Kinloch is a city in
St. Louis County,
Missouri
Missouri (''see #Etymology and pronunciation, pronunciation'') is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. Ranking List of U.S. states and territories by area, 21st in land area, it border ...
. The population was 263 as of the 2020 census.
The oldest
African-American
African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. ...
community to be incorporated in Missouri, Kinloch was home to a vibrant and flourishing black community for much of the 19th and 20th century. It began to decline in the 1980s, when
St. Louis began to buy up property due to an FAA noise-abatement program for nearby
St. Louis Lambert International Airport
St. Louis Lambert International Airport is the primary international airport serving metropolitan St. Louis, Missouri, United States. Commonly referred to as Lambert Field or simply Lambert, it is the largest and busiest airport in the st ...
. Between 1990 and 2000, Kinloch lost more than 80 percent of its population, and the city became an increasingly violent and dangerous place to live. In recent years, there have been efforts to rebuild the city.
History
The current city of Kinloch grew up around Kinloch Park, a commuter suburb first developed in the 1890s.
A Mrs. "B" and her husband are thought to be the first black family to purchase a home in Kinloch Park. As soon as the neighbors discovered the new owners were black they sold their properties, and new sales to permanent white residents of south Kinloch Park ceased. In a few years, more than 30 black families had bought into a six-block area that became called South Kinloch Park.
Kinloch, as an African-American community, developed out of a land purchase model similar to the
Brooklyn, Illinois model.
Since it was not legal to sell directly to blacks, the Olive Street Terrace Realty Corporation sold the parcels to whites for an average price of $150. The new owners then sold the plots to blacks for an average of $350. This allowed the company to use the white people's loans as
collateral for further bank notes. To get white investors, the company circulated testimonials of investors who paid in $50 towards a parcel and received returns of $500 to $1,000 on the investment.
In an advertisement to the ''
Argus'', Olive Street Terrace Realty said, "The good colored people of South Kinloch Park have built themselves a little city of which they have a right to be proud. More than a hundred homes, three churches and a splendid public school have been built in a few years."
The Kinloch Park development had a horse-racing facility called Kinloch Track. When Missouri outlawed the sport, the grounds were taken over by
Kinloch Airfield, which saw some historic flights. The Aero Club of St. Louis hosted the first international air meet in October 1910, where
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (October 27, 1858 – January 6, 1919), also known as Teddy or T.R., was the 26th president of the United States, serving from 1901 to 1909. Roosevelt previously was involved in New York (state), New York politics, incl ...
became the first U.S. president to fly in an airplane. Pilot
Arch Hoxsey flew the president around for over three minutes in a
Wright Brothers
The Wright brothers, Orville Wright (August 19, 1871 – January 30, 1948) and Wilbur Wright (April 16, 1867 – May 30, 1912), were American aviation List of aviation pioneers, pioneers generally credited with inventing, building, and flyin ...
plane they had brought in.
The Kinloch Airfield saw the first
control tower
Air traffic control (ATC) is a service provided by ground-based air traffic controllers who direct aircraft on the ground and through a given section of controlled airspace, and can provide advisory services to aircraft in non-controlled a ...
, the first meal served on a flight, the first
airmail
Airmail (or air mail) is a mail transport service branded and sold on the basis of at least one leg of its journey being by air. Airmail items typically arrive more quickly than surface mail, and usually cost more to send. Airmail may be th ...
shipped, the first
parachute
A parachute is a device designed to slow an object's descent through an atmosphere by creating Drag (physics), drag or aerodynamic Lift (force), lift. It is primarily used to safely support people exiting aircraft at height, but also serves va ...
jump, the first
aerial photo
Aerial photography (or airborne imagery) is the taking of photographs from an aircraft or other airborne platforms. When taking motion pictures, it is also known as aerial videography.
Platforms for aerial photography include fixed-wing airc ...
and the first animal airlifted.
