Broken Heart Park

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:
Our story this week is about a park. Not some massive city park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted or anything… just an ordinary, neighborhood park in a suburb of St. Louis. It’s about seven acres, with soccer fields, two playgrounds, tennis courts, and a creek that runs along the back. Dave Davis worked there as a groundskeeper in the 90s. It was an unpaid position, but it came with a strange perk.

Dave Davis:
The tradeoff was, is that you get to live in a house for free in a good school district, in a nice neighborhood, a park in your backyard.

Roman Mars:
Right at the entrance of the park, there was a house where Dave and his family lived. At the time he and his wife were struggling to save enough money to buy their own house, so it was perfect for them.

Dave Davis:
It was quite honestly, it felt like an answer to a prayer because we were newly married. We had two children at this point. And, you know, we really wanted to own a home and we wanted to get ahead.

Roman Mars:
At first glance, the house seemed just like an ordinary ranch home.

Dave Davis:
From the outside, It looked like pretty much any of the other houses in the area, maybe a little bit smaller. But it was when you got inside the house that you realized, wow, and the only way to describe it is to be quick and say, it’s like somebody hurried up and finished it.

Roman Mars:
And that’s because that is exactly what had happened. It turns out that Dave’s house wasn’t supposed to be the home for the groundskeeper…

Sofie Kodner:
In fact the park was never supposed to be a park. It was private property that once belonged to a prominent Black doctor. But the land was taken from him before he could even finish building his home.

Roman Mars:
That’s reporter Sofie Kodner.

Sofie Kodner:
I grew up near this park. I used to walk there after elementary school pretty much everyday. It’s in the town of Creve Coeur. It’s a French name, CRev KUR. But we pronounce it CREEV CORE. That’s Midwestern French.

Roman Mars:
Today, Creve Coeur is mostly white — about 75%– and St. Louis more broadly is one of the most segregated cities in the United States. That didn’t happen by accident. In the past, places like Creve Coeur actively prevented non-white people from moving in.

Sofie Kodner:
This is the story of one of those people – that prominent Black doctor, who back in the 1950s wanted his own piece of the suburban dream. It’s about the lengths the town went to to keep him from moving there and a powerful legal tool that was used to uphold segregation. I didn’t learn about this history growing up – in a white family I should say. The people of Creve Coeur ignored it for decades, let it lie buried beneath the green grass of that neighborhood park. But in recent years the story has resurfaced, forcing my hometown to finally face its ugly past.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
Howard Phillip Venable was a renowned ophthalmologist from Detroit. He graduated from medical school with honors in 1940, and became the first African American to earn an ophthalmology degree from New York University three years later. He passed the board exam with the highest score since its inception.

Rossalind Venable Woodhouse:
I always knew him as a larger than life character.

Sofie Kodner:
That is Rossalind Venable Woodhouse, Dr. Venable’s niece. Rossalind was close with her uncle growing up, she looked up to him. And she remembers going to the movies to watch her uncle in news clips that they’d play on the big screen.

Rossalind Venable Woodhouse:
That is what used to play between double features at the movies. And he would be featured because of his accomplishments.

Sofie Kodner:
Venable moved to St. Louis in 1943, during the era of Jim Crow. He worked as an eye doctor at the all-black Homer G. Phillips hospital, which had a reputation for training some of the best nurses and doctors in the country. Venable taught there too. He had this schtick where he would start his classes by asking students to spell ophthalmology.

Roman Mars:
That’s O-p-h-t-h. Two H’s in there.

Sofie Kodner:
Glaucoma and cataracts were a big problem in African-American communities, so Venable wanted to prepare his residents to work with Black patients specifically. One paper that he published on glaucoma in 1952 is still a crucial reference for ophthalmologists today.

Roman Mars:
Venable was also a renaissance man. Outside of work, he was a talented trumpet player. He even played with legends like Ethel Waters and Duke Ellington.

