been lies about you before in the community,” he said. “How did you deal with it?”

That set Foss back; it wasn’t what she was expecting to hear from the curly-haired weatherman.

“Bob, if what they’re saying is true — you know, you are so talented and so popular, I think you can get through this,” she told him. “If this is true, you probably need to say ‘I’m sorry’ and make amends. I think people will just forgive you because they all love you. We all make mistakes.

“He just wasn’t hearing it. He was just totally in denial,” Foss adds.

“It’s not true — this woman’s a liar,” Richards told her, and that was the end of the conversation. Foss got in her car and made the drive from Channel 5’s studio in downtown St. Louis to her home in Clayton. She was on Lindell Boulevard when she realized her hands were shaking so badly she couldn’t grasp the steering wheel.

She pulled over and collected herself.

“It had just been such a disturbing conversation,” Foss recalls. “He didn’t say anything about suicide. But he just was — I just felt like he was so out of touch with reality, that’s what I’m trying to say. I couldn’t handle it. I just stopped. Then went home, went to bed and early in the morning got this phone call. And then it all began to unravel.”

Bob Richards — born Robert Lloyd Schwartz in Bloomfield, New Jersey, in 1956 — arrived in St. Louis in October 1983. He’d never even seen the town when he flew in to interview with KSDK. He was hired that day. “I was pleasantly surprised that it had electricity and flushing toilets,” he joked later to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. After graduating from Penn State, Richards worked as a meteorologist in Atlanta; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Columbia, South Carolina; and joined the Weather Channel in Atlanta.

He met his future wife, Kathy, when he moved to Stamford, Connecticut, to do weather for the Satellite News Channel; she worked in the same building. SNC was the fledgling CNN’s first competitor: At one point, Richards was recording 21 forecasts a day to sate the 24-hour news cycle. Richards must have seen the writing on the wall, though — SNC folded after just sixteen months, two days after Richards was hired at KSDK to replace Dave Murray.

At the time, there were three news stations in St. Louis, and the majority of homes in town did not have cable or satellite television. The personalities of KSDK, KMOV (Channel 4) and KTVI (Channel 2) were written about often in who’s-who columns in the Post-Dispatch and were treated like out-and-out celebrities.

“St. Louis was very late to adapt or embrace cable TV,” says former KSDK cameraman Cecil Corbett. “You had three or four stations back then. You invite these people into your home, and there’s a certain level of trust — so [viewers] do kind of establish a connection with them.”

Before joining KSDK in 1979, Foss had worked at a station in Kansas City where there was not the same newscaster-as-celebrity culture.

“It was odd. I didn’t feel it was that way in Kansas City,” she says. “I felt very much like, ‘OK, I’m going to work, do my job and go home,’ just like the teacher, the bus driver, the checkout clerk, and in St. Louis there was a certain sense of celebrity attached, which kind of threw me for a loop. I was very surprised. And I think it was partially — not exactly created, but fanned by the gossip columns.”

Former Post-Dispatch and St. Louis Globe-Democrat columnist Jerry Berger was a big source of this, but both papers had local TV critics, which added to the high profile of on-air talent. Berger, who started his career in Hollywood, worked in public relations with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Liza Minelli and Cary Grant. He eventually came back to St. Louis and brought that movie biz sensibility with him, covering local characters’ comings and goings, often with a salacious angle. (Berger pleaded guilty in 2013 to first-degree sexual misconduct).

It was KSDK general manager Bill Bolster’s idea to pair Richards with the station’s new sportscaster, Mike Bush.

“Bill, for all his idiosyncrasies, really, on a gut level, understood television,” Foss says. “And he saw the potential of pairing Mike and Bob in this way, and he made it happen. And it worked.”

Bush joined KSDK in 1985. By the late ’80s, Bush and Richards became known for a series of commercials that Bolster sent them to Hollywood to film. The ads are pure ’80s cheese — you can find them on YouTube — and feature the duo in a variety of special-effects-aided situations. (Bush stopped responding to requests to be interviewed for this story.)

“The strategy is that both of them have strong personalities that mesh so well,” KSDK director of creative services Richard G. Brase told the Post-Dispatch ahead of the debut, noting that the silly ads wouldn’t damage their credibility the way they might Foss’ and Dick Ford’s, her on-air partner.

