Photography by Arthur Witman, courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri
The men wore dress shirts and creased linen trousers, the women church dresses and patent-leather heels. They met in The Ville’s Tandy Park, and in the heat of deep summer, walked a mile to Carter Carburetor Corporation, across the street from Sportsman’s Park. Days before, 10,000 people—not including the FBI agents and Jefferson Barracks troops posted around the building—assembled in the Municipal Auditorium for a rally organized by A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It lasted five hours. The year before, Randolph met with President Franklin Roosevelt about his plans for a March on Washington, protesting a lack of jobs for black workers, despite the boom in war manufacturing. (St. Louis businesses relocated whites from the bootheel, rather than hire blacks.) When Roosevelt realized thousands of protestors would flood the National Mall, he signed an executive order demanding the defense department hire equitably. Yet a year later, Carter’s 2,650 workers were still all white. So on August 14, 1942, the activists marched—and won.
In 1984, after 70 years of making parts for Camaros—and bombs—Carter closed. It was named a Superfund site, its concrete walls and floors toxic with PCBs, trichloroethylene, and asbestos. You could drive down North Grand Boulevard and see the green factory windows punched out, graffiti on the brick, a rusting fence half torn down, and a sea of cement out front, crabgrass in the seams. When snow fell, footprints crisscrossed the lot, maybe bus riders shortcutting to the corner stop. Curious trespassers crawled in the back windows; vagrants slept on the mattresses warehoused inside. And the people living nearby, as well as the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater St. Louis across the street, lived with the shambles, the chemicals suffusing offsite through air and rainfall. It took another generation of activists and a sit-down with another president to hold the owners of the building accountable. Now, the EPA is dissembling the building, carting it away in pieces, along with all the dirt. When activist Ted MacNeal spoke to a reporter on that hot day in ’42, his words echoed the struggle then, as now; all the protestors wanted, he said, was a chance to state their case to the world. “The conscience of the people,” he said, “will do the rest.”