[MUSIC]

Sofie Kodner:
And music was a big part of the Venable family life. When Dr. Venable and his brothers got together, they used to do this dance called the Sand.

Rossalind Venable Woodhouse:
You would spread sand out literally, like beach sand, out on a hardwood floor and then the sound of the feet going over the sand was rhythmic.

Allen Venable:
He’s always been a kind of dapper dresser, and he talked eloquently, you know. And he had, like, a little funny laugh that he would put on and he was just a remarkable man, you know.

Sofie Kodner:
That’s Allen Venable, Dr. Venable’s nephew. Allen remembers his uncle as the life of the party.

Allen Venable:
He would talk to anybody. He loved to talk #1. He just had a presence about himself because he knew what he was talking about and he could take over the room.

Sofie Kodner:
In the 1950s, Venable was a St. Louis socialite. He spent time in elite circles, with wealthy Black and white people. And he was used to being the first Black person to step foot in places that had previously been for white people only.

Roman Mars:
And in 1956 he took one of those steps into the St. Louis suburb of Creve Coeur.

[MUSIC]

Sofie Kodner:
One day in March of 1956, Dr. Venable saw a small ad in a local newspaper, promoting 22 vacant lots in Creve Coeur.

Roman Mars:
At the time, Creve Coeur was an all white community, sparsely populated with plenty of open space. Venable purchased 2 of the lots. He paid up-front, in cash.

DR. VENABLE / ARCHIVAL TAPE
[MY POINT WAS I WANTED FREEDOM OF CHOICE. I WANTED TO BE ABLE TO MOVE ANYWHERE THAT I HAD MONEY, I FELT LIKE I COULD MOVE TO.]

Sofie Kodner:
That is Dr. Howard Phillip Venable himself. Speaking on an oral history tape recorded in the 1980s.

DR. VENABLE / ARCHIVAL TAPE
[JUST LIKE A WHITE DOCTOR WITH COMPARABLE FINANCIAL STATUS CAN MOVE ANYWHERE HE WANTS.]

Sofie Kodner:
And Venable wanted to move to Creve Coeur to build his dream home.

Rossalind Venable Woodhouse:
And everybody was excited because it was ranch-style. And that was the first time I had ever heard of a ranch-style home. so. That was kind of exotic in my little mind.

Roman Mars:
Venable’s niece Rossalind was a teenager at the time. She remembers looking over the blueprints of her uncle’s grand domestic vision.

Rossalind Venable Woodhouse:
Oh yes. He was talking about a swimming pool, tennis courts and a nine hole golf course (laughs). All of that.

Sofie Kodner:
Then some of Venable’s colleagues at the hospital got interested in the area too. Soon, several more Black families started making plans to buy lots in Creve Coeur.

Roman Mars:
But achieving the suburban dream was never going to come easy. Even for a group of accomplished doctors with savings and social capital.

Sofie Kodner:
Right away, some of the white residents in Creve Coeur started organizing against Venable and the other Black families. They were afraid that their property values would decline if the neighborhood became mixed-race. So, they devised a wholesome looking plan with a sinister twist to keep their new neighbors out. They would build a park on the lots. And they quickly raised twenty-five thousand dollars amongst themselves to make it happen.

Roman Mars:
Dr. Venable says that they successfully intimidated many of the other Black families.

DR. VENABLE / ARCHIVAL TAPE
[ALL THE OTHER PEOPLE TOOK THEIR MONEY OUT BECAUSE THEY SCARED THEM. SAID IF YOU DON’T GET YOUR MONEY OUT OF HERE, YOU’LL LOSE EVERYTHING. I WENT TO THEM AND SAID, “LOOK, THAT LOT IS YOURS.” EVEN THOSE DOWNPAYMENTS, IT’S LIKE A CAR. IF YOU MAKE A DOWN PAYMENT ON A CAR, THAT CAR IS YOURS. UNLESS YOU DEFAULT ON THE PAYMENT, THEY CAN’T TAKE IT. WELL, THEY GOT SCARED.]