“In the spots, both television personalities do a spinoff of the Blues Brothers, called the ‘Kews Brothers.’ Brase said in excess of $100,000 was spent on production for the spots,” Berger reported, next to a huge black-and-white photo of Bush and Richards in full Blues Brothers gear. The goofy spots were instantly a topic of conversation around town.

“What is KSDK doing spending $100,000 on a promo? Second, did they have to spend the money out of town?” wrote Post-Dispatch reader Walt Lockley of Bridgeton to TV critic Eric Mink. “Third, if they had to spend the money out of town, how come they got back such a hackneyed, over-produced and self-congratulatory piece of [garbage]? … What makes me angriest is that KSDK pretends it is a serious news-gathering and news-reporting organization … but when it comes to attracting an audience, they trot out these two cartoonish clods. It makes me sick to my stomach.”

Dorothy Boyd of Collinsville, Illinois, disagreed.

“What’s wrong with having some fun? God knows the news is terrible and sometimes those giving the news and we, the viewers, need a break. Bob Richards and Mike Bush are believable with the weather and sports. A little clowning around certainly doesn’t hurt their reputations.”

The dynamic duo eventually became best known for being the local hosts of the Jerry Lewis MDA Labor Day Telethon, back when Jerry Lewis was still the host. Other local personalities would answer the phones and take donations while Bush and Richards appealed to the viewers.

Two years in a row, WKBQ disc jockeys Steve and D.C. (a.k.a. Steve Shannon and Isaiah Wilhelm) answered phones and appeared on air alongside the KSDK weatherman and sportscaster.

“Steve and I answered phones and then Bob and Mike would come over and talk to us,” Wilhelm recalls. “Off the air, we talked to them for a little bit, but that was the extent of how well we knew them.

“Mike was a little cold toward us because he was on a competing morning show at the time, but he was professional. Bob was the opposite. I think Bob was very outgoing and gregarious, and my impression of him was that he was the kind of guy that never met a stranger.”

Corbett, who joined KSDK in 1984 as a cameraman, had a similar initial impression of Richards. They began working together on “Weather on the Road” TV spots on Fridays, where they’d visit an out-of-the-way small town and do the weather on location.

“I would go out in advance in the satellite truck, and then [Richards] would come out — these were the ‘Mercedes ’80s’ — he would come out in the helicopter, and fly back and get ready for his ten o’clock show. We did that for a couple of summers, and got to be closer, because you’re out in the field, and I’d always set up something zany for him to do.”

The two became even closer after Richards took up aviation, a hobby he also shared with St. Louis radio host and personality Guy Phillips. Corbett remembers, in particular, an afternoon where he and Richards flew down to Sikeston and had lunch at Lambert’s Café, and Corbett let Richards take the controls for a while during the flight.

Phillips and Richards met when the latter first joined Channel 5; he was also hired as the morning weather guy on Phillips’ show on Y98.

VIA YOUTUBE

Bob Richards’ personality and sense of humor came out in the commercials he filmed for KSDK.

“He was a funny guy, and that came out on TV, especially when Mike Bush was introduced,” Phillips says. “[Richards] played accordion, nobody really knew that [at the time], so we started doing these things called ‘The Weather Raps’ — Bob would come up with these weather raps and he’d use his accordion. It was awfully funny.”

After going up in the air with Corbett and Phillips, Richards quickly earned his private pilot’s license, and he and Corbett started working together on their instruments certification, a process which requires a lot of trust between a pilot and his safety pilot. Corbett didn’t have his own plane, but Richards, with his 1980s on-air salary, bought a cherry red Piper Cherokee 180, which sped up his certification process. Richards was even the first pilot to take off at Spirit of St. Louis Airport after it reopened in October 1993 following the big flood.

“I think there was an element of trust [between us], but you can’t get in too much trouble at the Crawford County Fair — there’d be a tractor pull or a cow-milking contest, stuff like that,” Corbett says of their time traveling around for Channel 5. “That was Bob’s nature — he knew he had to keep ahead of the competition, and he was zany. He was fun. He loved meeting people. He’d descend out of the sky in this helicopter, and everybody would line up to say hi and take pictures. It was all quite cool, back when stations spent money on things like that.”

Longtime friend Karlee Stratton first met Richards on the set of a public service announcement in the late ’80s, where she was an extra. They sparked up a conversation between takes.

