Tina Turner. Arthur Ashe. Chuck Berry. Tuskegee Airman Wendell Pruitt. These are just some of the Black luminaries who once lived in The Ville, a nine-by-five block community northwest of downtown St. Louis, Missouri. A century ago, housing segregation shut African Americans out of numerous St. Louis neighborhoods, and many settled in the Ville. “It’s one of the most historic Black communities in the United States,” says Aaron Williams, president of 4theVille, founded in 2017, which is revitalizing the Ville. ”It’s made notable contributions to American culture and even global culture in the humanities, the arts, and healthcare, and it’s home to some pretty significant civil rights cases.” Yet the city of St. Louis neglected the Ville, and it deteriorated. Meanwhile, some leveraged the Ville’s cultural significance to benefit people and places elsewhere. 4theVille is reclaiming the narrative and using it as a community-building tool. They’re educating people about the Ville’s rich history, preserving the neighborhood, and restoring its magic to make it an exciting place to live and visit. Says Williams, “It’s a community whose history justifies its preservation.”
4theVille, powered by intergenerational residents and volunteers, is helmed by diverse leadership. It uses interactive storytelling to share the Ville’s vibrant history and inspire engagement with the community. 4theVille rolls out Black history tours highlighting the significance of the Ville community and African-Americans’ contributions to St. Louis. It runs a docent training program to create more professional Black storytellers and a museum studies program inside the local high school. The organization also secured funding to redesign the community’s main commercial corridor. Its Cultural Boulevard Project will weave the Ville’s cultural legacy into its public domain and make it more lively, walkable, and attractive to economic development. Core to these efforts is environmental justice, calling out health disparities and public safety issues like flood risks. “We completed an EPA-funded walkability study of the city that highlighted disparities like lack of tree canopy [which causes heat island effect] and the need to restore over 150 feet of sidewalks because they’ve deteriorated to the point of no use or safety hazards,” Williams says.