I just got back to E’Ville after having house-sat for someone who was sorta my boss on a temporary job about a half decade ago. He had to go on an emergency overnight trip, but didn’t want to leave his house alone.
The house is in the Benton Park neighborhood in South St. Louis City. That neighborhood is one with which I am fairly familiar, because I lived just to the west of the park when I was 7-12 years old. The areas to the west of BP are heavily black, to the north they are mostly white and a big haven for yuppie gentrification spillover from Soulard, and to the south mixed. That’s the way it is now, but when I was living in the area, it was pretty much all white — The changeover from mostly white to mostly black on the west side of BP didn’t happen until we moved away. The house I was minding today is well to the park’s north, in the yuppie area, but BP is the closest park to the domicile in question.
I decided to take his two dogs for a walk late this morning. As I was traversing through Benton Park, I saw that someone spray-painted some graffiti on the pavilion, which sits between the playground and one of the park’s lakes. The graffiti read, “Get the Fuck O Stinky N*****s.” (Obviously, I’m censoring the racial pejorative. I’m also guessing “O” was supposed to be “Out.”) One of the benches at the circular lake nearest the pavilion was spray painted with “N*****s.” The pavilion graffiti was red, and the bench graffiti was silver. The graffiti did not have its intended effect, as I counted at least three black adults and four black children in the playground area, (along with a lot of white adults and children), so they were either oblivious to the graffiti (which is unlikely, due to the size of the letters), or they wrote it off as a joke. There were at least two St. Louis City cop cars in the park, both sitting still. I saw at least three city cop cars actively patrolling the streets around the park, probably to find the doer(s).
I have a theory about the doers.
One of the few times I was in that neighborhood after I moved away and before the temporary job I mentioned was to take a gander at a certain address south of the park. In 2001 (?), in the several weeks before Martin Luther King’s birthday, a group of fanatical leftists were putting up placards along street poles and bus stop shelters in most of St. Louis City’s southern half, advertising a “spirited Pre-MLK Day Rally” Downtown. It listed the participating organizations, and among them were two orgs that used “communist” in their names. I snapped a pic of one of the placards, I’ve got it lying around in my hard drive somewhere. The point I made at the time as a caller to various shows on WGNU is that it was (and still is) total bullshit for neo-cons like Nut Gingrich and Ward Connerly to cast MLK as some kind of “conservative,” even of the milquetoast neo type. Why do all these self-proclaimed commie types so readily attach themselves to things with MLK imprimatur?
The placard had a phone number on it, and I reversed searched it to an address south of Benton Park. The house in question was some run-down frame house which looks way out of place in a block full of old time Kraut salt flats. It is, however, a big congregating point for South St. Louis’s left-wing extremist crowd. A bit west of there, on Cherokee, somewhere between the old shopping district and Gravois, is another hangout for the anarchist crowd. A few years ago, for another reason, I became familiar with that crowd, thanks to an unfortunate run-in. That joint is not too far from what used to be Herman Eisley’s Black Forest restaurant. I bet ole Herman would shit a brick if he could see what happened to that neighborhood.
So you’ve got two edifices associated with the local far left within walking distance of where this graffiti was spray-painted. I’m guessing racial hoax, on the part of these Info Shop or St. Louis Independent Media Center types.