“He was just funny; he was always making a joke,” she says. “He was a very personable guy, but the main thing that you could really tell about him was that he had very low self-esteem. He was always kinda chucking himself. I don’t find it surprising. I think that a lot of people who are insecure overcompensate by doing something great, but it doesn’t fix what is wrong.”

Stratton says Richards tried to ask her out at first, but she could clearly see he was wearing a wedding ring. Instead, they became close friends over the next seven or so years.

“By all accounts he was happy,” Phillips says. “He had a young child, lived out in Grover, had a nice little house out there. His career was kicking into high gear, he was popular on the No. 1 TV station, he was popular on the No. 1 radio station — he had a lot going for him.”

Foss, Corbett, Phillips and Stratton all agree that they didn’t see Richards as any kind of ladies’ man at the time — sure, he was famous, but women weren’t particularly taken in by him.

In April 1989, the Post-Dispatch‘s At Home section did a feature on Richards’ new home in Grover (which has since been incorporated into Wildwood) with the headline, “Bob Richards Separates Business, Personal Life.” The story detailed the couple’s new build, filled with antiques and country-style decor and life with their two-year-old daughter, Tricia.

“I don’t like to live a celebrity lifestyle,” Richards told reporter Carolyn Olson. “Karen Foss is into that, and I’m not. I’m more of a homebody … I like to maintain a sense of separation as far as my TV job and my personal life.”

At the time, no one — not Richards’ friends or his colleagues — knew how truly he meant those words.

11/13/2019
How the St. Louis Six Escaped the Slaughterhouse: an Oral History

Even a cow knows his own mortality. Two years ago, six steers knew enough to notice an unchained gate at a St. Louis slaughterhouse. It may have been the only chance the St. Louis Six ever had, and they seized it — dashing through the city streets for hours in a desperate bid for freedom.

Or perhaps a cow in a slaughterhouse knows only its terror. Maybe, as a slaughterhouse employee later claimed to police, it was just the crash of a thunderstorm that startled the cows into their stampede.

On March 30, 2017, a city of fractious humans watched in awe as animals took to the streets. In a way, it was the St. Louis version of O.J. Simpson’s trip down the freeway in that white Bronco. A city was riveted by the slow-motion spectacle — and seemingly everybody was rooting for the cows.

Their apparent leader, nicknamed Chico, was a big reason for that. Even after others were picked off, Chico avoided capture at every turn, juking and twisting his massive-yet-nimble body through gaps in corrals, even shaking off police SUVs smashing into his flank in attempted pit-stop maneuvers.

Eventually, all six were captured, but St. Louis wasn’t willing to let these stars end their lives in the slaughterhouse. A host of different groups and individuals rose up overnight in multiple bids to keep the escapees from becoming someone’s dinner.

Now, almost exactly two years later, five of the six cows who wanted to live are doing just that, less than an hour away from the slaughterhouse from which they escaped. For the first time, more than a dozen people involved in the rescue are telling the complete story of what happened that day, its aftermath, as well as what happened to Spirit, the cow who didn’t make it.

Curiously, not one of the eyewitnesses to the escape interviewed for this story can recall the thunderstorm mentioned in the police report on the incident. They insist the day was clear. What they do recall from March 30, 2017, was not a thunderclap — only the sound of hooves pounding north-city cement.

COURTESY OF GENTLE BARN

Chico refused to be cornered, bursting through an iron fence and evading police for hours.

Act 1: Escape

Just after noon on March 30, 2017, six steers escaped the Star Packing Company, a slaughterhouse and butcher specializing in halal meats. They were the only beef stock in the pen, and they were to be killed.

Fate had other plans. According to a report by the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, an employee revealed the chain around the gate holding the steers within their pen “was not secure at the time.” The employee, the report continues, “stated he was standing outside the pen when a thunderstorm started. The storm spooked the steers and one of the steers kicked at the gate to the pen, causing the gate to open.” Police were quickly summoned.

Buck Ford, owner of Buck’s Towing, three blocks from the slaughterhouse: I was working here on the lot and I looked outside the gate, and I saw these, might have been four or five cows. I had my truck parked over there, and they was trying to squeeze through between the truck and my car. They messed up the side of my truck.

Jeffrey Smith, Buck’s employee: They totaled Buck’s truck on one side and kept on moving. … Man, it was crazy! I mean, it was fucking bulls running through the city of St. Louis! How often would you see that? I saw this one guy, he came running out of his yard with a clothesline, and he was trying to round them up.