Roman Mars:
The other families pulled their money out, but Venable decided to stay and fight. He had paid cash for his property, he owned it outright, and he wasn’t about to give it up.

DR. VENABLE / ARCHIVAL TAPE
[BUT, I WAS A FIGHTER AND I WOULD CRITICIZE BLACKS, WHITES, ANYBODY, IF I THOUGHT I WAS RIGHT.]

Sofie Kodner: Dr. Venable hired an architect and started building a brick house right there on his land. But the white residents kept trying to push him out.

DR. VENABLE / ARCHIVAL TAPE
[THEY TRIED TO BUY US OUT ABOUT 10 TIMES. WE WOULDN’T SELL. THEN THEY SLAPPED ON THIS EMINENT DOMAIN.]

Roman Mars:
Eminent domain. That’s how the US government takes private property. The rule with eminent domain is that the government can only seize private land if it’s for public use – for things that benefit the public, like roads and airports… and parks.

Sofie Kodner:
But throughout the 20th Century, cities across the US used eminent domain as a tool to take land away from Black people and keep neighborhoods segregated. Central Park, in New York City, was a Black neighborhood that got converted to a park using eminent domain. Bruce’s Beach — a resort run by a Black couple in Los Angeles in the 1920s — suffered the same fate. In fact, Dr. Venable’s first house in St. Louis was taken by the state to make a highway!

Roman Mars:
One study by the Institute for Justice found that in the 1950s and the 60s, one million people in the US were displaced through eminent domain. More than two-thirds of those people were African-American.

Sofie Kodner:
And that is exactly what was happening in Creve Coeur. Many white people supported an effort to use eminent domain to take Venable’s land, where he was actively building his house, and turn it into a park.

Roman Mars:
They called it Beirne Park, after the mayor at the time, John T. Beirne, who was leading the eminent domain effort against Venable.

Sofie Kodner:
And Venable wasn’t the only one that Creve Coeur was keeping out. It turns out the town was ALSO trying to change its zoning code to prevent a Jewish Temple called Temple Israel from being built just down the road from the park.

DR. VENABLE / ARCHIVAL TAPE
[THE JEWISH PEOPLE WERE IN THE SAME BOAT! THEY WERE HAVING PROBLEMS WITH THE SAME PEOPLE.]

Roman Mars: For three long years, Dr. Venable and the temple fought for their land in court. Venable’s case went to the Missouri Court of Appeals, and the Temple’s case went to the Missouri Supreme Court.

DR. VENABLE / ARCHIVAL TAPE
[SO WE WERE BOTH IN COURT AT THE SAME TIME. SO THEIR LAWYERS AND OUR LAWYERS WORKED TOGETHER TO FIGHT THIS THING WHICH WAS VICIOUS. THEY WERE AGAINST THEM, BECAUSE THEY WERE JEWISH, THEY WERE AGAINST ME BECAUSE WE WERE BLACK AND THEY HAD TO MAKE UP THESE VERY STUPID LAWS TO TAKE CARE OF BOTH OF US.]

Roman Mars:
The temple won their case. The Missouri Supreme Court ruled that religious freedom took precedence over the zoning laws the town was trying to impose.

Sofie Kodner:
But Dr. Venable didn’t fare so well. In the end, after a long, expensive legal battle, the court sided with the town of Creve Coeur in December 1959. Dr. Venable got thirty-one thousand dollars for his land, which today would be worth a little under three-hundred thousand dollars. He left town. And his property became Beirne Park. Homes in the neighborhood today go for well over one million dollars.

Roman Mars:
But that wasn’t the end of Dr. Venable’s dream. He moved his family to another town in Missouri, called Ballwin. He said his neighbors there embraced him. Venable continued his successful medical career, and he built the house he always wanted. It even had a little pitch-and-putt golf course.

Sofie Kodner:
Dr. Venable’s nephew Allen says that the story of what happened to his family was written about widely at the time.

