Growing up in St. Louis and then Oklahoma, Khalid Abdulqaadir always knew that his grandparents had suddenly left the family home—and that it had been a traumatic event for some family members.
But it wasn’t until he was given a copy of Vivian Gibson’s 2020 memoir, The Last Children of Mill Creek, that he fully understood what had happened. The family hadn’t so much lost the home as it had been taken from them, making them part of the diaspora that resulted after the Black neighborhood in the heart of St. Louis was razed in the name of “urban renewal.”
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Abdulqaadir’s father, Butch, who was 8 when the family had to move, was even a character in Gibson’s book. “He is part of that generation in the title of her book,” Abdulqaadir says. “He was one of the ‘last children of Mill Creek.’”
Now Abdulqaadir, a filmmaker and American Studies doctoral student at Saint Louis University, is shining a light on his father’s generation and the world they knew. Working closely with Gibson, he filmed remembrances from 18 members of that generation, the last to remember Mill Creek Valley. Those interviews have now become Remembering Mill Creek, a deeply moving, 21-minute documentary that lets the people who lived in what is now Midtown St. Louis tell their stories in their own words.
The film debuted this past July as part of a series of shorts presented by the St. Louis International Film Festival, and this week it’s being shown in two local screenings tied to the opening of a new Missouri History Museum exhibit, Mill Creek: Black Metropolis. It screens tonight at Saint Louis University, along with a panel discussion from 6–8 p.m., followed by a screening at 1 p.m. Saturday at the museum, which also includes a panel discussion.
For Abdulqaadir, the screenings are a chance to bring the stories of Mill Creek to a wider audience—and help St. Louis understand what it lost. For his family, he says, the move from Mill Creek had mixed results. His grandparents, Jesse and Cynthia Lattimore, were able to draw on Cynthia’s connections as a biracial woman to move to the Central West End, a largely white neighborhood that afforded new opportunities. But other family members ended up in the notorious Pruitt-Igoe projects, which were also later demolished. Some eventually made their way to Ferguson. While some have become successful, others have suffered.
In Mill Creek, he says, “People who were doctors, teachers, they were neighbors with street sweepers and janitors. People shared food, they did work on each other’s homes. Everyone looked out for each other’s kids.” Of the interviews conducted for the film, he adds, “Everyone says the same thing over and over again about their experience as a child in that community, how connected and tight-knit it was, and when you split that up, well, then you have these lower-income people who don’t have the communal connections in the Black community, and they just fell by the wayside.”
Gibson (the film’s executive producer) and Abdulqaadir threw themselves into the project even though they didn’t really have the funding for it. The 18 interviewees are ages 76 to 95, and the filmmakers felt like they had to seize the day or risk the stories being gone forever. (To that end, Gibson says they would have had 19 interviews, except one man passed away before they could get the interview scheduled.)
She notes, “Most of the people I interviewed were older than me, and so they were teenagers or even adults when they left Mill Creek. They know things or saw things that I didn’t, and what I wanted to do with the film was to get the perspective of what it was like to watch your community disappear.”
With funding, both Abdulqaadir and Gibson are hopeful that they could capture more stories and turn the short documentary into a feature-length film. “There were so many things we learned that didn’t even get in,” Gibson says. “There’s still a lot to be told.”
Abdulqaadir agrees, saying the stories told by surviving Mill Creek community members should resonate for anyone interested in the Black experience in America. Of the interview subjects, he says, “They experienced an existence as Black people in America that’s almost like a fantasy or fairy tale.”
He adds, “It didn’t take anything to get people to get right into it. People were very eager to tell this story.”