Albert Bond Lambert, the first person in the St. Louis area to receive a pilot's license, and fellow members of the Aero Club leased the field in 1920 and renamed it the Lambert-St. Louis Flying Field in 1923. Two years later, Lambert purchased the field outright; on February 7, 1928, he sold it to the city of St. Louis at cost, allowing it to become the first city-operated airport and the precursor of today's
Lambert-St. Louis International Airport.
Kinloch was home to the 198th chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association
UNIA, which fostered black-owned businesses in the area. The chapter chairman was Elijah Woodson.
In 1902, the white residents of Kinloch Park decided to withdraw from the neighboring
Ferguson school district and built the Nuroad school for whites. Their two-room school was given to black students, who were using the 1885 Vernon schoolhouse built for the children of the servants to the whites in Kinloch. In 1913, the Dunbar Elementary school, named after
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Paul Laurence Dunbar (June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had been enslaved in Kentucky before the American C ...
, was established for the black children of South Kinloch. Still
segregated when it closed in 1975, it holds the record as the longest-operated school for blacks only.
In 1924, Kinloch became the first community in Missouri to elect a black man to its school board: the Reverend Walter Johnson, who later became a vocal critic of Kinloch's refusal to build a high school for its black students.
Another Vernon School opened in 1927 to educate the black students of Kinloch and west Ferguson. Although the
U.S. Supreme Court had ordered
desegregation in 1954, the school remained segregated until it closed in 1967.
Even though the Kinloch schools remained segregated, the Kinloch students took part in a court-ordered
busing
Desegregation busing (also known as integrated busing, forced busing, or simply busing) was an attempt to diversify the racial make-up of schools in the United States by transporting students to more distant schools with less diverse student pop ...
program to desegregate other school districts.
In 1931, Holy Angels Parish was established and opened Our Lady of the Angels Elementary School. A new, updated church was built in 1952. Both the church and school were open until 2002, making it the oldest continuing black parish in the St. Louis Archdiocese.
In 1938, South Kinloch was poised to elect a second black board member, with a district that was 543 black students to 349 whites. This was when the white north put on the ballot an attempt to split the school district. This third attempt to divide the district by the protesting and minority whites who attended Nuroad School ended in failure, with 415 unanimous votes against in the black south and 215 unanimous votes for in the white north. This led to the foundation of a new municipality called
Berkeley, which included all of North Kinloch Park plus land to the northwest and which formed a new school district. South Kinloch Park became Kinloch.
One all-but-forgotten element in Kinloch's success was the electric streetcar line which ran through it to
Florissant. Later the line was cut back to just north of Airport Road in Berkeley. At Kinloch, near the beginning of the 1900s, a branch had been constructed to downtown
Ferguson, connecting at what was known as various times as Ramona Junction and Ferguson Junction. This clean, economic and efficient transportation gave Kinloch residents the ability to travel with ease to jobs both in the City of St. Louis and the northwestern suburbs. At the Wellston Loop, the line connected with numerous other streetcar and bus lines, giving Kinloch residents a reliable way to get to downtown St. Louis and the suburbs of
University City,
Clayton,
Brentwood,
Kirkwood, and
Webster Groves–as well as communities along St. Charles Rock Road west to
St. Charles. Many white people became acquainted with Kinloch as they passed through the area on their streetcar journeys. The substation at the junction of the Berkeley and Ferguson branches still sits on the east side of Hanley Road opposite Suburban Avenue, which had been the streetcar right-of-way into Ferguson. In a heavy segregated culture, black and white rode the streetcars as equals. Anyone could sit wherever anyone wanted and it was not unusual for blacks and whites who otherwise would never have known each other to strike up conversations. In summer streetcar riders always commented on the tantalizing smoky breeze of barbecuing at the Kinloch stop, where the trolleys to Ferguson paused on a graceful, wide curve.
Decline and revitalization efforts
In the 1980s, the
City of St. Louis began to buy out property in Kinloch as part of a noise-abatement program for
Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. Eventually, the airport took the vast majority of private homes in Kinloch. Between 1990 and 2000, Kinloch lost more than 75 percent of its population. The social and economic effects of this buyout were disastrous for the community.
