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Recognition or reparations: What does Clayton owe a historic Black church? 9%
By Holly Edgell0%
4/30/2026, 5:00:00 PM
Keywords: Clayton, Urban Renewal, Development, Church, Faith, History, St Louis Black History, Black History
BS Summary: This article contains 13 faulty reasoning types, including Halo Effect, Recency Bias, and Optimism Bias, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 24.5% saturation with 517 hits. Analysis detected 1,015 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,108 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 25.7% and a BS Rank of 9% (15,393 of 16,813 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 91.60% of the article peer group.
On a Sunday in mid-March, Carmen Hill stood before fellow worshippers at a small brick church in north St.
Louis to deliver announcements, as she does every week, and told the congregation about an unusual ceremony coming in late April.
The city of Clayton, six miles to the southwest, was preparing to dedicate a historical marker at the site of the church's original sanctuary, at 216 South Brentwood Boulevard.
Hill, 70, attended the original church, known then as First Baptist Church of Clayton, as a child until it was forced to shutter in 1961, unable to fend off the forces of development in what would become Clayton’s commercial district.
She was happy with the plaque, she said later.
“I'm glad they're recognizing us, for one, because it's been a long time coming,” Hill said.
“It would be nice if there were some kind of reparations, though.”
For almost 70 years, First Baptist served a small but thriving African American neighborhood on a few blocks north of what is now Forest Park Parkway.
Then Clayton began to rezone its central district.
Businesses and commerce arrived.
Property taxes soared.
Historians and former residents say the city, in effect, pushed out its Black population.
Now some here, from church leaders to city officials to regular Clayton residents, are considering how to make things right for the residents who left.
The plaque will be unveiled Thursday.
But perhaps, several say, the church deserves more than a historical marker for the actions of Clayton's past.
Jerry King, a retired developer and Clayton resident, believes the church should be paid.
“The city of Clayton could deal with reparations by providing scholarships for schooling, by providing daycare for low income Black families, and somehow making some kind of reparations as a community for what happened,” he said.
Few government bodies, if any, have compensated a church community for razing a house of worship.
But cities have paid for other reasons:
In 2021, the state of California returned prime beachfront property to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce, a Black couple.
The city of Manhattan Beach had seized the beach using eminent domain nearly a century earlier.
That same year, Evanston, Illinois, started providing $25,000 housing grants to eligible Black residents who lived in the city between 1919 and 1969, or to their descendants.
Also in 2021, Durham, North Carolina, allocated $6 million toward reparations initiatives, including green infrastructure in historically Black neighborhoods.
In St.
Louis, a commission established in 2022 studied how the city should assess race-based harms and propose reparations.
The commission’s final report, issued in 2024, suggested grants, loans and cash payments to people displaced from McRee Town, Mill Creek Valley and the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project.
Clayton Mayor Bridget McAndrew knows a plaque for the church, now called Clayton Missionary Baptist, isn't enough.
“I think probably anything we could do is never going to be enough,” McAndrew said.
“I don't know how to rectify past wrongs other than hoping that conversation and recognition of our history prevents ongoing injustice in the future.”
King, the retired developer, said he would be willing to pay an extra tax to support reparation efforts.
King, 84, said he played his own role in displacing Central West End residents when he served as executive director for the Washington University Medical Center Redevelopment Corp., which began work in the 1960s.
“I'm ashamed in some ways of my involvement in that,” he said.
“I wasn't nearly as sensitive to the issues of gentrification and the effect of that on the lower income and racially diverse populations that were in those areas.”
He thinks Clayton has the chance to do better.
“Putting up plaques, that doesn't really address the issue,” King said.
'Reparations?
It would be hard to prove'
The relocation of Clayton Missionary Baptist Church was not much of a choice for Rev.
W.L.
Rhodes and his congregation.
As part of the urban renewal push that started around the late 1940s and early 1950s, Clayton changed zoning laws to accommodate commercial development.
According to local historian Donna Rogers-Beard, property taxes rose sharply for home and business owners in the neighborhoods that now comprise the city’s bustling commercial district, including the church.
Most of the people affected were Black, although a few white families also had to move.
“The erasure was complete,” Rogers-Beard said of the dislocation of Black Clayton residents.
Rogers-Beard said that city representatives went door to door, offering above-market prices to buy homes.
“It was the same urban renewal that was going across the country,” Rogers-Beard said.
“And leaders talked about areas that did not represent the city well.
Then the talk turned to a commercial center for Clayton.”
But reparations for the church now would be a hard sell, she said.
“Reparations?
It would be hard to prove that what happened was racial,” said Rogers-Beard.
“Because, one, it was an integrated community.
Two, there were no racial covenants in that area.”
Seeking to recognize past injustices and displaced Clayton communities, former mayor Michelle Harris formed a task force overseeing the installation of several plaques early in her tenure from 2019-2025.
The plaque at the church site is just one.
Another honors Filipinos displayed as savages at the 1904 World's Fair, another the Osage Nation forced to cede ancestral land.
Three represent Black neighborhood sites.
But Harris said her term ended before she could see all of her ideas through.
“My goal was to get as many sites commemorated as I could, and then to have their history on our website, and to then start doing public education about it, which I didn't really get to do,” Harris said.
The markers bear witness to the lives of between 800 and 1000 Black Claytonians who had to leave their lives behind to make way for new development.
Rogers-Beard said Black families lived along Hanley Road, Forsyth Boulevard and Bonhomme Avenue.