David Carson, photographer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: We got a tip in the newsroom, it was [crime reporter] Christine Byers who got it from a contact that there were cows running around in north city. So we were trying to figure out where that was taking place, because by the time we’d heard about the cows, the cows had traveled a fair amount of distance. …. The police have encrypted their scanners, but every now and then something drops across. So I heard a little nugget come across the scanner, and it said [to] look for the cows up by a White Castle up in north city.

Smith: Me and a friend, we followed the cows all the way down to Maffitt and Vandeventer, and then they made a right. I followed them and they hit St. Louis Avenue, and they made a left at Grand. And then we followed them and they crossed Natural Bridge. The cows were so close to me, I patted a couple of them on the head, from out the truck window. … They took a break in the park and looked around, like, “What should we do next?” I guess the leader of the pack said, “Let’s run for it again.”

Carson: When I went over there, initially I thought I’d missed all the cows running through the streets and stuff. The police had a group of the cows pinned in, behind a chain-link fence. They had another one trapped in a backyard … people were standing around; a lot of people were smiling. It was a jovial thing, like, “Look at these cows out running around in the ‘hood!”

04/03/2019
The Long, Violent Fall of Tanning Mogul Todd Beckman

One morning, a federal prosecutor named John Davis was driving to his job at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in St. Louis when he looked in the rearview mirror of his Toyota Yaris and spotted a BMW flying up behind him on Interstate 64.

Davis eyed the luxury car as it grew larger and larger in the mirror. When it blazed past him, the driver was a blur, but he immediately noticed the name on the vanity license plate — TANCO.

“One of these days, I’m going to get that guy,” Davis said aloud.

For years, the career prosecutor had heard about Todd Beckman, the founder of a chain of tanning salons called TanCo. The perpetually bronzed CEO was a local success story, turning a tanning bed in the back of his father’s beauty parlor into a small empire that extended across more than a dozen states. He opened not just tanning salons but massage parlors and gyms. In the coming years, he would debut yet another concept — a line of hormone and supplement centers, offering aging men the promise of recapturing their youthful vigor.

It was a lifestyle Beckman not only sold but embodied. Then in his mid-40s, he was a notorious playboy with blond highlights in his hair and a smile worthy of a toothpaste ad. He had a reputation as a hard-partying daredevil with a fondness for beautiful women, gaudy automobiles and anything that could go fast. He was even for a time a professional powerboat racer on the Formula One circuit, blitzing across waterways from Creve Coeur to the Florida Keys.

All that was fine, but it was Beckman’s rumored side business, importing crates of marijuana, that interested Davis.

A month older than Beckman, the prosecutor had spent his federal career assigned to the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, which focuses on large-scale narcotics conspiracies. Part of the job was talking to defendants who hoped to trade information on the bad deeds of others in exchange for shorter prison sentences. In those conversations, Beckman’s name had come up often enough to make Davis suspect the tanning mogul was up to something more than peddling a year-round glow to strip-mall customers.

Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration had also taken an interest in the flashy CEO, according to an agency official. So far, they did not have anything to present to prosecutors. Frankly, Beckman was a small fish compared to the major traffickers moving heroin, cocaine and mass quantities of marijuana through the metro area. And yet a supposedly legitimate businessman brazenly flouting the law had a way of annoying those responsible for enforcing it.

Davis watched the BMW and its TANCO plates speed out of sight. That was that.

But then, about four years later, in December 2016, the prosecutor was groggily watching the 4 a.m. news when the story of a vicious kidnapping caught his attention. A young Maplewood man had been abducted from his home, beaten and tortured for three days until his family paid a $27,000 ransom.

The names of four suspects — a pair of twenty-something brothers named Blake and Caleb Laubinger, 24-year-old Zachary Smith and 55-year-old Kerry Roades — meant nothing to Davis. But mention of the fifth made him sit up in bed.

“Did I just hear ‘Todd Beckman’?”

YOUTUBE.COM

Todd Beckman appears in a promotional video for MassageLuXe, one of the multiple brands he built into successful franchises.

Todd Beckman’s marijuana arrived every month in shipments from California. An eighteen-wheeler would back up to the loading dock of his corporate headquarters at 11 Champion Drive in Fenton and offload crates of what appeared to be industrial toolboxes.