Kinloch became an increasingly violent and dangerous place to live, infested with drugs and crime. The police department faced numerous investigations, and over a 20-year period a number of officers were arrested on corruption charges. In September 2002, St. Louis County police chief Ron Battelle directed his department to take control of law enforcement in Kinloch. The city's population had dwindled to 449, and there was talk of
disincorporation, which was renewed in 2011, when Mayor Keith Conway faced federal charges for using city funds to pay for personal expenses, including a vacation home in
Florida
Florida ( ; ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders the Gulf of Mexico to the west, Alabama to the northwest, Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia to the north, the Atlantic ...
.
In recent years, there have been efforts to rebuild the city. Faith Beyond Walls, a community service organization, has been instrumental in mobilizing volunteers to assist with these efforts.
The
City of St. Louis,
St. Louis County, Kinloch,
Berkeley and
Ferguson reached agreement on a
redevelopment plan for of land on the northeast corner of
I-70 and
I-170, along the eastern edge of the airport. Years ago, this land was part of the airport buyout. The redevelopment will offer office, retail, and industrial space and is expected to create about 12,000 jobs, along with tax revenue to be split among the municipalities. The developers, NorthPark Partners, intend to make improvements in Kinloch and donate a new civic center to Kinloch.
2015 election rejection
On April 23, 2015, newly elected mayor Betty McCray was refused entrance to City Hall on the first day of her term. Members of the previous administration claimed voter fraud and that she had been suspended according to the city attorney. Eventually she was allegedly served with impeachment papers. The impeachment hearing was canceled in June 2015, leading McCray to file suit in St. Louis County Circuit Court, asking Judge John D. Warner to require the city to dismiss the impeachment proceeding and to provide access to her office in Kinloch City Hall, as well as barring the city attorney James Robinson from prosecuting her.
Public safety
Since October 1, 2018 the City of Kinloch is patrolled by the
St. Louis County Police Department, replacing the Kinloch Police Department. In 2016, local media reported that Kinloch used donated police cars that it did not register or insure, and operated without paying into the state's
workers' compensation
Workers' compensation or workers' comp is a form of insurance providing wage replacement and medical benefits to employees injured in the course of employment in exchange for mandatory relinquishment of the employee's right to sue his or her emp ...
fund, making officers injured on the job were responsible for their own medical bills.
The City of Kinloch has been served by the Kinloch Fire Protection District since April 1944. The Kinloch Fire Protection District is a single-house
combination fire service, with one
Pumper and a
Pumper-Tanker. Prior to 2021 the District was served only by their now Pumper-Tanker, when the District's Pumper was unavailble they were covered by the neighboring Ferguson Fire Department. In mid-May 2021, the Kinloch Fire Protection District welcomed it's new Rescue Pumper "Roy" into service.
Notable people
*
Barrett Brooks, professional football player
*
Roy Clay,
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...
pioneer
*
Jenifer Lewis, American film and television actress
*
Ann Peebles, American recording artist
*
Maxine Waters, California congresswoman
*
Huey, American rapper and recording artist
Geography
According to the
United States Census Bureau
The United States Census Bureau, officially the Bureau of the Census, is a principal agency of the Federal statistical system, U.S. federal statistical system, responsible for producing data about the American people and American economy, econ ...
, the city has a total area of , all land.
Demographics
2020 census
2010 census
As of the
census
A census (from Latin ''censere'', 'to assess') is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording, and calculating population information about the members of a given Statistical population, population, usually displayed in the form of stati ...
of 2010, there were 298 people, 105 households, and 67 families residing in the city. The
population density
Population density (in agriculture: Standing stock (disambiguation), standing stock or plant density) is a measurement of population per unit land area. It is mostly applied to humans, but sometimes to other living organisms too. It is a key geog ...
was . There were 177 housing units at an average density of . The racial makeup of the city was 94.6%
African American
African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from an ...
