Sumner High School gave the world Chuck Berry, Tina Turner, Arthur Ashe, Grace Bumbry, and Dick Gregory. This spring, it almost closed

The Sumner High School cafeteria is like a fashion show, a sea of chin-length bobs and Barbie-like ponytails, twin sets, pencil skirts, and penny loafers. It’s 1961. In the midst of this pageant sits a quiet boy. To Jacqueline Vanderford, he seems lonely. Vanderford remembers a friend urging her: “Let’s go sit at the table with Arthur.” She liked him. “Arthur” was tennis prodigy and future activist Arthur Ashe.

Socializing with Ashe is just one of the stories Vanderford, a 1963 Sumner graduate, tells about the school, the first high school for African Americans west of the Mississippi, located in the historic Black neighborhood The Ville. For a time, Sumner turned out students who, like Ashe, would go on to achieve great things in education, the military, law and government, and activism, but the list of grads who helped shape the world of culture, arts, and entertainment is perhaps the most remarkable. Both the father and queen of rock and roll—Chuck Berry and Tina Turner—attended Sumner, as did opera stars Grace Bumbry and Robert McFerrin; singer/actor Robert Guillaume; and comedian/activist Dick Gregory. Some observers consider Sumner the biggest cultural influence on St. Louis. 

But this spring, the school almost closed.

Vanderford, who was an educator herself for 40 years, helped start the Sumner Alumni Association. She estimates that the association has raised over half a million dollars for Sumner, feeding it into the school to assist in fulfilling its needs. 

The cash infusion has helped, but when Saint Louis Public Schools conducted a study to identify schools in need of closure last year, the district looked at enrollment, building conditions, capacity, impact on the neighborhood, and other special considerations. Census estimates reveal that the city continues to lose Black residents, which some blame on the disinvestment in North Side neighborhoods such as The Ville. “When Sumner was at its peak enrollment, the surrounding neighborhood of The Ville was also thriving,” SLPS Superintendent Dr. Kelvin Adams says. “It was a hub of African-American community and culture. As the neighborhood has declined over more recent years with the loss of Homer G. Phillips Hospital and other stabilizing landmarks—and the overall population of the city has declined—Sumner has mirrored that decline.” 

Sumner’s enrollment was just 205 students in the 2019–2020 school year, fewer than when it opened more than a century ago. The cost of renovating the building was estimated at $4.2 million. In December 2020, Adams proposed closing 11 schools. Sumner was one of them. 

It wasn’t the first time Vanderford had heard such a proposal. Every year since 2008, alumni have met with Adams to discuss Sumner’s future and ways to keep the school open. 

“Hearing that it was going to close was like—” she pauses. “It really made me sad. But I knew that I had to pull up my sleeves and get to work.” 

The alumni aren’t fighting alone. A group of arts and community leaders have stepped up to help keep Sumner’s doors open. Their ambitious plan draws upon the school’s long history of turning out arts legends and activists. In addition to core classes, they want to offer arts electives in four new “pathways”: drama, visual art, dance, and music. Beginning in fall 2021, these subjects will be taught by practitioners from some of the region’s premier arts institutions. Eventually, electives in such topics as organizing will be added. 

“When I found out, ‘Hey, we’re not in this alone?’” Vanderford remembers. “Usually it’s just Sumner alumni and Dr. Adams. I feel really good that we’re not alone in this journey this time.

“I think it’s going to be the Renaissance, the resurgence, once we put the arts in.”

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Rep. Preston Brooks sneaks into the U.S. Senate chamber with a metal-topped cane. It’s 1856, and back then, such an instrument was used to punish an ill-behaved dog. He spots his target, Sen. Charles Sumner. Sumner is alone at his desk, writing. Brooks creeps up behind Sumner and brings the cane down on his head.

Thwack!

A few days earlier, during a debate over whether Kansas should enter the Union as a free or slave state, Sumner, a Republican from Massachusetts, accused Democrat Andrew Butler of South Carolina of taking a “mistress”—slavery. In defense of Butler, Brooks will exact revenge, beating Sumner over the head. For three years, while Sumner recovered, his desk in the Senate sat empty—a reminder of the brutality he’d sustained. He eventually returned to the Senate, where he served another 18 years and continued to fight for abolition. Sumner High School was named after him. 