Allen Venable:
My grandmother read it in Detroit, Michigan. Right here about her son that was happening to him in St. Louis. You know, so it was…you know, a known fact

Sofie Kodner:
But in Creve Coeur, it was all kept hush-hush. And as time passed, that known fact became unknown.

Allen Venable:
The material was there for them to know… but they didn’t really want to know is the way I looked at it.

Sofie Kodner:
But Even if no one was talking about the history of the park, there were clues, out in the open for anyone to see. Venable’s one-story, brick ranch house, which was built to near completion during the legal battle, remained intact on the park grounds. The city used it as a home for the park grounds keeper.

Roman Mars:
Which is how, in the 1990s, Dave Davis came to live in Dr. Venable’s half-finished dream home.

Dave Davis:
Like I said to you earlier, when you looked at the inside and you could just tell that there was something that was not completely finished about this. Linoleum floors, inexpensive roll tile in the meeting room. Just, nothing that would be that would be reflective of you believing that this was once somebody intimately decorated home.

Roman Mars:
Dave was working toward an associate’s degree at a local community college, and he enrolled in a folklore class to fulfill a requirement. He had a pretty good idea for the class project.

Dave Davis:
All my wondering about this house, all my wondering about all of this in the middle of this relatively affluent neighborhood and an older community, an area that would be premium real estate, this just seems to stand out to me. And I was curious, so I decided to pursue it… And I began doing my research.

Sofie Kodner:
Dave started talking to people at City Hall and in the Parks Department. He asked his neighbors if they knew anything about the history of the park. They didn’t have much to say, so Dave started looking through old newspaper archives.

Dave Davis:
That’s when I started learning about Dr. Venable and I started with like, wow, what an amazing guy.

Sofie Kodner: From the old articles, Dave learned that Venable was this dynamic eye doctor, with all these accomplishments.

Dave Davis:
And then I started reading the rest of the story

Sofie Kodner: You know, the part where the city of Creve Coeur took Venable’s land and turned it into a park.

Dave Davis:
I thought and assumed – maybe naively, Sofie – that, wow, well, if everybody knew the story, they’re going to want to make this right.

Sofie Kodner:
Dave didn’t know exactly what Creve Coeur would do with the information, but he kept documenting what he found for his school project. And he started talking about it to people in the neighborhood. He thought they should do something to honor Dr. Venable. That at the very least there should at least be a plaque at the park to tell the story of what happened.

Dave Davis:
But then it happened. Then the phone calls started at the house. Asking, “Is this Dave Davis?” Yes. “You’re the caretaker of Byrne Park?” Yes. “You need to let go of this subject of the park and how it came to be.”

Sofie Kodner:
Dave says he got about five of these calls. Each time he’d pick up the phone and hear a different voice on the other end, one he didn’t recognize. And with each call, the voices got more threatening.

Dave Davis:
The last phone call that I remember was, “If you like living in Creve Core and want to continue to live in Creve Coeur and have your children attend a good school district, you’ll let this go and drop it.”

Sofie Kodner:
Dave doesn’t know who was calling him. He has his ideas, but there’s no way to know for sure. But Dave says he got nervous. Not afraid for his life or anything, but he was worried about retaliation. His family was just getting on their feet and starting to save some money…

Dave Davis:
I get emotional talking about it… I was scared. I was scared. It’s like I don’t want to lose everything. I’m also embarrassed to admit to you that I… dropped it, I dropped it. I let it go. I dropped the class, I stopped talking about it because I didn’t want to lose what we had… sorry.

Sofie Kodner:
I think Dave did what a lot of people do. It’s much easier to stay quiet. To keep the past in the past. When unearthing it would make people in the present uncomfortable. But when Dave dropped the class, Dr. Venable’s story fell back into secrecy in Creve Coeur.

Roman Mars:
Dave was the last person to work as the groundskeeper of Beirne Park. The city later tore the house down. Of course, the Venables never forgot what happened to them in Creve Coeur. Over time, the story became a piece of family lore, although Rossalind Venable is quick to say they weren’t dwelling on it.