Some had been in Clayton as far back as the 1870s.
Today, on Hanley Road, there is a car wash where the home of the well-known McKay family once stood.
“The church was sort of a central part of the Black community’s connectedness, and I think that was kind of the last connecting piece for the Black community in Clayton,” Harris said.
A church united
Sitting on a gleaming wooden pew after choir practice on Holy Saturday, Hill said she was about five years old when the church closed its doors and moved to 2801 Union Boulevard in the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood of St.
Louis.
Clayton Missionary Baptist Church has been operating there ever since.
Hill said her primary impression from that time was a sense of unity and continuity fostered by Rhodes, who would lead the church for more than 60 years.
“I could see the camaraderie, the support and the love that they still had for one another that we brought with us from Clayton,” Hill said.
Hill’s mother, uncles and grandmother were all active members of the congregation.
It continued to serve Clayton’s Black community, but drew worshippers from across the region.
She remembers details from the original church: The smell of food cooking in the church basement.
Her grandmother singing in the choir.
The meetings and conventions held there, often statewide and even national in scope.
Hill even remembers watching white children frolic across the street in Shaw Park.
“I would sit out on the stoop and watch the people over there,” she said.
“They would skate, and I wanted to swim.
But at that time, Blacks were not allowed.
So I would sit out on the stoop and watch them.”
Hill said the trauma of displacement was not discussed, at least around her five-year-old ears.
For a short period after the church closed, it remained standing next to Barclay House, shuttered and at least twice the target of vandals.
“This was an important place,” Rogers-Beard said.
“So many people came to this church from Wellston, from Kirkwood, from Creve Coeur, from Webster Groves.
It was known around the state.”
Rhodes preached his last sermon at the original Clayton Missionary Baptist Church on Sept.
29, 1961.
Afterward, Rogers-Beard said, he locked the building’s doors and led the congregants in a solemn procession around the building.
It was razed just over one year later, according to city records.
Today, the property where the church once stood is occupied by a parking lot next to Bethesda Barclay House, a high-rise senior living building at 230 South Brentwood Boulevard.
If you’re heading north on Brentwood you might spot the historical marker on the roadside.
“People need to know the history,” Hill said.
“So many people that live in Clayton now don't have a clue that Black people used to live in Clayton."
What is owed?
Pastor L.
James Tate, who leads Clayton Mission Baptist Church today, never imagined that his first job leading a congregation would be in St.
Louis, where he was born but did not grow up, and didn't know of the church's story.
“I felt honored when I learned about the history of it, and how it started in Clayton, and how things happened,” said Tate, 45, the church’s sixth pastor.
Sitting in the small church office the day before Easter Sunday, Tate considered the historical marker that put the church back on the map, so to speak.
“Something more is needed,” he said.
“Even if it's as small as an apology or some type of monetary gift to say, ‘Hey, you know, what happened then was not right.’
Not just a plaque.”
Tate said monetary reparations from the city of Clayton would go toward growing and expanding the church’s ministry.
He wondered, half-joking, if a recreation center serving North City residents might be a fitting way for Clayton to make reparations.
“God has sustained us,” he said.
“But we could do more.”
Harris, the former Clayton mayor, said at least one person has asked whether the land itself, where the parking lot now sits, could be restored to the church.
“That's the thing that comes to mind for a lot of people when they think of, you know, making some kind of reparation or compensation,” she said.
McAndrew, Clayton’s current mayor, said the city’s Equity Commission has not recommended plans for additional reparation efforts.
She will be part of Thursday’s unveiling ceremony.
Maoise Palmer, 72, joined Clayton Missionary Baptist Church in 2025 and quickly learned its history.
“I don't think a plaque is enough,” Palmer said.
“But I don't know if there's any amount of money or whatever that the city could give as restitution for what they did.”
Geoff Ward, who teaches and researches racial justice at Washington University, said the definition of reparations is “fuzzy” and lacks broad consensus.
Nevertheless, he said, commemorative work — like the church plaque — is part of the process.
“I don't think we can really get to a place of pursuing something like restitution or compensation or rehabilitation if we don't at least have a shared understanding of where we are and what happened and why it matters,” he said.
Past and present
Accounts from the early 20th century characterize Rhodes, newly arrived from Mississippi, as committed, charismatic and energetic.
Decades later, Tate’s parishioners describe him in similar terms.
“I really like Reverend Tate's preaching style,” Palmer, the new parishioner, said.
“But also his love that he shows toward each member.”
Tate preaches with vigor and eloquence, sometimes wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the church logo and other times clad in a three-piece suit.
On a Sunday in late March, he embraced church members who shared emotional testimony and later sat in the front pew to encourage three junior pastors whom he’d assigned to deliver short sermons that day.
Since 2020, he said, church attendance has grown by at least 40 people to 150 total.
“I do appreciate the growth numerically,” he said, “But my main focus is I see our people’s spiritual growth through the roof.”
The church is now on the cusp of another change.
Later this year, it will move to a location on Clara Avenue.
With or without a form of reparations from the City of Clayton, Tate said, the church will live on — just as it has since its founding in 1893.
Carmen Hill is excited about the new facility on Clara.
“It's a little bigger than what we have,” she said.
“It's all on one level, and that's what's really exciting because our congregation is getting older.”
For more information about the River City Journalism Fund, which seeks to support journalism in St.
Louis, go to rcjf.org.
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