Between 1860 and 1880, St. Louis’ Black population exploded from 3,927 to 22,256. Because of segregation and racism, pursuing an education was difficult for African Americans. Until 1875, there was no high school for Black students. Lower schools for Black children were often located in dilapidated and abandoned buildings that had once been white schools. Black St. Louisans began to demand better. 

In 1875, Missouri’s General Assembly forced the St. Louis Board of Education’s hand, directing them to open a high school for Black students. Sumner High School opened in 1875, first in the former whites-only Washington School at 11th and Spruce, with 210 students. The name was doubly meaningful; until that point, schools for Black students were typically just numbered with no regard given to naming the school after notable people. 

Officials moved the school into a different building in 1895, to 15th and Walnut, and though it was better than the old building, it still didn’t have a gym, library, or a room large enough to host an assembly, writes John A. Wright Sr. in The Ville, St. Louis. And people were moving out of the area where the school was located. The St. Louis Palladium reported that a group petitioned the board to move: “Firstly, the location and surroundings of the school are bad. There is no approach to the school except along avenues lined with demoralizing establishments...saloons and questionable houses. Being not far from Union Station, there is within a radius of five or six blocks from the school a congestion of drinking places and pool rooms. Our daughters, as they go to and from school, are exposed daily to the solicitations of the vile characters gathered about these centers of vice.”

The board decided to build something new—and chose to do it in The Ville.

Racism and restrictive covenants blocked Black residents from finding housing in many parts of the city, but at the end of the 19th century, there were few property restrictions in The Ville, a neighborhood in North St. Louis that takes up less than half a square mile. A community of middle- and upper-middle-class Black residents sprang up in the area. Annie Turnbo Malone, the chemist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist who made millions with her line of hair care products, established her cosmetology training ground Poro College in The Ville in 1917. The neighborhood’s Homer G. Phillips Hospital, completed in 1936, was created to serve the African-American population, but it also trained Black doctors and nurses—one of the only places to do so in segregated St. Louis.

Brand-new and modern, Sumner reopened in 1910 at 4248 Cottage Avenue. William B. Ittner, also the architect of the Missouri Athletic Club and Scottish Rite Cathedral, designed it. Ittner worked as Commissioner of Buildings for the St. Louis Board of Education from 1897–1910. His firm designed 50 schools in St. Louis as well as hundreds of others across the country. Ittner, who had himself attended St. Louis public schools, hated their design. According to research by the National Register of Historic Places, “They had dimly-lit corridors; too-wide classrooms that received light from only one source, resulting in difficult working conditions; no indoor plumbing...In addition, most older St. Louis schools were boxy red hulks of almost forbidding aspect and little imagination, more suited to inspire dread rather than genius.”

Sumner, one of the last schools Ittner designed as building commissioner, reflects the architect’s vision of school design that is well-planned and aesthetically pleasing. Ittner chose the Georgian Revival style for the building, which consisted of a center block with two matching wings. Three large, attractive arched windows adorn the center block. Ittner’s father was a brick manufacturer, and the architect used culls—or pieces of brick that weren’t up to par—interspersed with the reddish-brown brick to create an appealing visual effect. 

The instruction at Sumner—regardless of where the school was located—was equally impressive. Again because of racism and segregation, there weren’t as many job opportunities for Black academics as there were for their white counterparts. It wasn’t unusual for teachers at Sumner to hold doctorates. One was Edward Alexander Bouchet, the first African American to earn a doctorate from an American university. When Bouchet earned his Ph.D. in physics from Yale, in 1876, he was the sixth person in the Western Hemisphere to do so. He taught at Sumner 1902–1903. 

Excellence was also reflected in Sumner graduates. The list of students who once attended Sumner include several Tuskegee Airmen, educator Julia Davis, civil rights attorney Margaret Bush Wilson, and Ethel Hedgeman Lyle, founder of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority (Vice President Kamala Harris is a member). 

A year after Sumner reopened, the Superintendent’s Annual Report of 1911 stated that parents’ “pride in the school and their appreciation of its place and influence promise for the future their active cooperation in making it the very center of social and civic improvement for the race it is intended to serve.”