Rossalind Venable Woodhouse:
Well, you know, this isn’t the only injustice that we’ve ever (laughs)… ever experienced. We are a Black family. So it’s not like the emotions around this are new to us…

Sofie Kodner:
Rossalind went on to have a distinguished, varied career much like her uncle. She was the first female Chief Motor Vehicle Administrator in the US. She earned a PhD in educational policy. And she was the president and CEO of the Urban League in Seattle. For years, she didn’t think much about Creve Coeur, until the Venables got a call from a man named Jim Singer.

Sofie:
So I was hoping that we could start from the beginning.

Jim Singer:
Well, there’s really two stories. There’s the story of what happened with Dr. Venable. And then there’s the story of how Creve Coeur kind of woke up from its slumber.

Sofie Kodner:
This is Jim Singer. He’s a labor lawyer in St. Louis and a member of a Jewish temple in Creve Coeur. He says one wake up call was what happened in Ferguson.

Roman Mars:
About 10 miles from the park, in the summer of 2014, a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown. His death brought international attention to the Black Lives Matter Movement and put St. Louis’s history of segregation in the spotlight.

Sofie Kodner:
After Ferguson, some people in Creve Coeur started looking more closely at the legacy of racism in their own neighborhood.

Jim Singer:
I looked around and I realized this had been the park that I’d been to with my parents like 60 years earlier. And I just started wondering, you know, does anybody remember what my mom told me? Did she have it right?

Sofie Kodner:
Jim had a vague memory of hearing about Dr. Venable from his parents when he was just a kid. And it all came back to him one day at the park with his grandson. So he started doing research. And it was all right there.

Jim Singer:
It was well-publicized at the time, even though people later forgot about it, it was covered by the Post. It was covered in the African-American press. So it wasn’t exactly a secret what Creve Coeur had done… at the time.

Roman Mars:
Jim started writing an article about the history of the park with the Missouri Historical Society. And then in 2019, he started working on a movement to rename the park. He got his Jewish temple in Creve Coeur involved too. They wanted to strip the park of its original name, Beirne Park, and rename it after Dr. Venable.

Sofie Kodner:
They made a Facebook group – The Venable Park Coalition – and invited residents to join. They put together a public event at a local auditorium to have an open discussion of the history. Then they reached out to the Venable family, including Allen and Rossalind.

[MEETING AUDIO]

Sofie Kodner:
Two hundred people filled the auditorium. The mayor patched in Rossalind on speaker phone.

Mayor: Do we have the Venables?
Woman: Yes, we do.
Mayor: Terrific!

Sofie Kodner:
There was excitement in the room, some nervousness. More than six decades had passed since Dr. Venable had been pushed out of Creve Coeur. Rossalind had been a teenager back then. She had seen the blueprints for her uncle’s home, and she had heard all about his dreams for the neighborhood. Now, after all these years, she was about to speak to the people of Creve Coeur directly. No one in the auditorium knew what she would say.

Rossalind Venable Woodhouse:
Good evening, everyone. I am Rossalind Venable Woodhouse, niece of Dr. Howard P. Venable.

Sofie Kodner:
Rossalind started by thanking Jim Singer and the rest of the Venable Park Coalition. And then she got to the heart of the matter.

Rossalind Venable Woodhouse:
Ironically, in French, Creve Coeur means broken heart.. Indeed it was a source of heartbreak to the Venables, and continues as such in the lives of their descendants. It was the source of the denial of the essential elements of the American dream, the right to own a home…

Roman Mars:
The family then had some recommendations for Creve Coeur. They wanted the park renamed after Dr. Venable, and they wanted the city to build a memorial in honor of all the Black people who attempted to integrate the neighborhood.

Sofie Kodner:
They also proposed that the town establish a fund or landbank to provide city-owned land or down payment assistance to non-white people who want to buy or build homes in the area.

Rossalind Venable Woodhouse:
The crowd sounded very receptive to and supportive of doing something that would acknowledge the terrible injustice that had taken place.

