(soft tense music) - [Announcer] We go to the place where the River Des Peres disappears.

- Comes into this tube here and runs about six miles down to where the tube opens at.

- [Announcer] A look into the tunnel and the issues of our region's capacity to handle extreme rainfall.

He grew up in Affton and made it big in Hollywood, but when the Repertory Theatre asked actor John Goodman for help, he came back home.

- I've always, I've always loved it here and I hated to go away.

But yeah, I just feel like I owe the community a little bit for all that I was given.

- [Announcer] And when family history is American history, Lynne Jackson on what it means today to be a descendant of Dred and Harriet Scott.

- That is the mission, education.

It's commemoration, education, and reconciliation.

- [Announcer] It's all next on "Living St. Louis".

(jazzy piano music) (jazz piano music continues) (jazzy piano music continues) (jazzy piano music continues) - I'm Brooke Butler and for years we've been doing stories about St. Louis history, not just about things that happened, but how they have been viewed and interpreted from era to era.

We thought Martin Luther King Day was a good time to talk about how old events can continue to offer fresh and relevant lessons.

The Dred Scott case happened a long time ago, but as Ruth Ezell shows us, it's a story that really never grows old.

(somber piano music) - [Ruth] The unveiling in 2022 of the sculpture called "Freedom's Home" was the culmination of a project to recognize the efforts of enslaved people to break free from bondage through the legal system.

Located outside the Civil Courts Building in Downtown St. Louis, the sculpture depicts enslaved plaintiffs, along with attorneys who represented them through what are known as freedom suits.

In September of the following year at Calvary Cemetery, the grave marker of Dred Scott was replaced by a striking nine-foot monument etched with Scott's image and details of his own historic court case.

The fundraising drive to pay for the monument's creation was spearheaded by the Dred Scott Heritage Foundation.

- A memorial exists to preserve our memories, to commemorate, celebrate, take note of and salute someone of great significance.

This memorial is a representation of the hopes of many dreamers, doers, supporters, donors, and champions who gave freely of their strength, talents, and gifts to telling the story of Dred Scout.

It has evolved from a simple grave marker, something often withheld from the graves of the enslaved to a place for commemoration and contemplation.

It has been quite a journey.

- And two weeks later, in October of 2023 at Greenwood Cemetery, a grave marker for Scott's wife, Harriet, and their infant grandson, Edward Madison, was presented.

Many people were unaware of the exact location of Harriet's grave within Greenwood until recently.

Ensuring that the stories of the enslaved are never forgotten is the mission of a descendant of Dred and Harriet Scott.

Joining us now is Lynne Madison Jackson, founder of the Dred Scott Heritage Foundation.

Welcome, Lynne.

- Thanks, Ruth.

Thanks for having me back.

- That is such a beautiful monument.

Is that marble or granite, for Dred Scott?

- It's granite and I'm just thrilled with it.

It is a nine-foot and 10 by 10.

And what I want people to know about it is that as much as we appreciate the one that was there, which was given by a descendant of the original owners and the Blow family, this one, this one will tell his story.

This one will have all of his story on the front and the back, and that in order to do this the way we did it, there were three graves purchased for Dred Scott when that original grave was there.

He was there for 90 years, unmarked.

And Peter Blow had to pay.

I'm sorry, Taylor Blow had to buy three grave plots so that Dred Scott could be buried in Calvary and not next to a white person.

So those three plots together allowed us to have a 10 by 10 granite base and a nine-foot high monument.

- I would imagine it makes it much easier to find his grave now if you're going to the cemetery.

- Absolutely.

I personally have to admit that I have gone by the old one before.

Calvary has 300,000 people in it, as well as he is about one of the most asked for persons there.

He's number one or number two.

And there wasn't that much to see.

And I thought about people coming from out of town who might ride by and go, "Well, we never found it."

Well they're gonna find this one.

- Well, getting monuments, that's not your only mission.

It's also spreading the word.

You have gone into schools too, to tell this story.

- Oh, goodness, yes.

I go into schools, I go into law firms.

I am in museums.

I've spoken to the National Association of Attorney Generals twice.

I've been everywhere, almost, you know?

And that is the mission, education.

It's commemoration, education, and reconciliation.

So that is a big part of what I do personally, yes.

- We had spoken earlier, you had mentioned a project you did with the Rockwood Schools.

- Yes, I did.

Last summer, I was honored to be one of the eight people who shared history our histories with the Rockwood School children.

They had the fourth graders through the 12th graders come out to Beaumont Camp.

And over a two week period for six days, I gave 48 sessions on the life and legacy of Dred Scott.

It was fast moving.

Every 30 minutes a new class would come in.

But it was wonderful.

And the children were so receptive.

They were amazingly well-behaved and very receptive to the history.

So yeah, that did happen in the Rockwood School District.

