Tall and lean, with long dreads, Gwen Moore is wearing black leather pants with a white shirt and long black jacket. Her appearance is as dramatic as her Missouri History Museum exhibits. She carries keys to the basement storerooms at the Missouri Historical Society’s Library & Research Center, where she unlocks a heavy steel door to reveal a space the size of a small condo. It’s operating-room clean—light-, temperature-, and humidity-controlled—and constantly monitored. The room is filled with rows of tall gray steel cabinets.
Guarding the entrance is a mannequin wearing an antebellum-era hoop skirt. “Our biggest collection is in textiles, mostly women’s things,” says Moore. She unlocks a cabinet, inserts the key into an upper drawer, and gently folds back acid-free paper. An exquisite black lace Victorian mourning dress lies as if in a coffin.
Moore has been delving into these storerooms for decades. As curator of Urban Landscape and Community Identity, she preserves, assembles, and tells stories through historic artifacts. The story she told five years ago in the exhibit #1 in Civil Rights: The African American Freedom Struggle in St. Louis surprised St. Louisans. Some 250,000 visitors to the Missouri History Museum discovered this city has led America in civil rights since 1819, when free Blacks and whites rallied against the territory entering the union as a slave state. The exhibit won awards from the American Association for State and Local History, Washington University Brown School, and the University of Missouri–St. Louis.
“So many parents came up to me after the exhibit and said their children were not getting this history in school,” Moore says.
“People didn’t expect to find stories of such optimism in the exhibit,” recalls Jody Sowell, the new president and CEO of the Missouri Historical Society, which operates the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park, the Library & Research Center on Skinker, and the Soldiers Memorial Military Museum downtown. “Gwen looks for stories of hope and resilience.”
“For each exhibit, I start with the narrative, then go looking for ways to tell it,” Moore says. “I like telling stories about our history that people don’t know.”
Now, she’s preparing her next surprise: an exhibit about resilience during segregation. “I won’t do Black trauma and suffering,” she says. “I don’t catalog pain.”
The narrative for the upcoming exhibit came to her after reading a disturbing document in the archives: the 1916 residential segregation ordinance, which St. Louis voters passed three to one. The proposed legislation restricted Blacks from moving onto a block with more than 75 percent white residents. The U.S. Supreme Court later struck it down.
Moore shakes her head. “Whites feared a Black invasion,” she says. At the time, according to the 1910 Census, only 7 percent of St. Louisans were African American, 44,000 out of 643,000 residents.
The new show, as yet untitled, is tentatively scheduled for 2025. It takes years to research and assemble the artifacts—some of them have to be sent out for conservation, often to other states. “Everyone becomes involved in an exhibit,” Moore says. “It’s collaborative. Like the credit roll at the end of a movie.”
“This new exhibit will address why St. Louis is one of the most segregated cities in America,” Sowell explains. Blacks once lived in every ward of the city, but by the end of World War I they were forced to cluster in neighborhoods. The largest were Mill Creek Valley in Midtown, The Ville in North St. Louis, and Finney Avenue near Vandeventer Boulevard.
In another storeroom, Moore unlocks a cabinet of hats worn by Black men who broke through racial barriers: There’s the hat of Tuskegee Airman Charles White, a metal firefighter’s helmet worn in the 1950s by Capt. Matthew Miley of #29 Engine Company after the St. Louis Fire Department integrated, and one worn by riverboat Capt. Kevin East, who managed the Becky Thatcher and the Tom Sawyer for the Streckfus line. Moore will write labels that explain the hats’ significance.
Other artifacts show how African Americans enjoyed typical middle-class leisure activities. Moore points out a red jacket from the 1940s and ’50s that belonged to Raymond Collier, a member of the Prince Hall Freemasonry, the oldest and largest predominantly African American fraternity in the nation. That African Americans achieved middle-class life is also displayed by a large model speedboat that Arthur J. Kennedy Jr. once raced at the Boating Club, an all-Black group established by his father, Arthur Kennedy Sr. Both men were among the few African Americans in the National Outboard Association and the first Black professional speedboat racers in the world.
“Look what we built despite residential segregation, how we built strong institutions and communities in the ‘Negro Districts,’” Moore says. “They’re a testament to Black achievement.”
Photography by Izaiah Johnson
Moore in the Missouri Historical Society’s Library & Research Center.