Roman Mars:
After the public event, the Creve Coeur city council voted unanimously to change the park’s name. Beirne Park became Dr. H. Phillip Venable Memorial Park.

Nicole Greer:
Venable Park is sacred ground to me.

Sofie Kodner: Nicole Greer is Creve Coeur’s only Black City Council member. She appreciates the name change. She says visiting the park feels different now.

Nicole Greer:
Sometimes it’s tough, you know, to go because you get really emotional. But there’s always gonna be this element of me thinking about why this is a park because it wasn’t even supposed to be a park.

Sofie Kodner:
For Nicole and other people in Creve Coeur, just renaming the park was not gonna cut it. So the city formed a Task Force in 2020 to figure out what else they were going to do.

Richard Miller:
The Mayor of Creve Coeur, he asked me if I could sit on the Task Force. Obviously, they needed a Black presence on the Task Force and I was willing to serve and share my opinions.

Sofie Kodner:
Richard Miller is another Creve Coeur resident. He keeps it candid on the Venable Park Task Force.

Richard Miller:
I don’t bite my tongue, you know, I just tell the truth and I say things that some people are afraid to say.

Sofie Kodner:
For example… Rich is not afraid to say that the city of Creve Coeur owes a debt. And not like a metaphorical debt. They owe money.

Richard Miller:
Some folks have a problem with that name – reparations. With that term. So if that is an issue, then let’s not call it reparations, okay? Let’s call it honest money or fair money. Or money to make folks whole again.

Roman Mars:
Critics of reparations sometimes argue that it’s impossible to figure out who owes how much, and to whom. But the Creve Coeur case is clear cut and well-documented. The financial losses to the Venable family are concrete. You can calculate them.

Sofie Kodner:
And so for Rich, it’s important that Creve Coeur make it up to the Venable family, by paying them directly, or by funding something like the landbank that the family recommended.

Richard Miller:
We found money for a police station, 11 million dollars that we really didn’t need, okay? And we did that by issuing a proposition, okay? And we got the residents to agree on it. Why can’t we issue a proposition to raise money, taxpayers’ dollars to make the Venable family whole?

Sofie Kodner:
Since the founding of the United States, land has equaled economic opportunity. In this country, owning property has been key to building wealth that lasts, from one generation to the next.

Roman Mars:
Today home ownership for Black Americans is 30% lower than for white Americans. And white families have a net worth that is ten times higher on average than that of Black families. Eminent domain is part of the reason why

Sofie Kodner:
In Creve Coeur, the Venables and the other Black families weren’t just bullied out of town. They were bullied out of the opportunity to grow wealth there, by owning a home.

Allen Venable:
Those are million dollar houses over there. You took that away from him you know? I think he should be compensated for, you know, one way or another.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
In September of 2021, Rossalind and Allen got the chance to visit Venable Park for the first time. The house is no longer there, but they had been hearing about this area, and what happened here, since childhood. Finally, they saw it with their own eyes.

Rossalind Venable Woodhouse:
When I saw the park. I got a rush. I was almost… I was almost dizzy. Because I had no idea that it was so beautiful and it was quite an experience to actually see it for the first time.

Allen Venable:
Actually, when I arrived at the park, boy, it almost made you want to cry, you know? Because you saw all the beautiful homes, all the beautiful homes and lots and everything was all kept up together. And this man had picked this area out, you know, and it made me think like if I love something and I want something, but it don’t love me, you know, it don’t want me, you know, and that’s a terrible thing for you to love something and something don’t love you back.

Sofie Kodner:
The people of Creve Coeur have so far been more than willing to support a symbolic kind of racial justice. A name change.

Allen Venable:
I think naming the park is just a start. It’s just a starting point.

Sofie Kodner:
Right now, the city is making plans for a memorial at the park. And it’s still possible that something more like reparations could happen too. Because as nice as symbolic gestures are, Allen Venable wants the people of Creve Coeur to remember this about his Uncle.

