(L.A. Times) Dorothy Kaiser rides down the main streets of Ferguson, the town unfolds before her like a diary. This neighborhood is newer; that one is older; she raised her children in this house, and grew up in that one herself.
As far as anyone can tell, she has lived here longer than anyone. She’s 80 now, and moved to Ferguson at 2. She understands this place.
Moving west along one of the town’s central streets, Suburban, she points and recounts and smiles. She knows every doorway and mailbox.
Then, at a narrow spot in the road, she falls silent. The diary slams shut.
“I wouldn’t really know this area,” she says.
This is where the gate used to be, she says.
The one to keep black people out.
At the narrow spot there’s a sign: “Welcome to City of Kinloch.”
In a few hours, a grand jury will announce its decision not to indict a Ferguson police officer who shot an unarmed black man, touching off protests around the nation, with a violent start outside the Ferguson Police Department. The grand jury, and observers around the globe, spent months examining the questions of what happened, and how. But it’s here, on Ferguson’s border with a forgotten community called Kinloch, where you can find the history that helps explain the explosive aftermath.
Kinloch is the oldest black town in Missouri, and possibly west of the Mississippi River, formed in the 1890s when a real estate developer found a loophole in laws against selling property to black people. Life there centered on Kinloch Airfield, a history-making place where President Theodore Roosevelt flew in a plane built by the Wright brothers, where the first control tower was built, where a man first parachuted out of a plane.
Larman Williams grew up in Kinloch. He is now 80, like his white counterpart, Dorothy Kaiser. Like her, he knew his town block by block, and remembers it as a vibrant place. “People were wonderful,” he said.
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