It was a good cover. The building, which included offices and a large warehouse, was the nerve center of Beckman’s wide-ranging interests. Over the years, more than two dozen corporations have been registered there under his watch. Some fizzled, but others, including MassageLuXe and LifeXist gyms, had grown into multi-state franchises. The warehouse teemed with motorcycles, sports cars, racing go-karts or whatever else happened to grab Beckman’s attention.

When a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter visited in 2010 for a profile of the successful entrepreneur, she noted walls covered with photos of him racing during his Formula One days, along with a “human-sized trophy” planted near his desk.

“You’ve got to be motivated,” Beckman told her. “That’s why I have all those pictures here. They’re not just because I like to see myself. It’s because it reminds me of winning.”

With everything going on, no one was going to notice a couple nondescript crates arriving every four weeks.

It was Kerry Roades’ job to handle the incoming cargo. A capable mechanic and generally handy when it came to building or fixing things, he had helped take care of the literal nuts and bolts of Beckman’s big ideas for two decades. Once the crates were in the warehouse, Roades cracked them open and retrieved the true payload — between 50 and 80 pounds of marijuana in airtight packaging.

COURTESY EUREKA POLICE

Blake Laubinger was Todd Beckman’s protege and the drug dealer trusted to move his marijuana.

From there, the weed went to Blake Laubinger, a dull-eyed young drug dealer who started as an investor in one of Beckman’s gyms and became an awestruck protégé. Laubinger stashed the pot at his house in the small town of Pacific, Missouri, parceling it out to a network of low-level dealers and then collecting the proceeds from their sales. He and Beckman split profits of about $800 per pound and sent the rest back to their supplier in California. On an 80-pound shipment, they could each clear $32,000, maybe more if the market was good.

The operation hummed along month after month until October 2016, when Laubinger returned home to find his house had been burglarized. The 24-year-old searched desperately, but it was just as he feared — his safe with $15,000 and 24 pounds of marijuana was gone.

In a panic, he called both Beckman and his older brother, 26-year-old Caleb Laubinger, and told them what happened. He even called Pacific police and reported the burglary, although he wisely omitted the bit about the missing marijuana and drug money.

Both were problems. Not only had Blake Laubinger fronted his network of dealers — putting up the weed on the promise of being paid after they sold it — but Beckman had fronted him. Forget about profits; he was now in debt tens of thousands of dollars to the tanning mogul, and he worried about the consequences.

“I mean, it wasn’t a good situation,” Blake later told prosecutors. “There was a lot of money lost, and I had no way of paying it.”

In the short term, he says, his brother loaned him $75,000 to buy time. (Caleb Laubinger claims it was only $3,000.) But the only real solution was to find the burglar and get their money back.

Luckily for Blake, he knew exactly who had ripped him off. A fellow drug dealer, Ellis Athanas III, knew where Blake kept the marijuana and had easy access to the house, because the two 24-year-olds had been literal partners in crime ever since meeting in 2010 at St. Louis Community College. Both were student drug dealers at the time and decided to team up.

Athanas had long, light brown hair that hung past his shoulders, contributing to his surfer-bro vibe. He had met Beckman just once (when the middle-aged entrepreneur complained of an aching back, Athanas suggested they go to hot yoga together), but he knew when the shipments were incoming. After all, he was one of the people who had helped sell them.

Athanas had been peddling marijuana since he was about sixteen years old but recently had grown more interested in daring drug ripoffs. “Seizing dealers’ assets,” is the way he described it.

Blake Laubinger had teamed up with him on a few such escapades. Athanas would arrange to meet another seller in an out-of-the way location, snatch the drugs and speed off in his car. Blake, parked just out of sight, would wait until his partner passed and then pull his truck across the road, cutting off any pursuers.

Now, he discovered, he was the one whose assets had been seized. And his former accomplice was on the run.

01/16/2019
Do You Want to Know the Truth?

On the morning of November 3, 2016, Ken Allen was found dead in his dining room in Washington, Missouri, his hands and legs hogtied with phone cords, his stomach and chin resting on the blood-stained tiles. The medical examiner would later conclude that he’d been put into a sort of wrestling hold, with his assailant pressing against his airways as he choked to death.

