Race and St. Louis: A reflection on event that shaped my life

Linda Lockhart died May 4 after a long career in Midwest newsrooms from St. Louis to Madison and Milwaukee. Last summer, on the 10th anniversary of the Ferguson uprising, she reflected on what it was like to grow up as an African-American in St. Louis.

By Linda Lockhart >>

Linda Lockhart is a St. Louis native. The eldest daughter of Cornelious and Laura Lockhart, Linda attended Lutheran schools from kindergarten through high school. In 1970, she became the first African American student to graduate from Lutheran High School South. 

That is an abbreviated version of my early years. Those three sentences alone tell a lot about me and can be used, at least in part, to explain how I turned out as I did. 

Let me elaborate. 

When I speak to groups of students, especially those attending the long-running Minority Journalism Workshop, I usually start by saying, “I’m a kid from north St. Louis.” More than just a St. Louis native, I spent my formative years living with my parents, Cornelious and Laura Louise Lockhart, and sister Connie in several neighborhoods on the north side of St. Louis — the mostly Black side of town.

So from the start, without knowing me or seeing me, most people with any knowledge of St. Louis demographics would correctly presume that I am African American. 

Many people, however, often stumble on the two second sentences — that I “attended Lutheran schools from kindergarten through high school,” and that I graduated from Lutheran High School South. 

Many have a hard time picturing Black people as Lutherans — historically a denomination dominated by people for German or Scandinavian descent.  But Lutheran I am. Third generation, in fact. 

Though I can’t remember how I learned this, I’ve long believed that my parents declared at the time of my birth that I would not attend public schools. I was born in 1952 — two years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Brown v. Board of Education case that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional.

I will never know why they made their choice. All I do know is that when I began kindergarten in 1957 at Mount Calvary Lutheran School in St. Louis, I sat in a classroom where, from my 5-year-old perspective, Black children and white children learned together in their classroom, ate together in the lunchroom and played together at recess.

While it wasn’t the case for many Black and white kids in the public schools, this was the beginning of true integration for me. 

I remember the teacher, Mrs. Satterwhite. She was tall, blonde and pretty, and she always wore high heeled shoes. But when her young learners graduated and were promoted to first grade, Mrs. Satterwhite  wore the prettiest pair of black patent leather slippers. She wore them because she knew I owned an identical pair and would be wearing them that night. 

I was thrilled! This tall, blonde, pretty, Lutheran woman had shoes just like mine!

Unspoken race lessons

While growing up, matters of race were things I observed but rarely talked about. 

My family attended an all-Black, Lutheran church; the pastor and his family were white. 

I knew my neighbors were Black. Actually, I remember approximately when the last of the white neighbors moved from our block, circa 1963. I was about 10.  

I also knew that when we went downtown to go shopping, my mother and grandmother picked stores where they knew they would not have to suffer the indignities of being directed to back entrances or not being allowed to try on clothes in dressing rooms. We went to places where we could walk through cafeteria lines and be served lunch just like the white folks. 

As I learned from reading “Jet” and “Ebony” magazines in our home and hair salon, that wasn’t the case for girls who looked like me and their mothers who happened to live in places like Birmingham, Alabama, or Greensboro, North Carolina. 

In 1958, at age 6, I entered first grade at St. Stephen’s Lutheran School, in the old Gaslight Square neighborhood of St. Louis. I was escorted by my mother, and welcomed warmly by the teacher, Miss Elda Lucht, into her classroom of well-behaved children, Black and white, seated side-by-side. 

I didn’t know two years later that Ruby Bridges, at age 6, had to be escorted by four armed federal marshals for her own safety as she became the first student to integrate William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. 

In 1966, I became one of the four African American students to integrate Lutheran High School South, in the south St. Louis County municipality of Affton.Though I was frightened and anxious, I knew my situation was nothing like what had happened in 1957 to the famed “Little Rock Nine” who were blocked from integrating Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. President Dwight Eisenhower had to send federal troops to escort the nine Black students into the school, yet they continued to be harassed.

The fact that I attended Lutheran South rather than Lutheran North was surprising to many. Lutheran North, as the name implies, is on the north side of the metro area. The city of St. Louis and St. Louis County is somewhat divided, north from south — Black from white. The assumption at the time was that any Black students attending a Lutheran high school would go to North. 

But that wasn’t the case for me, because in 1966, at the height of what sociologists called “white flight,” my parents joined what was more accurately a middle-class flight from cities to suburbs. They chose to have a home built in Webster Groves, west of the city of St. Louis and decidedly south of the invisible dividing line.

To me, then age 13, I didn’t see us as fleeing anything. It was more of a sense of going home. That’s because my mother’s mother was raised in Webster Groves — the north side — with a host of relatives all around. We visited often and I knew the neighborhood well.