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The members of the Ville’s Antioch Baptist Church choir are gathered around the kitchen table of the Berry family home. Little Chuck Berry’s ball rolls under the table. To avoid crawling on all fours to retrieve it—he thinks this will earn him a punishment—he crouches down, extends his leg, and scoots. As biographer John Collis writes in his book Chuck Berry, it’s the beginning of his signature duck walk.

Before he was the father of rock and roll, Berry was a little boy growing up in The Ville. Piano and Victrola were fixtures in the family’s home. He tuned the radio to the Black station in East St. Louis, listening to the blues and boogie-woogie. As a student at Sumner High School, in 1941, 15-year-old Berry will jolt his classmates with his performance at the typically stuffy end-of-term All Men’s Review, a sort of talent show. With Tommy Stevens on guitar, they’ll turn to a current hit, Jay McShann’s “Confessin’ the Blues.” 

I said baby, honey, please don't dog me around

Because I'd rather love you, woman, honey, than anyone

Else I know in town

Consider Sumner’s student body—the women, anyway—wooed. 

Soon after his performance, someone will lend Berry a guitar. He’ll master the blues’ three-chord trick. And then it clicks: He realizes he can play a handful of songs that have the same pattern. 

In 1955, Berry travels to Chicago to see a Muddy Waters show. After, he’ll approach the blues artist and ask him how to get in touch with a record company. Go see Leonard Chess on 47th and Cottage, Muddy Waters advised. Berry does just that, showing up at Chess Records, where Chess himself will ask for a demo tape. Empty-handed, Berry will drive all the way back to St. Louis and lay down two songs, “Ida May” and “Wee Wee Hours” on a tape recorder with piano player Johnnie Johnson and drummer Ebby Hardy. Chess likes it—but the record exec wants a new name for “Ida May.” Berry picks “Maybellene.” It’s his big-beat tribute to fast cars, sex, and youth, infused with country and inspired by Western swing. It’s also likely the birth of such Berryisms as “motorvatin’.”

As I was motorvatin' over the hill

I saw Maybellene in a Coupé de Ville

A Cadillac a-rollin on the open road

Nothin' will outrun my V-8 Ford

The Cadillac doin' 'bout 95

She bumper to bumper, rollin' side by side

Maybellene, why can't you be true?

Oh, Maybellene, why can't you be true?

You done started back doin' the things you used to do

Berry will need 36 takes to perfect the recording of “Maybellene,” but as Collis conveys, it was unchartered waters—there wasn’t really anything to compare it to. Phil Chess, Leonard Chess’ brother and Chess Records co-founder, will remember that “this was an entirely new kind of music.”

Berry’s career will explode after the eventual success of “Maybellene,” which stayed near the top of the pop charts for 11 weeks. “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Reelin’ and Rockin’,” and “Johnny B. Goode” will follow. (The “Goode” is a nod to the address of the family home—2520 Goode Avenue—where Berry was born.) Astronomer Dr. Carl Sagan and NASA will find “Johnny B. Goode” so influential that in 1977, they transfer it—along with music from Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart—onto two golden records, attach them to the sides of Voyager 1 and 2, and blast them into outer space. Should other space travelers—or aliens—find them, scientists want them to be able to hear sounds representative of Earth: a mother kissing her child, greetings in 55 languages, and Berry hollering “Go, Johnny! Go, go!” 

Back on Earth, after that first recording session, Berry will return home to The Ville. He passes by the tailor who made his high school graduation coat. The shop is playing “Maybellene.” “That was the first time I heard it,” he told NPR in 2000. “That day, nice, sunny day, beautiful day. Knocked me out to hear myself.”

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When Tom Ridgely, producing artistic director of the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, began his tenure, in 2018, the festival was producing its Shakespeare in the Streets program downtown. Ridgely went for a coffee with playwright Mariah Richardson, a Sumner alumna, to talk about where they should take the program next. Richardson drove Ridgely around The Ville and took him to Sumner’s homecoming. Yes, there was a football game, but there was action off the field, too, in a mass of tailgate tables. Sumner alumni barbecued and served up corn on the cob and something called muskacholli. (Ridgely, fresh from New York, was happy to discover that it was mostaccioli.) Ridgely and Richardson bopped from table to table, meeting people and eating. 

