The enslavement of Africans became central to the economic success of the British farmers and eventually to the economic flourishing of the United States.

The enslavement of African men and women in the American colonies was supported by Western thought, which portrayed Black skin as inferior to White skin.

As White farmers in the colonies became dependent upon African forced labor for economic success, they passed laws that used race as the justification for perpetuating African bondage and forced labor, thereby protecting White cultural, political, and economic dominance.

After 1718, when they established a strong presence in New Orleans, the French began importing African slaves to the Mississippi region in response to increasing needs for labor.

As with other colonial cities, St. Louis’ European population remained influenced by Western notions of race and viewed Africans as inferior to English, French, and Spanish colonists.

Even as the legal system across the French, Spanish, and British colonies moved to deny Africans their rights, Africans themselves retained a vision of resistance that refused to embrace slavery as a permanent institution.

The White founders and writers of the Constitution protected and defended the legality of race-based forced bondage and enslavement even while Black authors continued to highlight the willful misunderstanding and misapplication of freedom in the new country.

In 1790 Congress passed the Naturalization Act, which denied citizenship to any Black man or woman, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free.

Abolition of slavery challenged the economic model upon which the South derived its wealth and stability, but it also threatened the legal, cultural, and political status quo of the North and South.

The first half of the nineteenth century brought the debate over the legality and morality of the institution of slavery to a dramatic climax.

The history of the Catholic Church, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), and enslaved people in St. Louis is significant because the Church established itself in the area using slaves as laborers.

As part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, Missouri entered the United States as a slave state, while the state of Maine entered the United States as a free state to maintain the balance of states allowing slavery and those that did not.

As the public debate over free versus slave states continued, an African American slave named Dred Scott pushed the conversation further. He sued for his and his family’s freedom arguing that they had been enslaved in a free state and therefore should be released as free.

The conflict over slavery reached its zenith during a Senate debate on the floor of the Senate in May 1856.

While Missouri entered the United States as a slave state, Missouri entered the Civil War as a border state, with Unionists and Confederates struggling for power.

Early Reconstruction efforts empowered blacks to own land, build communities, form churches, vote for government officials, and send their children to school.

When the federal government withdrew its support of Reconstruction in 1876, the period of post-civil war growth for Blacks ended. Local and state laws were quickly passed that racially segregated Blacks from much of white life in the South. Known as “Jim Crow,” these laws, regulations, and social requirements relegated Blacks to second-class citizens.

As the South struggled to recover economically from the old plantation system, white anger grew and was focused on Blacks. African Americans were viewed suspiciously, and brutal, extrajudicial killings were used to control them and keep them in a state of fear and subjugation. Lynching became an especially horrendous tool used by the Ku Klux Klan and other white mobs as a way to instill fear and to ensure that Blacks followed the racial segregation required by whites.

The effects of Jim Crow laws were compounded by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 which held that racial segregation did not violate the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. The Court narrowly interpreted the amendment, effectively formalizing the racist “separate but equal” culture that pervaded the South and border states like Missouri into law, and that led to systematic, gross inequality and violence against African Americans.