SHSMO Center for Missouri Studies
605 Elm St.
Columbia, Mo.
Historian Matthew Knox Averett examines the vital center of Black life in St. Louis at the turn of the 20th century and how Black migration, real estate, housing, poverty, and policing shaped the neighborhood of Chestnut Valley. The vibrant Black neighborhood in downtown St. Louis centered around Market, Targee, and Chestnut Streets and became a place of community, survival, and culture creation with ties to ragtime, the Blues, and the famous ballad "Frankie and Johnny."
After the Civil War, Black migrants moved to the area abandoned by wealthy white residents who moved further west of downtown. The neighborhoods were subdivided, rented, industrialized, and "handed down" through the city's racial and economic hierarchy. By the late 19th century, the dense Chestnut Valley was shaped by poverty, policing, sensational journalism, the workings of the real estate market.
Targee Street and the surrounding neighborhood's history reveal how Black St. Louis was made through migration, real estate, disinvestment, cultural life, and civic erasure.
Averett's presentation is part of the African American Experience in Missouri lecture series sponsored by the State Historical Society of Missouri, the University of Missouri History Department, and the MU Kinder Institute for Constitutional Democracy. The event is free and open to the public. Reception begins 5 p.m. followed by the lecture at 6 p.m.
About the Presenter: Matthew Averett is Professor of Art History at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He completed his PhD in Art History and Archaeology at the University of Missouri where he specialized in architectural and urban history focusing on the development of early-modern Rome. Averett also works on the urban history of St. Louis. His book, Canfield Drive: A History of Race and the American City on a Street in St. Louis was published in 2025 by the University of Missouri Press and won the 2025 Book Award at the Missouri Conference on History in March 2026. Averett is currently working on an article about horse troughs in St. Louis, and a book on postwar downtown St. Louis. Averett will also be available to sign copies of his book following the program.