The City Within the City
The museum’s forthcoming exhibit will highlight life in Mill Creek Valley—where Moore grew up.
The once-vibrant community, which ran along the central corridor from 20th Street to Saint Louis University, was home to 20,000 African Americans, one of the largest Black communities in America. It was a tight-knit city within the city. Most residents were working class or middle class. There were 839 businesses, some Black owned. Their motto: “Buy where you can work.” Neighbors and friends looked out for one another’s children, as Vivian Gibson recounts in her book The Last Children of Mill Creek.
“Mill Creek epitomizes the talent of African Americans,” Moore says. “Here Blacks were treated as full citizens and intellectual equals, which is what we always wanted.”
Blacks and whites packed Tom Turpin’s Rosebud Café to hear Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin pound the keys in ragtime. Some say Joplin invented rags, the first American form of music; others say that Turpin published the first piece with his “Harlem Rag” in 1897.
Many storied people from St. Louis history come from Mill Creek. Everyone knows the name Josephine Baker, the dancer, movie star, and French Resistance operative. How many know, however, that she started her career as a child nicknamed “Tumpy,” dancing for pennies and nickels? Everyone knows philanthropist Annie Malone, who created the children’s home. But how many know that she built her fortune from her hair care products in Mill Creek? (She later moved to The Ville and established Poro College.) At a time when very few white women entered law school, Margaret Bush Wilson not only tried cases in court, but she also became the president of the local and state NAACP boards. She later served as the first woman to chair the NAACP’s national board.
More legal history was made in Mill Creek, where civil rights attorneys Homer G. Phillips and George Vaughn practiced law. Phillips led the successful fight to build a hospital for African Americans. Vaughn represented J.D. Shelley in the landmark Shelley v. Kraemer, which struck down restrictive covenant clauses. It’s where Sidney Redmond, chief counsel for Lloyd Gaines, prepared for the trial that proved the University of Missouri discriminated against Blacks. This landmark case laid the foundation for Brown v. Board of Education.
The hub of Mill Creek’s political, commercial, and social life was the People’s Finance Building. Known as a “race enterprise,” it marked the first commercial building in the U.S. built entirely with Black money. The People’s Finance Corp., established by seven prominent Black professionals, funded construction. The corporation also gave loans to African Americans when white-owned lending institutions refused. The People’s Finance Building opened its doors in 1926 to a crowd of 5,000.
“Everybody who was anybody had his office in the People’s Finance Building,” Gail Milissa Grant, a former U.S. State Department cultural attaché and daughter of civil rights attorney David M. Grant, recalls in her memoir, At the Elbows of My Elders. Physicians, attorneys, and the local branches of national organizations, such as the NAACP and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, had offices in the building. Judge Nathan B. Young set up the St. Louis American newsroom in the building in 1928.
The building gave these men and women a place to organize civil rights strategies when they were barred from downtown restaurants and hotels. In the penthouse ballroom, they donned formal attire to dance at the prestigious sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha gala. (Vice President Kamala Harris is a member.)
In 1959, however, city officials tore down Mill Creek Valley in the name of urban renewal. In The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, Harvard historian Walter Johnson writes that Mill Creek Valley got in the way of the expansion of Highway 40.
As James Baldwin put it, “Urban renewal means Negro removal.” In tearing down Mill Creek Valley, St. Louis tore down much of its history.
One Family’s Story
You’ve probably never heard of Flora Armstead Horne, Moore’s mother. Despite the odds, this amazing woman raised her six children to become one of the most successful sets of siblings in American history and in a working-class Black family during segregation.
As an adolescent, Horne left Starkville, Mississippi, to live with a sister in St. Louis and attend Vashon High School. “All she wanted out of life was to be an educated person,” says Moore. “That was the most important thing to her.”
Horne believed that a library card was a passport to a better life. “Every Saturday, she sent us to the main St. Louis Public Library, the only place Blacks were welcomed,” Moore recalls, “where we had to check out six books and read them by the following Saturday, when we returned them and checked out six new ones.” It taught the Horne children to keep learning.