At the time I didn’t fully appreciate that segregation was also alive and well in Webster, as the city is known. I just knew that I was happy to be able to walk short distances to the homes of aunts and uncles, cousins and long-time family friends. Up one street and down another, there was very likely someone I knew — or who knew me. 

It didn’t matter to me that most of the white folks lived “up the hill,” on the south side of Webster. I knew I could enjoy the community swimming pool and check out books at the public library without interference. 

While that may not have been the case for my older cousins, navigating the white side of Webster was never a problem for me. 

Neither was I ever harassed in high school, other than the one time I went to my locker and found someone had etched a stick-figure pickaninny into the metal door.  

But I was lonely. While four Black students — two boys and two girls — enrolled at Lutheran South in the fall of 1966, I was the only one to graduate four years later. The other three had left the premises long before. One of the boys had lasted two days; the other two weeks. 

My imagination conjures images of name-calling and worse that would cause the boys to leave this Christian school that their parents had paid good money for them to attend. 

The other girl made it through two years, but didn’t return as a junior. That left me alone. Though friendly in class, none of the white girls invited me for sleepovers. None of the white boys asked me to dance at school parties. 

Years later, I learned that one of my friends had wanted to invite me to spend the night at her house with other girls, but her mother “was afraid of what the neighbors would think.”

Fast forward some 30+ years later, I moved into that neighborhood. I live there today. 

An unexpected opportunity

Back in high school, I had never envisioned myself as a journalist — a reporter. It just sort of happened. 

My course became set one day in the spring of senior year when I was notified that I had been selected to receive a scholarship from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to attend the University of Missouri in Columbia, and its famed School of Journalism. The four-year, full-ride scholarship came with entry-level jobs in the newsroom each summer plus an offer for a permanent job upon graduation. 

I had been blessed beyond my imagination. 

My experiences with having white teachers and classmates for my entire pre-collegiate life had prepared me for being deposited on this predominantly white university campus.

While some of my Black friends struggled with a kind of culture shock in this environment, I sort of just coasted along.

I was thrilled that for the first time since elementary school I found Black friends — especially the guys. Finally, there were guys who would ask me to dance at parties. 

I embraced the Black Power movement, hanging out at the campus Black Culture House and listening to powerful speakers such as feminist and political activist Angela Davis and poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou. I grew out my chemically straightened hair, giving way to an enormous Afro. (insert photo)

In 1974, I graduated from the university, began working as a reporter at the Post-Dispatch and got married, all within the span of five months. The marriage didn’t last — ending after two years with an amicable divorce. But the job led to a fulfilling career that lasted for more than four decades. 

It was the news business that led me to the man who would become my second husband and father of my children: Steve Korris. Unlike my first husband, who was Black, Steve Korris is white. And Lutheran. 

I have far too many “Lutheran connection” stories to tell here — perhaps another time. 

Back to the job thing, it was the excitement of learning something new every day that I loved most.

The cranky editors, always white, mostly always men, were one of the “givens” of the job. But this was a time of change. In the 1970s and ‘80s, newsrooms across the country were recognizing the need to open their doors to white women and people of color — mostly Black people. 

The fight for equality in the newsrooms as a woman and a Black person were ongoing. The National Association of Black Journalists was established and led efforts around the country to increase the number of Black journalists, not just as reporters, but also through the ranks of editors and managers. I helped launch a local chapter.

I had great opportunities — supported by training from the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education — at newspapers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and St. Paul, Minnesota. I eventually returned to the Post-Dispatch where I held many positions, from copy editor to editorial writer. 

I endured countless occasions of what are now recognized as microaggressions that add up to subtle and sometimes not-so subtle forms of racism. 

Eventually, in what feels like the blink of an eye, I raised two children and retired from daily journalism work. For the most part, I thought my life was good. 

Reality check

But then I saw what happened to Michael Brown and to George Floyd and I remembered just how ugly the world can be, and how racism is still among us — always was, and probably forever will be.

I sometimes wonder what was the point of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. I wonder why the need for jobs and justice is greater now than it was back then. 

But then I reflect on the knowledge that many Black people still struggle for opportunities equal to those of whites and the irony that I now live in the subdivision where four decades earlier I was unwelcome to join a group of teenage girls in a night of gossip and pillow fights.

Still, in recent years, when one of the few African American men living in the neighborhood went for walks, White neighbors called police, asking them to check out this “suspicious character.” All he was doing was taking a walk! 

Today, we face a presidential election. Regardless of who wins, the outcome is likely to deepen many divisions — race and ethnicity being among the most dangerous.  

Today I am concerned for the future — concerned about further polarization. I fear for my grandchildren. I fear for my nation. 

At the same time, I have hope that something good will happen. I see small signs of goodness in Black and brown children playing together with white children, like my grandchildren’s sports teams. 

The only answer for breaking down racial barriers is by teaching children from the youngest ages that they can learn together, eat together and play together and nothing bad will happen. They might also learn to become friends. That can be a good thing.