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The history of greater St. Louis, is bound up in a tangle of local, state, and federal policies that explicitly and decisively sorted the City’s growing population by race. These policies yielded both an intense concentration of African Americans in certain wards or neighborhoods of St. Louis itself and a virtually unbreachable wall between the City and its suburbs. The isolation of African Americans on St. Louis’ near northside was accomplished and enforced in a variety of ways; some private and public strategies of exclusion overlapped and reinforced one another, others were cobbled together as legal challenges prohibited some of the more direct tools of segregation. At the center of this story was the local realty industry, which lobbied for explicitly racial zoning in the World War I era; pursued and enforced race-restrictive deed covenants into the middle years of the century; pioneered the practice of residential security rating which governed both private mortgages and public mortgage guarantees; and—as a central precept of industry practice—actively discouraged desegregation of the private housing market.

These maps summarize the principle elements of racial “redlining” as it developed in St. Louis. Click the layers you wish to display from the menu below. For a fuller explanation of each, hover over the layer name below.