U.S.
KIRKWOOD, Mo. — A horrific shooting tears apart a St. Louis community and forces residents to confront the city’s racial history — an event so troubling that national attention suddenly focuses on a previously unnoticed neighborhood in Missouri.
Sounds like Ferguson? Close. Travel about 25 miles south to the predominantly white municipality of Kirkwood, an upper-middle-class community that in 1991 annexed Meacham Park, a historical and mostly black neighborhood. In 2008 a beloved community figure from Meacham Park cracked, his friends said, after years of discrimination and showed up at a Kirkwood City Council meeting with a gun, killing five city employees, including two police officers.
The tragedy tore through Kirkwood, prompting wrenching conversations. White and black residents discovered they had different views of the city they shared. Kirkwood didn’t erupt into protests as Ferguson did, for a constellation of reasons, but if there’s one lesson that the black residents of Kirkwood have for those in Ferguson, it’s this:
Don’t stop talking to one another.
In 2010, Michelle Plants and four of her friends were pulled over by a police officer in Kirkwood. At the time, Plants was 18. She and her friends were all asked to get out of the car while the officer searched it, asking several questions, she said, about where and why they had gotten a Subway sandwich he found. Plants said the officer searched and patted her down, along with three of her friends — all black. Their white friend with them was not.
"I don’t want to say it was because of race,” Plants said. “But if all of the people of color in the car are treated one way and the one white kid is treated in a different way, that paints it to be a different situation.”
Ferguson and Kirkwood are different when it comes to history and demographics. However, the anger and frustration that both communities’ black residents experience are similar, and many in Kirkwood have found themselves standing in solidarity with their neighbors in Ferguson.
The relationship between Meacham Park and Kirkwood proper, right or wrong, came to be a defining factor in race relations in the community. Portions of Meacham Park were soon acquired through eminent domain for commercial development. Latent distrust and confrontations between the neighborhood’s residents and Kirkwood law enforcement emerged. Stereotypes were pervasive.
Linda Lockhart had grown up in St. Louis, and her family moved back in 1998 after living in Minnesota and Wisconsin. They bought a house in a Kirkwood subdivision near a country club.
“I’m sad and disappointed in Kirkwood because it’s a microcosm of the greater St. Louis area,” she said. “I had just stupidly assumed St. Louis had progressed while we were up North.”
It did not take long to realize otherwise. When they bought their new house, Lockhart and her husband were given a copy of the neighborhood Trust Agreement and Indenture of Restrictions, which laid out neighborhood rules regarding issues like yard maintenance and structure standards.
It also said this: “That no building shall at any time be occupied by Negroes or Malays, except in the capacity of bona fide servants or employees.”
The document, which was written when segregated real estate laws dominated the St. Louis area, had no legal standing. Lockhart, who is black, and her husband, who is white, were allowed to buy the house, but that single sentence has haunted them since. It was removed only in 2013.
When their children started going to Kirkwood High School, she said, both the subtle and the overt racism became even more apparent. She said her son and daughter were assumed to be from Meacham Park because they were black, which spiraled into one horrible experience after another.
“It was just the most painful experience we had ever been through,” Lockhart recalled.
For Plants, who was adopted by a white family at an early age, Kirkwood High was a similar education. “I’ve always felt like I experienced what a colorblind America would look like,” she said. “It wasn’t until I got to high school that it really became evident that there were differences between growing up here being black and growing up being white.”
Plants, who graduated in 2011, said she remembers being the only black student in many of her classes, especially the advanced ones. Approximately one-fourth of the high school’s students are black.
“The first couple days of class, people would always point out that I was the only black kid in class,” she said. “I know that. Thanks for sharing. I’m very aware of that. And now I’m even more aware.”
“I don’t think you could be black in Kirkwood and not experience some type of racism,” said Rhonda Burgett, a lifelong resident of Kirkwood who is helping organize protests there. “From when I went to school in Kirkwood, from having to leave my neighborhood to be bused across town and back to being stopped and harassed by the police when I was younger to me having to go to the police department to complain when my children were being harassed.”