Within 24 hours, three people were charged with Ken’s death. But they were not charged with murder. Instead, the prosecutor insisted that his death was somehow an accident, the result of a robbery gone fatally wrong.

The facts of the case were puzzling, particularly for Ken’s only daughter, Kallen, who couldn’t help but wonder about the signs of a struggle noted in the police report, the pool of blood at the crime scene and the injuries to Ken’s body. Then there was the fact that Ken had known the suspects.

The pieces didn’t line up, and Kallen’s maelstrom of grief and discovery came to a head during a meeting in a courthouse conference room in 2017, the moments captured by a camera secretly recording from Kallen’s wristwatch.

“Do you want to know the truth?”

The question, posed by the county prosecutor to Ken’s surviving family, would shatter their sense of equilibrium and begin Kallen’s quest for truth and justice for their family.

According to the prosecutor, Ken had been a pedophile.

Born as Kathy Allen, Kallen (who now uses gender-neutral pronouns) was a freshman in college when they came out as gay to their father during Thanksgiving break in 1990. Then, three weeks later, it was Ken’s turn. In an emotional phone call to Kallen, he himself came out as gay. That bond would tie the father and daughter together over years and miles, but as Kallen sought the tolerant social climate of San Francisco and a career in startups as a systems engineer, Ken remained closeted in Franklin County. And though Ken came out to his wife, they opted to remain married.

Ken had met his future wife, Janet, at Southwest Baptist University, and after living on a military base during a stateside deployment during the Vietnam War, the two moved to Franklin County in 1975. That’s where Ken’s career as a probation officer started to take off.

About an hour’s drive west of St. Louis, Franklin County might generously be placed on the outer-most exurbs of St. Louis County sprawl. The county’s 100,000 residents are spread over 110 square miles in a handful of tiny towns and two modest cities, Union and Washington. Ken made his home in the latter for more than 30 years.

In Franklin, the rules of small communities everywhere prevailed; standing out wasn’t encouraged. Growing up, Kallen quickly figured that out at the hands of school bullies. When a boy in high school showed up to class wearing makeup, Kallen recalls, he “got the shit kicked out of him.”

Kallen believes that kind of intolerance surrounded and shaped their father from birth.

“He was not able to live his truth,” Kallen says today. “He was a baby boomer, grew up on a farm in rural bootheel Missouri and was more or less a public figure in Franklin County. How do you know how to be gay? How do you be an out gay man in such a place? The answer is you don’t.”

Not long after moving to Franklin County, Ken was assigned to supervise a newly hired probation officer named Roger Cook. It was the start of a friendship that stretched more than four decades.

“He was a very dedicated professional — he seemed to have it together,” Cook says. He remembers Ken as a natural businessman. In the mid-1970s, Cook says, Ken established the area’s first programs designed for defendants with alcohol and drug abuse, and eventually he founded a private treatment company — a rarity for a rural area like Franklin County. Ken’s ambition grew, and in a matter of years he was managing multiple treatment centers and a host of other probation and social services. And in 2000, Ken’s Meramec Recovery Center began handling the treatment requirements for every drug-court participant in the county. The arrangement continued for more than a decade.

But in 2013, the Office of State Courts Administrator terminated its contract with Meramec nine months early, and around that time Ken sold the business to a longtime employee. With his treatment center in new hands and his other businesses largely shuttered, Ken found himself in late-life crisis.

In November 2015, Kallen returned to Franklin County for a 25th high school class reunion, only to find Ken a shell of anxious desperation. He stockpiled guns, maintained multiple phones and fretted to friends about the cars with tinted windows that apparently rolled past his home at all hours. His friends’ attempts at intervention were met with vague dismissals.

On that trip home, Kallen remembers asking Ken, for what felt like the hundredth time, if he wouldn’t be happier in St. Louis. There, he could experiment with living openly as a gay man; he could abandon his fear of the small-town rumor mill or what his clients might say. “It didn’t go well,” Kallen says now. He had refused to move, insisting, “This is my home.”

When Ken finally offered an explanation for his anxiety, it made Kallen more worried. He claimed that people were spreading rumors about him, and that he’d been targeted for harassment. He had apparently come home one day to find that someone had poured sugar in the gas tank of his vintage Volkswagen Beetle.

But what the harassment and rumors added up to, exactly, Ken never fully explained. Still, Kallen could tell he was obsessing over it, and that it terrified him.