“We kind of talked our way into the building and walked around,” Ridgely remembers. “The building’s gorgeous. The floors are old polished hardwoods. The lockers are giant, and they’re built into the wall. It feels like it can’t be that different from what it felt like in 1955.” Learning about the school’s history—feeling the school’s history—Ridgely was sold. He started work on Shakespeare in the Streets in The Ville, linking up with the community organization 4theVille in the process.

So when Ridgely heard in December 2020 that Adams had recommended the closure of Sumner, along with a handful of other schools, with a formal proposal and a scheduled school board vote, the immediacy struck him. 

“I’m not from St. Louis,” Ridgely says. “I didn’t grow up in The Ville, and I didn’t go to Sumner High School, but I am in the arts. What I can say is that without a doubt, Sumner High School is far and away the most significant cultural institution in St. Louis. More than the Shakespeare Festival, more than the Opera, the Symphony, or the art museums. No disrespect: They’re incredible—world class—but if you think about the impact that a single institution has had on not just American culture but globally, Chuck Berry and Tina Turner alone would be enough...but then you start to think about the doctors and lawyers and entrepreneurs and judges and congressmen and politicians and activists, and you’d be hard-pressed to find something as consequential anywhere in the country. Certainly, I can’t think of another high school.”

Ridgely called Aaron Williams, board chairman of 4theVille, and asked whether writing a letter to the school board in support of keeping Sumner open would help. Williams said yes. Ridgely rounded up more than 30 other arts leaders and put thoughts to paper. 

“We understand the enormous challenges you face as leaders of the St. Louis Public Schools. And we recognize that so many of them are beyond your purview or control. We see how traumatic any school closure can be for the students, teachers and residents of its home community. And we know that you all are thinking first and foremost about the systemwide welfare and education of the many young people in your care,” they wrote. 

“Sumner though is a special case," the letter continues. "Its cultural, historical and symbolic importance are simply too great to let it succumb to the same forces of divestment, depopulation and decline that have closed so many other schools in our region.” 

The letter went on to pledge support in finding a way to keep Sumner open. “If it’s creative solutions, that’s what we do best,” it states. 

Ridgely sent the email to Adams and the Board of Education on December 13. On December 16, he received a reply. The school board was delaying the vote. Adams wanted to see a plan.

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Venus steps onto the stage. Her black-and-gold dress flows, and her cheeks are slicked with metallic body paint. She can see the orchestra pit but blocks out the audience. Instead, she envisions sheet music, the libretto and notes of German composer Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser floating through her mind. German isn’t her mother tongue, but she’s been practicing for months. Venus opens her mouth. Her soprano is rich, powerful.

Geliebter, sag, wo weilt dein Sinn?

Tell me, beloved, of what are you thinking?

Grace Bumbry, who is playing Venus, knows that this performance has to be letter-perfect. It’s 1961 and her Bayreuth Festival début. The festival is an annual celebration of Wagner’s works, and the composer’s grandson Wieland Wagner has cast Bumbry as the goddess of love. She’s just 24 years old. Bumbry will be the first African American to perform at Bayreuth—and in postwar Germany, the role of Venus is traditionally reserved for a blonde. When Germans get word, the letters of protest pour in. Richard Wagner would spin in his grave, they write. 

“That performance meant that everything that I had learned from my childhood was now being tested,” says Bumbry, now an international opera star, who grew up in The Ville and attended Sumner in the 1950s, “because I remember being discriminated against in the United States, so why should it be any different in Germany?”

The diva, now in her 80s and living and teaching in Vienna, discovered her voice singing in the Union Memorial United Methodist Church when she was 10 or 11. By the time she reached high school, she desperately wanted to try out for Kenneth Billups’ a cappella choir. Like some kind of wizard, Billups transformed every choir he touched into something amazing. She was spellbound but convinced that she wasn’t good enough. She auditioned instead for the girls’ glee club—and was rejected. 

