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East St. Louis is in the suburbs of America's heartland. Suburban spaces are growing at much faster rates than central cities in terms of household income, business growth and development, falling rates of unemployment, and digital access. The city of East St. Louis was established as an industrial suburb, and was developed to promote and protect particular industrial interests. Its government operated primarily to protect investment and industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Great Depression hit East St. Louis particularly hard before the industrial demands of World War II sparked a resurgence. East St. Louis is the city with the highest percentage of African Americans in the nation, but it has a population of just under 30,000. A range of housing remains today in East St. Louis; however, abandoned or deteriorated businesses, multifamily dwellings, and single-family homes dot almost every block and neighborhood.

This book aims to capture the complexities in the glorious resilience of East St. Louisans, as well as in the more commonly observed desperation and helplessness of the city itself. Race and place mattered throughout the twentieth century. The status of East St. Louis as a transportation hub defined the city's prominence in the early half of the twentieth century, but its marked decline distinguished it thereafter. Place matters, but no space—rural, urban, or suburban—is an escape from the negative effects of race for African Americans; a truth that the circumstances of East St. Louis unfortunately demonstrate. The book uses a case-study framework and qualitative research methods to undertake a holistic investigation of the cultural aspects of family and work life, while also examining the role of larger processes in shaping these circumstances.

The car problems of citizens of East St. Louis stop looking like the petty nuisances of poverty. The love–hate relationship of East St. Louisans with the automobile has an additional component that outsiders seldom notice: they are actually far more dependent on reliable private transportation than are more conventionally categorized suburbanites. There are few job opportunities within or near East St. Louis. Most residents search for employment in St. Louis proper and its predominantly white and outerring suburbs on both the Missouri and Illinois sides. Catching or borrowing rides adds to the cumulative frustrations caused by such obvious burdens of poverty as shortage of food or money. Ideals of black masculinity have been linked to the automobile culture. Unemployment rates for African American men have always been significantly higher than those for whites.

Contrary to popular belief, many black men and women want to work and actually do. Most black men and women do the work that is hardly noticed. Joblessness, underemployment, and poverty wages have been the hallmark of inner-city neighborhoods, not the suburbs. Unemployment rates in East St. Louis were strikingly high well before the high profile of massive layoffs. The East St. Louisans were clear and articulate about how their basic life circumstances affected decisions pertaining to jobs and work. East St. Louis was declared a federal Empowerment Zone in 1998. Whether low-income communities benefited on the whole from Empowerment Zone initiatives was questionable. People in East St. Louis want good jobs and the good life these are expected to bring.

Today, in the metropolitan-area small cities, African Americans are more likely than whites to live in poverty, to experience a high rate of school dropouts, and to be incarcerated. At a later point in the twenty-first century, a clear majority of African Americans will be living in the suburbs, not in either rural areas or inner cities. The experiences of those in East St. Louis report that there is nothing particularly romantic about the deprivations of working-class suburban life in this space or place, especially for those at the outermost socioeconomic margins. The hallmarks of suburban living were being threatened by a global economic crisis, but working-class suburbanites in East St. Louis have been feeling the pinch for a long time. Without fixes of the problems at the root level, the spiral of distress and abandonment will continue.

This chapter discusses how the lifelong burdens borne by the men of East St. Louis translate into their fears about a bedrock of their identity: their responsibility to keep loved ones safe and protected. For families relocating from cities to suburbia, safety—freedom from fear of violence and property crime—is a key motivator. It seems that many black fathers believe it is their paternal obligation to provide support, security, and protection for their children. The stories presented illustrate that fathers strive to protect, and that they try to protect young ones from the everyday perils and violence associated with urban areas. They try to protect daughters from harmful sexual encounters and boys from the drug scene. In East St. Louis, when it comes to the safety of children, even parents' overtime often is not enough.

