Art historian Matthew Knox Averett, Ph.D., will be giving the African American Experience in Missouri lecture at the State Historical Society of Missouri, 605 Elm St., Columbia, Oct. 7 at 6 p.m. The presentation is titled “Where Frankie Met Johnny: Targee Street and the Making of Black St. Louis.”
Averett’s talk will examine 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 with ties to ragtime, the blues and the famous ballad “Frankie and Johnny.”
Averett is a professor of Art History at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He completed his PhD in art history and archaeology at the University of Missouri. Averett is the author of Canfield Drive: A History of Race and the American City on a Street in St. Louis, published in 2025 by the University of Missouri Press, which won the 2026 Book Award at the Missouri Conference on History.
“An extensively researched book that makes hauntingly clear the history of abandonment of the American city alongside ideals of democratic society. The title is Canfield Drive, but the story covers a much larger territory, across St. Louis and the U.S., through decades of housing and public policy decisions. Read this book to contextualize our present moment of urban crisis.” – Patty Heyda, Washington University in St. Louis, author of Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA
The event is free and open to the public. A reception will be held at 5 p.m. with the lecture at 6 p.m. cosponsored by the State Historical Society of Missouri, University of Missouri History Department, Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, and University of Missouri Press.