In 1858, Cyprian Clamorgan wrote a brief but immensely readable book entitled The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. The grandson of a white voyageur and a mulat

Every American city had a small, self-aware, and active black elite, who felt it was their duty to set the standard for the less fortunate members of their race

In the battles to determine the destiny of the United States in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, St. Louis, then at the hinge between North, South,

This collection of fiction and poetry, memoirs and autobiography, history and journalism illuminates the African American experience in St. Louis in the ninetee