- In recent months, I'm sure you've read a number of stories about Black history being taught in general and objections in some quarters to that.

As someone who's promoting Black history and talking about the stories of slaves, how do you react when you see this stuff in the news?

- Well, I'm a different kind of person, I guess.

It doesn't anger me so much because I realize that we should put our energies into doing something about a problem.

And I'm on a committee called Challenging History, which is part of the Jefferson National Parks Association Board that I'm on.

And we started challenging history about three or four years ago under the name Teaching Hard History.

So we've not stopped doing that, in fact, it has mushroomed.

But when we hear about school districts or organizations or whatever, feeling like, maybe we shouldn't teach Black history, it just motivates us all the more to be sure that we do.

And I also think that we need to be very careful to understand the motives and the understandings behind some of the decisions that these people make because I don't think the general public is as well informed as they should be.

And I do think that as far as Francis Hall goes, there are some issues with their social justice standards.

And I think that was the push behind it, but that never came to the forefront.

So I take a deep dive and I look into it.

I don't just react to what I see or hear.

- Yeah.

Very quickly before you leave, you are headed to Salt Lake City next month.

- Oh, yes.

- For what I understand is the world's largest genealogical conference.

- I know, I'm as surprised as you are.

(Lynne chuckles) But I will be a keynote speaker at RootsTech 2024, and that will be the days of February 29th, March 1st, and March 2nd in Salt Lake City.

It is the largest genealogical conference globally.

About three to four million people attend either in person or online.

So I'm promoting it for them and invite people to go to RootsTech.org and sign up because it is amazing and I'm looking forward to it.

- Good, and family history is some of the most important history we can all learn.

- Well, isn't it though?

- Yeah.

Well, Lynne Jackson, thank you so much for joining us this great conversation.

- Well thanks, Ruth.

Always a pleasure.

Thank you.

(big band music) (typewriter tapping) - [Announcer] 206 years ago, in January of 1818, Congress was taking up the question of Missouri statehood.

Territory residents had signed and presented petitions asking to be admitted to the union, but Congress wasn't quite ready and ended the session without taking any action.

The issue of slavery, of course, the expansion of slavery, the political balance of power in Washington, it was all at the center of statehood requests.

Illinois was admitted to the union in 1818 as a free state even though slavery existed and forms of servitude and restrictive race laws continued in Illinois for decades.

Missouri's admission to the union would come only with the Missouri Compromise, Maine coming in as a free state to offset Missouri's admission as a slave state in 1821 three years after the statehood petitions were first presented this week in history, 206 years ago.

(relaxing banjo music fading) - Our next story is about a very large and very important St. Louis structure that has never made it onto a postcard.

That's because it's underground and well, it's a sewer, which is exactly why Jim Kirchherr wanted to see it and why so many people are talking about it.

(water rushing) - This is where the River Des Peres ends in University City and turns into an underground sewer.

We were met at the entrance to this 20-foot tunnel by the Metropolitan Sewer District's, Bess McCoy.

So we are standing in the River Des Peres.

- Yeah, yeah.

And the River Des Peres runs through U City.

It comes into this tube here and runs about six miles down to where the tube opens at Mackland and Manchester.

- [Jim] MSD's project is cleaning and inspecting this tunnel.

It had already removed huge slabs of concrete from the tunnel entrance and was about a mile in in early December, still bringing stuff out.

Where did this stuff come from?

Do you know?

- No, I mean, it came from upstream, but beyond that, it's hard to say.

It could have gotten washed in from, you know, sidewalks or, you know, other.

- And the water has the power to move concrete blocks.

- Yeah, when you get that much water, it's pretty powerful stuff.

- The day we were at the tunnel entrance in U City, there was just a trickle of water running into it.

The next day's forecast though was for an inch or two of rain.

Couldn't be here.

- No.

- [Jim] Tomorrow or tomorrow night.

- Yeah, no, today was the day just because, because of a couple inches of rain, when you're talking about an entire watershed draining into one area, a couple inches adds up really quick.

- [Jim] After the rains, the River Des Peres and the tunnel were working as designed.

But the River Des Peres and other creeks in the watershed can go from this to this pretty quick.

And it was in July of 2022 that rivers, creeks, sewers, streets were overwhelmed.

Officially, just over nine inches of rain brought widespread flooding.

U City was just one of the areas hard hit.

Homes on both sides of the River Des Peres were flooded, including Mary Ann Gaston's house, which is right above the tunnel entrance.

- Ended up with almost two feet of water in my first floor.

I've lived here 27 years.

- [Jim] And River Des Peres, this channel was always in your backyard?

- Right.

- [Jim] You must have kept an eye on it, though.

- I didn't because it never caused an issue.

- [Jim] But it was flooding issues more than a hundred years ago that brought about this underground system in the first place.

Here's how it came about.