Moore’s eldest brother, William Horne, became a federal administrative law judge in Kansas City. Her brother Gerald Horne is an endowed history professor at the University of Houston, with 30 published academic books and a law degree. Her sister Malaika Horne worked as a public policy analyst at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, served as president of the University of Missouri System’s board of curators, and sat on the board of the Saint Louis Art Museum. (She also published Mother Wit about their mother.) Her late sister Mary Horne Young set up the African and African American Studies Department at Berea College in Kentucky. The baby of the family, Marvin Horne, is a professional jazz guitarist in New York, where he was the longtime musical director of the Cotton Club. Moore’s daughter is a labor attorney in New Jersey. “I’m the only failure,” Moore says, adding that she’s finished all but her dissertation for her doctorate.
Her older sister Malaika Horne begs to differ. “Gwen is the smartest of all of us,” she says of Moore, “smarter even than Gerald, who went to Princeton on a scholarship. She set the standard for our family.”
Photography by Izaiah Johnson
Moore on the campus of Harris-Stowe State University, which sits in Mill Creek Valley’s former footprint.
“Gwen’s incredibly modest,” adds Sowell. “We created an advisory board when we developed the #1 in Civil Rights exhibit. No one at the table knew more about civil rights than Gwen. I can trust her to explain the breadth of history and how each layer played out. She’s our expert, our model for that. She doesn’t look at any moment in history as self-contained but digs into how it got there and what we can do going forward. Gwen creates a useable past.”
As a child, Moore devoured history books but decided to become a social worker when she turned 15 years old because she didn’t think there were jobs in history—and certainly not for a woman of color. Instead, she majored in sociology at UMSL and received her master’s degree in social work from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.
She came to the Missouri History Museum in 1998 as a research fellow. Under the tutelage of Jackie Dace, she conducted oral histories for the project Through the Eyes of a Child: Growing Up Black in St. Louis, 1940–1980, which captured childhood memories of St. Louisans who grew up in four predominantly African American communities: The Ville, Carr Square, Kinloch, and East St. Louis. “It was just me and the tape recorder,” Moore recalls.
After completing a history fellowship at the University of Indiana, she returned in 2004 for another oral history project. “There are so many interesting people,” Moore says. “You hear about family history as far back as you can go and then bring them up to date. Oral history is like being a social worker. You learn about their childhood, even if it was difficult. People reveal things, although you can’t show your reaction. They have to trust you.”
A number of people she interviewed became good friends, including 97-year-old Billie Teneau. As a young white mother in the 1940s, Teneau integrated lunch counters at downtown department stores and became a founding member of the St. Louis chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. Moore often asks during interviews, What else do you have—letters, photos, clothes, objects—to illustrate your story?
“We don’t yet have a strong Black collection,” she notes, “so we’ve developed the African American History Initiative.”
“The one thing Gwen does so well is she’s always looking for inspiration from the past to give hope for the future,” Sowell says. “She shows how we can use the past to create a better present and future. She shows how an individual can make real change.”
Moore’s own story took a dramatic turn when she was 10 and her family was forced to leave their house in Mill Creek Valley during land clearance. They left behind the entire infrastructure of their lives: friends and neighbors, schools, and churches.
Courtesy of Malaika Horne
Gwen Moore (center) with sister Malaika Horne and Daughter Heather.
“I’d enjoyed a childhood with a sense of safety in an all-Black community. People looked out for each other. My family was respected. It was traumatic to move,” Moore says. “I was in shock when we moved. Integrated North St. Louis was not welcoming. One of our Black neighbors referred to us as rag-pickers.”
For years, Moore would seize any opportunity to learn about her old community. “Mill Creek was no slum, as the city fathers claimed. What we had was inconsistent zoning,” she says. The former mansion of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, on North Garrison, which was then a funeral home, wasn’t far from a dilapidated building. Redlining prevented homeowners from receiving loans to make repairs.
For decades, academics and urban planners have looked at the issues through a white lens. Moore plans to change that through exhibits seen through a Black lens.
“I’ve always been interested in social justice—I remember segregation,” she says. “When you’re Black, you want to understand. You want answers. Why discrimination happens. Why it continues to happen.
“I’m inspired by what W.E.B. DuBois said: ‘Black institutions are a source of strength. We cannot be afraid of our history.’”
If you have a story to tell or an artifact from a Black community in Missouri, you can contact Moore at gmoore@mohistory.org.
Editor's Note: This article has been update to reflect the correct spelling of Jackie Dace's last name.