, 3.4%
white
White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no chroma). It is the color of objects such as snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully (or almost fully) reflect and scatter all the visible wa ...
, 0.3%
Native American, 0.7%
Asian, and 1.0% from two or more races.
There were 105 households, of which 36.2% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 19.0% were
married couples
Marriage, also called matrimony or wedlock, is a culturally and often legally recognised union between people called spouses. It establishes rights and obligations between them, as well as between them and their children (if any), and b ...
living together, 31.4% had a female householder with no husband present, 13.3% had a male householder with no wife present, and 36.2% were non-families. 32.4% of all households were made up of individuals, and 8.6% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.84 and the average family size was 3.63.
The median age in the city was 31.8 years. 31.9% of residents were under the age of 18; 9.8% were between the ages of 18 and 24; 21.8% were from 25 to 44; 29.8% were from 45 to 64; and 6.7% were 65 years of age or older. The gender makeup of the city was 46.6% male and 53.4% female.
2000 census
As of the
census
A census (from Latin ''censere'', 'to assess') is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording, and calculating population information about the members of a given Statistical population, population, usually displayed in the form of stati ...
of 2000, there were 449 people, 157 households, and 116 families residing in the city. The population density was . There were 231 housing units at an average density of . The racial makeup of the city was 96.4%
African American
African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from an ...
, 1.8%
white
White is the lightest color and is achromatic (having no chroma). It is the color of objects such as snow, chalk, and milk, and is the opposite of black. White objects fully (or almost fully) reflect and scatter all the visible wa ...
, 0.7%
Native American, 0.2%
Asian, and 0.9% from two or more races.
Hispanic
The term Hispanic () are people, Spanish culture, cultures, or countries related to Spain, the Spanish language, or broadly. In some contexts, Hispanic and Latino Americans, especially within the United States, "Hispanic" is used as an Ethnici ...
or
Latino of any race were 0.7% of the population.
There were 157 households, out of which 37.6% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 14.0% were
married couples
Marriage, also called matrimony or wedlock, is a culturally and often legally recognised union between people called spouses. It establishes rights and obligations between them, as well as between them and their children (if any), and b ...
living together, 50.3% had a female householder with no husband present, and 26.1% were non-families. 24.8% of all households were made up of individuals, and 8.3% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.86 and the average family size was 3.39.
In the city the population was spread out, with 38.3% under the age of 18, 11.1% from 18 to 24, 21.4% from 25 to 44, 20.5% from 45 to 64, and 8.7% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 26 years. For every 100 females, there were 98.7 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 84.7 males.
The median income for a household in the city was $10,156, and the median income for a family was $11,875. Males had a median income of $22,500 versus $12,031 for females. The
per capita income
Per capita income (PCI) or average income measures the average income earned per person in a given area (city, region, country, etc.) in a specified year.
In many countries, per capita income is determined using regular population surveys, such ...
for the city was $8,798. About 77.5% of families and 81.5% of the population were below the
poverty line
The poverty threshold, poverty limit, poverty line, or breadline is the minimum level of income deemed adequate in a particular country. The poverty line is usually calculated by estimating the total cost of one year's worth of necessities for ...
, including 82.9% of those under age 18 and 26.9% of those age 65 or over.
In 2015, press reports indicated the average lifespan in mostly-black Kinloch is thirty years less than in mostly-white
Wildwood.
Education
All of it is in the
Ferguson-Florissant School District.
[ ]
Text list
/ref>
References
Further reading
* Schuessler, Ryan.
. ''Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera Media Network (AJMN; , ) is a private-media conglomerate headquartered in Wadi Al Sail, Doha, funded in part by the government of Qatar. The network's flagship channels include Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera English, which pro ...
''. April 5, 2014.
External links
City of Kinloch
Kinloch Fire Protection District
NorthPark Partners
Kinloch, Missouri – St Louis Patina
{{authority control
Cities in St. Louis County, Missouri
Aviation history of the United States
Political scandals in the United States
Cities in Missouri
Populated places in Missouri established by African Americans