Allen Venable:
He didn’t want no park.

Sofie Kodner:
Not even a big, beautiful park with his name on it.

Allen Venable:
He didn’t want a park. No, he wanted to build his home and raise a family there.

[MUSIC]

Roman Mars:
Coming up, more on how eminent domain was used across the country to strip Black homeowners of their land and a new movement to get some of it back. After this.

[BREAK]

Roman Mars:
So I’m back with Sofie Kodner, brought us that piece about eminent domain. And you know about this story because this was a particular incident that happened in your hometown. But this whole concept of eminent domain, you know, taking land from people is really a national issue.

Sofie Kodner: Yeah. So this happened in Creve Coeur where I’m from, but it also happened all over the country. Eminent domain was a big part of the urban renewal efforts that happened after World War II in the 1950s and 60s. Cities across the country would get funding from the federal government to basically bulldoze certain neighborhoods. They call them blighted or substandard, and they do that to make space for newer development. And it was often used to target low income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color. And outside of urban renewal, eminent domain was used to target specific people, too.

Roman Mars:
And this is what happened in the case with Dr. Venable, right?

Sofie Kodner:
Yeah, exactly. It often had to do with keeping areas segregated or taking particularly valuable land specifically for its resources. So again, there are a lot of stories like this all around the country. And while I was reporting, I learned about this organization I thought was really interesting, called “Where is My land?” And they’re actually focused on this exact issue — reclaiming land stolen from Black people. I talked with Ashanti Martin about it. She’s one of the founders.

Ashanti Martin:
We were established in 2021, and our mission is to help Black families in America reclaim stolen land and secure restitution.

Roman Mars:
2021 is really recent. So how did they get started?

Sofie Kodner:
Yeah, the organization was born out of this incident in Southern California that came to a head last year. It was this place called Bruce’s Beach, which was a popular resort owned by a black couple. Their names were Willa and Charles Bruce. And in the 1920s, the city of Manhattan Beach used eminent domain to take the land, and the city said they wanted it for a park.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, I mean, that sounds exactly like the Venable story.

Sofie Kodner:
Right? So Ashanti’s co-founder, her name’s Kavon Ward, she was living in Manhattan Beach when she heard about this history. And after George Floyd was killed, she decided to hold an event at Bruce’s Beach Park on Juneteenth in 2020 to get the word out to the community about what had happened to the Bruces. Some of the Bruce family ended up attending the picnic, and that’s when Kavon decided there should really be a way — some policy mechanism — to actually return the land of the park to the Bruce family. She led some community organizing, advocacy work. There was definitely a lot of pushback. But in the fall of 2021, it happened. And it’s thought to be the first time in the history of the United States that land stolen from bBack people was actually returned to their descendants.

Roman Mars:
Wow.

Ashanti Martin:
Bruce’s Beach and Kavon’s work showed that something can be done. If we can find evidence that, you know, a family or an individual owns land and it was taken from them by various means — and particularly if those means were racially motivated — then we have to do something about that.

Sofie Kodner:
Ashanti told me that part of the reason she wanted to start “Where is My Land” with Kavon actually came from reading more about George Floyd’s family history. She read about it in a story in “The Washington Post.”

Ashanti Martin:
And one of the parts of that story that just really stayed with me and stuck with me is that his great great grandfather, a man named Hillery Thomas Stewart Jr., he had acquired a few hundred acres of land in North Carolina. And as told to “The Washington Post” by George Floyd’s family, that land was seized by white farmers. So it just becomes very salient and palpable that this history is directly connected to some of the issues that we’re facing now.

Roman Mars:
I mean, it’s such an important point because, you know, first, we knew such a narrow slice of the end of George Floyd’s life, like literally, like on tape. And then, you know, you get to know him as a person, his whole life. And to think about the whole history of his family and how it all led to this moment is really powerful stuff.

Sofie Kodner:
It’s like, you know, thinking about cards being stacked against someone. And that’s sort of the… that’s what systemic racism is.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, yeah.