Cook, too, remembers a change coming over his friend. Over lunch in April 2016, Cook says Ken complained about a Franklin County Sheriff’s lieutenant named Jason Grellner. Ken claimed Grellner was the source of the harassment — and that the cop and others had used subterfuge to snatch away his company’s contract.

Later that year, Ken would file suit against Grellner, Franklin County and the competing treatment center awarded the contract over Meramec. The lawsuit accused Grellner of interfering in Meramec’s recovery program by pressuring participants to serve as confidential informants.

Grellner, the lawsuit alleged, had threatened potential snitches with being dropped from the recovery program unless they helped him build drug cases, and, ultimately, aided his political ambitions as a candidate for county sheriff. Grellner, the suit claimed, had also been “spreading false rumors” about Ken to members of the state board that awarded the contract.

By the time Ken filed the lawsuit in August 2016, Grellner had already lost his bid for county sheriff. (Reached by phone, Grellner “completely, 100 percent” denies any wrongdoing.)

Still, Ken was set in his paranoia. To friends and family, he claimed the harassment and rumors were only getting worse. And always, somehow, Grellner was behind it.

“Grellner had apparently made a statement, ‘We’re going to take care of Ken Allen,’” Cook says, recalling the April conversation with Ken. “That could mean anything, but Ken took it as violence, and a serious threat.” Ken told Cook he’d started carrying a pistol.

Cook recalls feeling shaken after his April meeting with Ken. “I really felt sorry for him, the state he was in,” he says.

It was the last time the two spoke. Seven months later, Ken was dead.

12/19/2018

For the past five years, Cynthia Wren, 66, has applied to get her ten-year-old granddaughter, Ariel Gibson, into St. Louis’ student desegregation program.

The Voluntary Interdistrict Choice Corporation, or VICC, oversees the student transfer program. It is a race-based transfer that allows black city children to attend county schools, even as white students in the county can attend city magnet ones.

Ariel is black and lives in the Shaw neighborhood of St. Louis city. Part of her application includes ranking her interest in much more highly rated suburban districts. If she’s chosen, it could be a ticket to a top-tier public school district: Brentwood, Kirkwood, Clayton.

But she hasn’t gotten in. So the ten-year old attends Tower Grove Christian Academy. In lieu of sending her granddaughter to an elementary school run by the St. Louis Public Schools, or SLPS, Wren pays Ariel’s private school tuition. A former teacher’s assistant and current substitute for St. Louis County Special School District, Wren says that paying Ariel’s tuition is a hardship for her family.

“It’s not always easy,” she says. “But we do what we have to do.”

Wren plans to continue applying to VICC for her granddaughter in the years to come. But it’s a lottery situation, and with a 17 percent acceptance rate, the odds are against her.

“I just don’t understand the situation,” Wren says. “[Ariel’s] being skipped over and it breaks my heart to know she hasn’t gotten in.”

Ariel isn’t alone. In 1999, VICC reached its peak enrollment of 14,626 students. Since then, though, the program has been on steady decline. Last school year, 4,392 students were enrolled.

It’s not a case of lessening demand. A total of 2,488 black students living in the city applied to VICC for the 2017-2018 school year. Just 413 were accepted. (Of the 148 white students from the county who applied to attend St. Louis magnet schools through VICC, 85 were accepted.)

And the clock is ticking for Wren and her granddaughter. This month marks the official beginning of the end for the desegregation program, beginning the five-year extension that provides one final reprieve before the education leaders running VICC plan to shut it down entirely.

VICC oversees the longest-running race-based student transfer program in the nation, and even as it’s brought a dose of color to many affluent county districts, it’s also been a real boon to thousands of lucky city kids. State Representative Bruce Franks (D-St. Louis), who graduated from Lindbergh High School in 2002, is just one prominent alumnus.

Yet if you ask the people in charge of the program — the superintendents of the twelve schools that make up VICC’s governing board — what comes next, and what they’ll be doing to increase diversity in districts that would be largely monolithic absent the transfer students, they’ll acknowledge they don’t know just yet.

“We want to roll into this new five-year extension,” says Eric Knost, Rockwood superintendent and VICC chairman for the 2017-2018 school year. “Once things start to settle a little bit, we will start talking about what’s beyond the five-year extension.”

He acknowledges, “We really haven’t even scratched the surface yet on what’s to come.”