Many protesters in Ferguson describe Mike Brown’s death as the spark to a powder keg that exploded into the unrest that drew worldwide attention. In Kirkwood such a moment was in 2008.
“I can’t really say there are similarities [between Ferguson and Kirkwood],” Burgett said. “Other than you can only push people just so far. And at some point they push back.”
On a cold night in February 2008, Charles “Cookie” Thornton, a well-respected and widely loved figure from Kirkwood’s Meacham Park neighborhood turned a gun on a routine City Council meeting, killing Officers Tom Ballman and William Biggs, Public Works Director Kenneth Yost and City Council Members Connie Karr and Michael Lynch. Kirkwood’s Mayor Mike Swoboda, who was critically injured, died months later. Police killed Thornton at the scene.
The shooting cast a spotlight on the long-standing tension between Kirkwood and Meacham Park, long felt by the residents of the latter. Thornton, a lifelong Meacham Park resident who was active in local charities, had a long history of disagreements with the municipal government regarding city codes, tickets and business contracts. He accused the government of Kirkwood of racial discrimination and had been tied up in lawsuits with the city for nearly a decade.
After that February night, those in the community described Thornton as having snapped, gone insane or gone to war.
“Nobody condoned Cookie,” Lockhart said. “It was wrong. But we understood why he felt that way.”
Like many in Kirkwood and Meacham Park, Lockhart saw a thread that connected Thornton’s actions and the anger and unrest seen in Ferguson: the actions of people who felt they had no other options left.
Plants was a freshman at Kirkwood High School in 2008. Like Lockhart, Burgett and many others, she in no way condones what Thornton did that night. But she can understand the anger. “Now looking back on the situation,” she said, “seeing how I feel in the wake of Ferguson, I can see how somebody could be so fed up and so angry with the situation. And how when you’re angry, you don’t necessarily have control over your actions or think rationally.”
“It was a scary time,” Burgett recalled. “Because I think some people put all blacks as if we were Cookie Thornton. I remember my husband saying he was in the store and the lady looked at him and treated him as if he was Cookie and had done the shooting.”
One memory stands out in Lockhart’s mind when she recalls the days after the shooting. At a vigil for Thornton’s family in a Meacham Park church, working as a journalist, she was surprised to see Kirkwood Police Chief Jack Plummer.
“He was in plainclothes in the back,” she recalled. “He was there because he wanted to be. He didn’t inject himself.” Plummer declined to comment. “I mean, he had just lost two officers, but he didn’t retreat into anger or bitterness,” Lockhart said. “And God bless him.”
Despite the inflamed tension, Lockhart, Plants and Burgett all remember other instances of togetherness in the days after the shooting. Plants’ father, a white pastor in Kirkwood, was part of the effort of clergy from Kirkwood and Meacham Park to come together. The predominantly white Kirkwood United Methodist Church volunteered its 500-seat sanctuary for Thornton’s funeral, since there was not enough space for all the mourners in the Meacham Park church. Groups and commissions were set up to reconcile, heal and talk about race in Kirkwood.
Talk doesn’t cure everything, Burgett warned, saying she remembers seeing people become more divided. “People are afraid to deal with the issue,” she said. “I think some people, rather than deal with it, just want to bury their head in the sand and say there’s not a problem. Or they’re afraid to deal with it because there might be some kind of backlash.”
But the need to maintain communication is the one lesson that Lockhart, Plants and Burgett all said Kirkwood, after its trauma, can offer Ferguson.
“I almost feel like that here, seven years later, it’s gotten pushed under the rug,” Plants said. “I don’t think things in Kirkwood are necessarily good now. We just live and pretend like it doesn’t happen or pretend like it didn’t happen. And that doesn’t really solve problems.”
She added, “I hope that doesn’t happen in Ferguson.”
Error
Sorry, your comment was not saved due to a technical problem. Please try again later or using a different browser.