But Billups eavesdropped during Bumbry’s audition—and invited her to join his choir. “You cannot imagine my joy," Bumbry says. "I told him, ‘I really wanted to be in your choir, but I didn’t think I was good enough.’ He said, ‘No, no, no, you come to class on Monday morning, and you will see what will happen.’ From that day on, I was in—and I sniff my nose at the choir director of the girls glee club.”

Six days a week, Bumbry practiced with Billups. On Saturdays, she’d walk the block and a half to his house from her home on Goode Avenue. Billups was trying to get her to understand and sing two songs: “Witness,” a spiritual, and “Honor, Honor.” Billups’ voice was dark but warm. It was commanding. It was arresting. At 16, Bumbry couldn’t replicate it—she still can’t, in fact—and so she’d leave in tears. “I know, I know,” her mother would say as soon as Bumbry, tears streaming down her face, walked in the door. “He’s already called me to tell me you’re on your way and not to worry. You’ll be alright.” 

For Bumbry, her time at Sumner was about striving for perfection. “They were grooming us for a higher standard of living, giving us what they knew was the best, whether it was in voice or in mathematics,” she says. Still, her instructors taught her that she wasn’t better than anybody else. Or lesser than anybody else. All she had to do was her best. 

When Bumbry was 16, she won a local talent competition. The prize was a scholarship to the St. Louis Institute of Music, but she wasn’t admitted; the school was segregated. She left St. Louis for Boston University instead. 

Bumbry then attended Northwestern and the Music Academy of the West, in Santa Barbara, California. In the 1958 Metropolitan Opera auditions, she split first place with soprano Martina Arroyo. Before heading off to New York, Billups sent her a telegram: “Good luck. Don’t forget the tones in the front of the face and all the perfect vowels and perfect diction, and you will win.” She still has the telegram.

But the Bayreuth début was a turning point in Bumbry’s career. After, first lady Jackie Kennedy will invite her to the White House, the first time an African-American opera singer will perform there. She’ll sing for Marian Anderson in the first Kennedy Center Honors ceremony, in 1978. And in 2009, Bumbry will be honored at the same celebration, by President Barack Obama. At the gala performance, in a tribute, Aretha Franklin will say that Bumbry “sings like a goddess and never lets anything get in her way.” 

Back on the stage at Bayreuth, Venus finishes. The audience erupts into an applause that lasts 30 minutes. 

Oh my God, this will never end, Bumbry thinks. By the time it does, she and the cast will have received 42 curtain calls. This is fantastic. This is fabulous!

I guess that’ll show them.

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No one quite remembers who threw out the idea, but it happened over Zoom.

Once Adams emailed a request to see a formal proposal on how to keep Sumner open, 4theVille's Williams called together a group from the community, as well as Sumner alumni and arts leaders. Together, in a video conference, they started with a blank whiteboard. Eventually someone chimed in: Inspired by the legacies of the most prominent Sumner alumni, what about offering electives in the arts and eventually activism? The arts organizations could relieve the school district of some of its instructional burden by teaching. They could also fundraise.

The group drew up a proposal that listed four new arts pathways as extracurriculars: drama, visual art, dance, and music. The drama pathway would be led by the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival and The Black Rep and offer up to four levels of daily year-round drama classes for two periods and at least one after-school production of a full-length play or musical. Two St. Louis arts institutions, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and Craft Alliance, would support the visual arts pathway. Students would receive dance instruction from Ballet 314 and La Voûte. Last, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis would offer students a semester of intensive studio lessons, guiding students through the roles of librettist and composer to create an original piece. The arts institutions also planned to give seniors, in the spring, the opportunity to pursue internships with the organizations. The group would start exploring additional pathways in activism in the fall, potentially partnering with Creative Reaction Lab, WEPOWER, and Action STL to launch new courses 2022–2024. 

Along with the electives, the group set some important intentions: Improve teacher recruitment and retention, provide more professional development to the school’s staff, increase enrollment by 10 percent annually, and have Sumner designated a National Historic Landmark by 2024. The proposal also called for a community-based organization to work with the partners in hiring one or more program directors to implement the electives.

Adams was drawn to the proposal because it was comprehensive and the benefits to the students were made clear. “Oftentimes, you receive a proposal, and it’s really just a series of action items for the district,” he says. “The partners involved in this plan are dedicating their time and their funding to make this work.