Since 1981, more than 70,000 black students from St. Louis city have attended schools in St. Louis County through the VICC program. Under its auspices, white students from the county have also been attending magnet schools in the city since 1982, albeit in much smaller numbers (9,000).

Those students have added much-needed diversity to some county districts. In 1999, the year of VICC’s peak enrollment, participating county districts notched an average of 20 percent black students. Had VICC not existed, the projected black enrollment would have averaged a mere 4 percent.

Nearly two decades later, not much has changed, demographically. In 2017, black enrollment within participating districts averaged around 15 percent. Without VICC it would’ve been just under 7 percent.

But as the years have gone by, some of VICC’s original participants have pulled out. Hazelwood, which was steadily growing more diverse even without transfer students, left in 1988. Ladue and Ritenour both exited in 1999, Pattonville in 2005 and Lindbergh in 2011. (Students in the program were allowed to graduate from the districts they’d been placed in, making the districts’ withdrawal a gradual one.)

According to VICC, the districts left the program after finding other ways to enable diversity in their schools. Ladue, for example, consolidated its ten neighborhood elementary schools to four in the 1970s. At that same time, Ladue also redrew its school boundaries. In doing so, the district, which is made up of nine municipalities (Creve Coeur, Crystal Lake Park, Frontenac, Huntleigh Village, Ladue, Olivette, Richmond Heights, Town and Country and Westwood) plus some parts of unincorporated St. Louis County, created more racial diversity in its schools.

Lindbergh, though, hasn’t quite done that. The district saw black enrollment as high as 20.56 percent in 1999 thanks to its participation in VICC. By the time it pulled out, that had dropped to 6.11 percent. Lindbergh’s last VICC student graduated in 2017, and at that point, its black enrollment had sunk to just 2.69 percent — around ten times smaller than it was in 1999.

The percentage of black students at Lindbergh schools plummeted after it pulled out of VICC. - GRAPHIC BY CAMILLE RESPESS

GRAPHIC BY CAMILLE RESPESS

The percentage of black students at Lindbergh schools plummeted after it pulled out of VICC.

In the coming years, absent some sort of replacement transfer program, what’s happening at Lindbergh could happen to districts across the county.

VICC’s board approved that final five-year extension in November 2016. It’s set to run from the school year that just began through 2023-2024 and will accept around 1,000 students into the twelve participating school districts during these five years. Priority for acceptance into VICC during its final extension will be given to siblings of students already in the program.

It’s a long goodbye, by any measure. If a kindergartner is chosen for the program during its last year, 2023, he or she wouldn’t be on track to graduate until 2036 — walking an increasingly lonely road as other minority students graduate and move on.

From its inception, VICC’s model was built on continual phase-out. The program was set up in 1999 to dwindle at a rate of 5 percent over a twenty-year period. And that’s exactly the outline its remaining districts are following.

VICC leaders say that their long-held plan to phase out the program dovetails nicely with the growing ambitions of the St. Louis Public Schools. After all, VICC takes black students to county schools who would have otherwise been zoned to attend city schools.

“Clearly, county schools benefit [from VICC] by creating a more real and diverse student environment,” Knost says. “At the same time, we have got to keep the interest of the SLPS.”

In 2012, the St. Louis district regained provisional accreditation after five years of operating as non accredited. In 2017, the district became fully accredited.

“We are trying to be competitive as we can for families to look at us as a real option,” SLPS superintendent Kelvin Adams says.

But while Adams says he believes the desegregation program has fulfilled its purpose, he agrees the ending of this iteration of VICC may not mean the end of transfer programs between the city and county school districts.

“I’m not saying it can’t continue in some way, shape or form in the future,” Adams says.

Maalik Shakoor, 22, graduated from Clayton High School in 2014. He was bussed from his neighborhood of Baden in north St. Louis for the twelve years he was in VICC: first to Bierbaum Elementary School in south county, then to Clayton for middle and high school.

Shakoor graduated from Webster University in May with a degree in film production. He’s spent the summer as a teacher at the Freedom School in St. Louis.

Though Shakoor wishes he could have gotten a strong education in his own neighborhood, he sees the value in VICC.

“If [black children in the city] can’t get a good, quality education where they’re at, then the next best solution is to bus them out,” he says. “Until the city schools can be up to par with the county schools, I see no other option.”