The River Des Peres used to run as a river through Forest Park.

It wasn't clean and it sometimes flooded.

It was first put underground temporarily for the 1904 World's Fair.

But the extensive tunnel system we have today came about because of a 1915 storm brought to the Midwest by a hurricane.

It poured a then record seven inches of rain in 24 hours, flooding homes and businesses, and bringing demands for an engineered solution.

The city started putting the entire River Des Peres under Forest Park in the 1920s, emerging into the open combined sewer that forms the city's southern border, a massive project recognized as a marvel of modern engineering.

MSD has taken visitors under Forest Park to see the junction of these huge sewer tunnels.

And while it's hard to imagine when you're there, they do fill up fast in heavy rains.

And there are those who say in the summer of 22's storm debris at this tunnel entrance made the flooding in the U City neighborhood worse, although it's not clear if the debris was already there or if it was deposited by the storm water or both.

- It had to have had an impact.

It may not have been the major cause I mean, there was a lot of rain and it came quickly, but it didn't help.

- [Jim] MSD sees it differently, says the cleanup was not prompted by these flooding concerns.

- And so I understand people seeing this being a bottleneck.

What we've seen is that our models show this tube is acting exactly as it's designed.

And so it wasn't a matter of this tube blocking the flow, it was simply a matter of too much water and development in a floodplain.

- Yeah, and the River Des Peres, you can't really see it well, but it's right beyond the bushes.

- It's right up, behind.

- Yeah.

- Retired Washington University Professor Bob Criss was the guy who brought to the public's attention all that debris at the tunnel entrance.

We met him in a nearby U City neighborhood that also flooded a year and a half ago and before that.

There used to be houses all the way along here.

- A couple dozen.

- Right.

Those homes were bought out and torn down after the 2008 flood.

Homes across the street flooded in 2022.

- To a geologist, it just screams this is where you do not build your house.

- Right.

He's an outspoken critic of building in floodplains and rebuilding in floodplains.

- I think buyout is the most cost effective way to deal with flooding.

We need to turn some of these lands that should have never been developed geologically inappropriate and turn 'em back into parkland.

- Well, this is where the River Des Peres water was.

- This is the level from July '22, which is about a foot and a half higher than 2000.

- Chris serves on U City's stormwater commission and was behind the effort to post signs showing the high water mark and the development of a flash flood warning system.

- It gives us about 40 minutes most of warning, that's all.

- Yeah, yeah.

- The River Des Peres responds within an hour to heavy rainfall.

- [Jim] And the difference between now and say, a hundred years ago is not just the frequency of extreme rains due to climate change, but the widespread development that's brought increased runoff from the entire watershed funneling into these rivers, streams, and sewers.

And dealing with that means dealing with MSD and municipalities, and state and federal agencies, and individual landowners, and developers.

- I don't frankly give a hoot about finger pointing.

All I care about is fixing problems.

You see, we have this myth where we can out engineer our problems away.

- Yeah, well, and unfortunately with global warming, we're gonna see more and more of these types of events.

We're gonna see the atmosphere holding more water and then dumping it all at once.

- MSD says it's willing to help work on broader solutions.

Voters will be asked in April if they're willing to increase their sewer bills in part to provide additional resources for unspecified stormwater projects.

But the tunnel stays.

It was built long before MSD was created, and this project will actually help MSD get to know it a little better.

- So really the reason we're here, the reason we have ACE Pipe Cleaning contracting with us is to inspect this tunnel.

We know that there are about a hundred different connections where wastewater comes into- - Different sewers.

- Exactly.

- Neighborhood sewers a hundred times they're coming in to this tunnel.

- Yeah, and we know more or less where they are, but we don't know the condition and we don't know the exact location for all of them.

And so this is a way for us to, you know, inspect, see if there's any routine maintenance that we need to do.

- [Jim] It's not likely St. Louis will get another nine inches of rain anytime soon.

Not likely, but not impossible.

If and when it happens, things will flood again and there will be more serious conversations about what we need to do about it.

- There are people with stars on the St. Louis Walk of Fame who grew up here or spent time here, but pretty much cut their ties when they went on to fame and fortune in New York or LA.

John Goodman is not one of those.

He was back in his hometown this past December because somebody needed help.

(playful soft orchestral music) - After spending decades working in Hollywood actor John Goodman admits there are some things he misses about St. Louis.

- I love going to the Busch Stadium, Imo's.

(John chuckling) Ted Drew's.

Just, you know, the basics.

I just like it here.

When I'm here, I drive around.

I just gets to see the old places, some of the new places.

I'm very comfortable here.

- [Interviewer] Goodman known for his roles in films and TV shows like "Monsters, Inc." "The Big Lebowski" and "The Connors" grew up in St. Louis.

- I did go to Affton High School.

I started at Southwest Missouri State College, which is now Missouri State University the Harvard of the Ozarks.