The historic election of Barack Obama, cause for euphoria throughout the American black community, had special poignance in Illinois. Obama simultaneously served as a potent role model for black youth and formidable proof that racial barriers cannot prevent African Americans from succeeding. His entry to the Oval Office seemed eerily analogous to the rise of black mayors in industrial hubs such as East St. Louis, weakened by falling tax revenues, financial bankruptcy, declining infrastructure, and the dissolute practices of exiting white administrations. The charges of nepotism and corruption against the mayor are elaborated. The circumstances of East St. Louis provide an opportunity to reconsider the core values and direct attention to building equity and creating a just America.

“The Radical Humanist Meets the Black Power Revolution: Dunham in East St. Louis” discusses how Dunham was an important figure in the Black Arts Movement. She established multiple institutions in East St. Louis to enact her ideas about African diasporic arts education as a means of empowerment. The most important institution was the Performing Arts Training Center (PATC), where she steered youth away from violence and toward productive lives. Her dream to make PATC a degree-granting institution of higher education was in line with many of the aims of the Black Studies movement on college campuses nationwide. As always, she emphasized diasporic thinking. She brought Senegalese drummers Zakariyah Diouf and Mor Thiam to PATC and brought PATC students to Haiti. She created networks to promote her philosophy on a national scale, becoming involved with the Institute of the Black World and other organizations.

This chapter reveals that people who hustle also work in the formal labor market. For East St. Louis African Americans, hustling strategies have been rooted in the city's history. Residents from East St. Louis distinguish “dirty” and “clean” hustles. The dirty kind involves what the public defines as vice or criminality: the sex trade and the narcotics industry. Clean hustles consist of more routine “off the books” interactions, such as the unlicensed auto mechanics and food sales. Prostitution has a deep history in East St. Louis. Dirty or clean, hustling in East St. Louis is about survival. The male and female hustlers there share a belief in the American dream, using hard work and a strong will to climb the socioeconomic ladder.

This chapter addresses the seemingly never-ending demands on East St. Louis women for the care of others. These women bathe, dress, and nurture children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. It is shown that the life for African Americans in suburban space and place has differed markedly from that of their white counterparts. Then, it is noted that women make decisions about the care of others, work, and retirement, and that their own health is caught in the middle. Researchers suggest that married elderly women are happier and healthier than their single counterparts. Responsibilities to family do not end when children reach the age of eighteen, nor do they dissipate when women reach the age of retirement in their suburban place.

This chapter uses the mortuary data of the Mississippian period of the American Bottom as evidence in support of the heterarchical polyistic locale-centric account, in general, and of the World Renewal Cult Heterarchy model, in particular. It is noted that under a hierarchical monistic modular polity system based on proprietary corporate clans, a unitary CBL system should exist, with a strong emphasis on primary burial and with variation in artifact and burial facilities correlated with the presence or absence of ranked clans and specialization. It is also clear that the nature of the clan-cult relation in a polyistic-type social system is a function of the relative degree of polluting that everyday settlement and subsistence practices are perceived to be generating. An analysis is initiated by concentrating on four American Bottom mortuary sites that have been excavated and/or analyzed using modern archaeological standards: the East St. Louis Stone Quarry site, the Kane Mounds site, the Wilson Mound, and Mound 72. The Wilson Mound is interpreted by George Milner as an elite cemetery, although a distinctly “lesser elite” cemetery.

A skeletal national communications network of news by, about, and for African Americans came into existence as black men and women migrated from the rural South for better wages and opportunities in the industrial North and elsewhere. Upstart newspaper publishers courted readers by adopting modern journalism practices and emboldening demands for racial reform, as illustrated by the Chicago Defender and Crisis magazine. News coverage of the East St. Louis race riot and the so-called Houston mutiny showed how journalists continued to denounce segregation and discrimination even after the United States joined World War I. Press criticism provoked government surveillance and censorship. State intimidation, though, failed to silence dissident publishers who claimed to rival ministers as Black America’s preeminent leaders.