St. John, Missouri

St. John is a small city on St. Charles Rock Road a few miles from Lambert Airport, and its history carries a dark chapter that many residents have worked to move past.

The city incorporated in nineteen forty-five as a whites-only community and was formally classified as a sundown town, a place where Black residents were not welcome after dark. A sign on the main street once read, in plain language, that Black people were not to remain in town past sunset. Sundown towns were common across Missouri and the Midwest, enforced through custom, threat, and sometimes violence.

St. John eventually integrated along with the broader St. Louis region as federal civil rights law took hold.

Today it is a diverse working-class suburb of about six and a half thousand people.