- [Interviewer] Goodman admits he doesn't get to come here as much as he'd like to.

So when the Repertory Theater of St. Louis asked him for help, he was happy to oblige.

- Got a lot of sustenance from this community.

I've always, I've always loved it here and I hated to go away.

But yeah, I just feel like I owe the community a little bit for all that I was given.

- [Interviewer] But what the rep needed help with was not a small task.

The nonprofit regional theater company was staring at a $2.5 million deficit.

- It's been one of those things that it didn't happen overnight, where all of a sudden we woke up and said, "Oh my gosh, we need to raise more money."

It's been in the works for a few years.

- [Interviewer] Danny Williams is the managing director of the Repertory Theater of St. Louis.

- Not only have people been not slow to come back, we've also lost support of some corporations that have either moved away from St. Louis or they've decided not to fund the arts the way that they used to.

And so that on top of the pandemic, on top of just people's habits changing, really led to this moment of needing to say out loud we need your support now more than ever.

- [Interviewer] Williams says his organization began a Rally for The Rep campaign in October and their December 17th holiday benefit headlined by John Goodman is a huge part of the effort.

- I mean, it was really one of those, like, Christmas miracle type of moments.

We had reached out to him through some mutual friends because John, even though he has been working in Hollywood and around the world for many years, still has deep roots here in the St. Louis community.

And we reached out to him and he said, "As long as I can be there, let's make it work."

- I auditioned for "The Rep" a few times, and they didn't hire me.

So this is my revenge.

- [Interviewer] All jokes aside, though, Goodman really does want the theater to succeed.

- It's a great part of culture in the community.

And I think we need our arts.

There's so much other crap going on in the world that we, it's nice to have something that enriches our souls.

And I know that theater can do that.

- [Interviewer] As of early January, "The Rep" had reached 80% of its $2.5 million goal.

But Williams says the work isn't over.

- Should and when we reach the goal, we're gonna continue to rally for this organization.

We won't be done, the work won't be done by December 31st.

As an organization that relies on support by ticket sales or donations, we're always going to be needing support from our community.

So for me, this is a huge turning point and a launching point to actually reintroduce "The Rep" to people and say what we're doing here is important and exciting, and you should really check it out.

- But I heard him explain as he rode out of sight Happy Christmas to all.

- Finally, St. Louis's oldest and largest domestic violence shelter has received a much needed and completely donated renovation to their spaces.

These updates better support women and children, and including the furry members of their family.

(soft piano music) The Women's Safe House in St. Louis provides a full range of services to survivors of domestic violence.

And now they'll be extending refuge to the four-legged members of the family.

- Well, it is an important aspect because if the women and children are being abused, their pets probably are too.

And when women call and they wanna come with their children and they ask if they could bring their animals, we've said no.

And that really started weighing on my heart, because I wouldn't go off and leave my 85-pound doodle at home and knowing that it might not survive or that I needed it for my emotional support.

So after a while, we decided we need to do something about that situation, and that's why we're here today because we will be building a kennel.

- [Brooke] A groundbreaking ceremony was held earlier in October, which is domestic violence awareness month raising understanding, and uniting survivors of an issue that affects one in three women.

The kennel is being constructed with support from various organizations such as the City of St. Louis and Nestle Purina.

Several representatives attended the groundbreaking, including Sara Newton, who is already a frequent visitor of the shelter with her duo support dog, Nishka.

- So when I was five years old, I first saw my mother with a black eye.

When I was seven years old, my father punched his fist through a window of a car, pulled me out, and dragged me down the sidewalk on my bare knees.

- The fact that 10 million children a year witness domestic violence like myself and my childhood is alarming.

And I think it is a taboo topic.

There's a stigma around it and people are not comfortable talking about it.

So it's very important to me to advocate for survivors and let the St. Louis community at large know that this is still an issue, that in an epidemic that we're dealing with in our community, (soft chiming music) - According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, it takes survivors an average of seven attempts at leaving an abusive relationship before getting out for good.

And as pets are often used as collateral in the cycle of violence, studies show that not being able to take their pets to shelters is the reason roughly half of domestic violence survivors don't leave immediately.

As this is a growing awareness, only 17% of shelters across the country allow pets.

The Women's Safe House will be the first shelter in the greater St. Louis area to welcome cats, dogs, lizards, birds, any type of companion that women and children can keep safe while they rebuild their lives.

And that's "Living St. Louis".

Keep sharing your thoughts and ideas on our social channels or at NinePBS.org/LSL.

I'm Brooke Butler.

Thanks for joining us.

(jazzy piano music) (jazzy piano music continues) (jazzy piano music continues) (jazzy piano music continues) (jazzy piano music continues) "Living St. Louis" is funded in part by the Betsy and Thomas Patterson Foundation and the members of Nine PBS.