Sofie Kodner:
And Ashanti told me, you know, these are these are facts. These aren’t feelings. She’s looking at the hard evidence behind these stories. “Where is My Land?” is actually trying to create a database of land that was stolen by eminent domain and by other means. On their website, they have a page where Black families can register their land, and they’ve already gotten hundreds of claims.

Ashanti Martin:
We have a case from Connecticut to California. A lot of cases are, of course, concentrated in the South, and they really span rural, urban and suburban land. They span– they go back to, you know, right around the time of reconstruction, up through the 21st century. So that’s really why we exist, is to get at this from a national level and to just really wake people up as to the history specifically of the racially motivated theft of Black land.

Sofie Kodner:
So “Where is My Land” is really trying to turn land reclamation into a movement?

Ashanti Martin:
It has been so easy to ignore these families for so long because they haven’t had anybody in their court fighting for them. So that’s really what we want to change.

Sofie Kodner:
I think we’re going to be hearing more and more stories like Bruce’s Beach and Venable Park.

Roman Mars:
I mean, it’s interesting because in the story that you reported, the Venable family didn’t express interest in having the park in Creve Coeur returned to them as land, you know?

Sofie Kodner:
Right. Yeah. So actually returning the land of the park to the Venable family hasn’t really been part of the discussion so far. I think right now, the Venable family and the Creve Coeur Task Force are really focused on this memorial. They want to redesign the park and make it a destination, a place where people can go and learn about the history of the park and also of housing discrimination more broadly and sort of talk about this from a national perspective. But I will say that much like Venable Park was renamed recently, Bruce’s Beach Park was renamed for the Bruces in 2007. And, you know, 14 years later, the land was returned.

Roman Mars:
Wow, that’s fascinating stuff. Well, thank you so much for sharing the story with us and this addendum. I really appreciate it.

Sofie Kodner:
Thank you, Roman.

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CREDITS

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible was produced this week by Sofie Kodner. Edited by Emmett FitzGerald. Mix and tech production by Martín Gonzalez. Delaney Hall is the executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Vivian Le, Chris Berube, Christopher Johnson, Joe Rosenberg, Lasha Madan, Jayson De Leon, Sofia Klatzker, and me, Roman Mars.

Music by our director of sound Swan Real plus an additional song, “La Pereza,” by Duke Ellington and His Kentucky Club Orchestra.

Special thanks this week to the Venable family including Victoria Venable-Fletcher and Krystal Venable, Sydni Jackson, Kimberly Norwood, Steve Stradal, Eric Berger, Mark and Nancy Kodner, the office of the city of Creve Coeur, the Missouri Historical Society, and the audio program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building — in beautiful uptown Oakland, California.

You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me @romanmars and the show @99piorg. We’re on Instagram and Reddit, too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org.

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Roman Mars:
Our limited series “The Future Of…,” sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is all about exploring how changes to the way we live, learn, work and play may shape our health and well-being in the years to come. Our second episode in the series, which we will release as a bonus episode of 99pi this week, is all about the future of broadband, a thing once viewed as a home luxury but is now a requirement for navigating the modern world. People without good internet access are at a severe disadvantage

Monique Tate:
Education, economic development and opportunity, which I’m relating to jobs — you are stricken from that.

Roman Mars:
That is Monique Tate, a digital justice advocate.

Monique Tate:
If you go somewhere and say, “I’m interested in a job, can I just fill out a piece of paper?” No one has that for you to do anymore. They’re going to say, if you can’t submit your application, we can’t even consider you.

Roman Mars:
On the next 99% invisible, we’ll look at the past and future of broadband and the solutions people are coming up with to solve what’s known as the last mile problem. This special episode is the second in a four part series we created exploring the future of health and well-being. Each episode examines what we could do today to create a healthier, more equitable future. Thanks to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for their sponsorship of “The Future of…” Do not miss a single episode. All you have to do is subscribe to 99% Invisible.