Kinloch: Missouri's First Black City

Kinloch, wedged between Ferguson and Lambert Airport, was Missouri's first incorporated Black city. A real estate company began selling lots there in eighteen eighty-five, marketing specifically to Black buyers in Saint Louis. More families arrived after the East Saint Louis race riots of nineteen seventeen and during the Great Migration.

The town grew into a tight community of homeowners and businesses. But Kinloch also sits at the origin of American aviation. Kinloch Field hosted an extraordinary string of firsts: the first presidential flight, when Theodore Roosevelt went up in October nineteen ten; the first parachute jump from a powered airplane, by Captain Albert Berry on March first, nineteen twelve; and the first aerial photographs and airmail.

Albert Bond Lambert later leased the field, gave it his name, and eventually sold it to Saint Louis. Today Kinloch has fewer than three hundred residents, its housing bought out in the nineteen eighties under a noise-abatement program for the very airport it helped create.