“I am a superintendent driven by data,” he continues. “The data clearly show that students—especially students of low socioeconomic status—have better academic and social outcomes when they are exposed to the arts. They are also more involved in civic life and more likely to go to college.”

At a school board meeting on March 9, Adams presented the proposal. He recommended that the board adopt it, starting with the 2021 school year, and that Sumner remain open for the next three years. An independent evaluator would review enrollment, attendance, and GPA annually to measure success. 

“I don’t want to be naïve about the fact that it’s going to be very difficult to turn the school around in a way that I think this community deserves and we want to as well,” Adams said, “but unlike the past, there are a group of persons who have aggressively come to the table, pursued us, and are willing to put in dollars and sweat equity to try to turn this around.”

Board member Adam Layne spoke: “I think that we have been calling for community support. And this shows that the community is showing up. It is new. It’s different.”

The board voted unanimously to move forward.

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Anna Mae Bullock, a 17-year-old Sumner student, is out with her sister Alline at Club D’Lisa. It’s 1956, Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm is the hottest band around, and everyone is jockeying for a chance to get onstage and sing with Turner. Turner brings on Pat, a classmate of Anna Mae’s. Pat is younger than Anna Mae and, in Anna Mae’s opinion, she can’t carry a tune. 

Anna Mae is the young woman Turner will eventually christen with the stage name Tina Turner. The rest of the world will nickname her the Queen of Rock and Roll. The pair will find success with their band, the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. In their hit cover of “Proud Mary,” Tina’s voice is so fiery in the second half of the song that it nearly combusts. She’s singing about a woman leaving the everyday behind for a riverboat adventure on the Mississippi—freedom from working for The Man night and day. And after divorcing Ike, Tina will propel herself to superstardom with her 1984 album Private Dancer. 

Anna Mae cut her vocal chops in Nutbush, Tennessee, singing “Amazing Grace” at the Spring Hill Baptist Church or whatever song Bootsy Whitelaw played on the trombone during their summertime picnics. “I was just a little girl, little Anna Mae, and I’d shout, ‘Come on, everybody, sing with Mr. Bootsy,’” Turner writes in her autobiography, I, Tina. Later, in Knoxville, Anna Mae’s mother will take her shopping, and the girl will perform for the sales ladies and customers. The quarters they give her will go into a big glass bank—her first paid gigs. But Anna Mae longs for glamour, music beyond singing along with the radio, or in church, or with Mr. Bootsy. 

Anna Mae has asked Alline to tell her boyfriend, the Kings of Rhythm drummer, to give her a shot. Turner hasn’t called her, but one night, it’s intermission, and he’s alone onstage. He starts playing B.B. King’s “You Know I Love You” on the organ. Anna Mae knows the words. She seizes the opportunity—and the mic.

Darling, you know I love you, I love you for myself

Turner runs off the stage to pick her up. 

In her autobiography, she writes, “It was the first time I ever felt like a star.” 

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A concern raised at the school board meeting: How is the Sumner program going to prepare students for the workforce? “I want to be clear about this,” Adams said. “This is not a school that’s going to turn kids into artists. This is a school that’s going to expose kids to the arts with the belief and hope that if they learn about the arts, it gives them a greater appreciation about who they are and how they fit into the world that we’re in.”

“It was easy for us to say yes,” says Ron Himes, the founder and producing director of The Black Rep, about signing on to provide theater instruction to Sumner students. His theater has a long history of bringing educational programming to Saint Louis Public Schools, Sumner included. The arts, Himes says, engages students. It helps them learn how to express themselves and work as a group. Sometimes, when The Black Rep teaches at a school, staff members will try and pull out students whom they perceive will be distractions. “We say, ‘No, leave them in,’” Himes says. “We’ve found that in those instances, we’d turn the lightbulb on for them. Participating in theater games or exercises or acting in scenes would give them a spark. They would really turn themselves around.”

They’ll start by circling up around a box of props. The teacher will instruct the students, one at a time, to pick a prop—maybe a baseball hat—and begin telling a story about it. A bold student goes first, and then tags a friend to go next. Once everyone has taken a turn, the teacher asks that they pick something else out, put it on, and make up a character based on the garment they’re wearing. 

“Kids with great imaginations—sometimes these would be those kids who the school said can’t participate—would take the cap, and the cap wouldn’t be a cap,” Himes says. “The cap would become a cup or a plate, and they’d eat out of it or they’d drink out of it. Or they’d make it a flying saucer. It’s stimulating creativity and imagination.”

At Sumner, the arts will be infused into non-electives as well. The arts-based nonprofit COCA will provide 16–28 hours of arts integration professional development workshops for Sumner teachers, so that they’ll be able to incorporate arts experiences into the classroom. While arts enhancement—what students traditionally participate in—might ask a student to read a chapter on the water cycle and make a poster about what they’ve learned, an arts integration program might ask a group of students to read a chapter, watch a video, create a terrarium, and then choreograph a modern dance that shows how the water cycle works. What does this do for students? “The classroom becomes a space where learners who approach learning through different processes are valued,” says Abby Crawford, COCA’s director of education. And for teachers, it’s often an aha moment in terms of understanding equality versus equity. Equality means everyone gets to make a poster. Equity means students who learn differently are given the opportunity to do so. “The arts, then, become an additional tool that a teacher has in their arsenal to differentiate both the process of acquiring and learning and also the process of showing what [a student has] learned,” Crawford says.

Back to the question of jobs. To Ridgely’s mind, if the Shakespeare Festival can engage young people in the arts and, five or 10 years down the road, some of them wind up working for the festival, it’s a win. That’s because as much as onstage talent has diversified—and it’s still not as diverse as it could be, he says—it’s still more representative than offstage, roles in production and administration. “The festival has been looking at our organization and trying to address that,” he says. “We haven’t historically done a good job of reaching out to those communities, or engaging those communities, or making them feel like our organization is a place that you would want to work.”

One program that could allow practitioners to read the tea leaves on whether Sumner’s new focus will work is CAM’s ArtReach program, started in 2017 with Vashon High School. Vashon is another storied public high school, 2 miles east of Sumner. The school had been operating without a consistent art teacher for five years, and the partnership allowed the museum to fill that gap. CAM hired four teaching artists to help create with students a different quarterly project. A professional evaluator formally assessed Vashon students’ learning, to go beyond anecdotal evidence of the program’s success, and found an 80 percent increase in teamwork, leadership, and critical thinking skills among students, as well as a 75 percent increase in creative thinking skills. 

Michelle Dezember, CAM’s director of learning and engagement, stresses that the Sumner program will not be a simple act of altruism. Yes, the ArtReach program is crucial to holding the museum accountable to its public education mission. But it’s also a way for the museum to learn about the next generation of patrons. “The reason that we have continued to commit our resources and our time with Vashon is not out of some sort of benevolent gesture,” Dezember says. “It’s because we genuinely learn every quarter. We learn more about how to teach better, we learn about what’s relevant and what matters to students and to people. We take that information back to our curators and our staff at large. That close connection is what we depend on to keep us grounded, to keep us relevant.”

Anh Le, director of marketing and public relations at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, perhaps sums up the program’s intent the most elegantly: “We want to build a future audience, show kids that there are career paths in the arts, and make sure that St. Louis stays as vibrant an arts community as it has long been. That shouldn’t be limited to predominantly white wealthy schools. That should be true of every neighborhood in St. Louis.”

Bumbry remembers attending rehearsal at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra when she was 6 or 7. The symphony was then under the baton of Vladimir Golschmann, and he invited students from area schools to come witness his orchestra practice. She remembers listening to Golschmann describe the music of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. Before her eyes, flutes transformed into tweeting birds. An oboe quacked like a duck. Horns played the role of the wolf. An entire strings section brought to life the brave little boy. Golschmann moved on to the William Tell Overture—or as the children knew it, the theme song from The Lone Ranger. 

“For me, that was the beginning of a classical music foundation,” Bumbry remembers. “So what does that do? It opens my ears and my mind to another world. And this is what children need to know: that there's another world out there besides what's in St. Louis. You need to know that there is something bigger than your environment, and you need to be part of it.”

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“They noticed me!” high schooler Dick Gregory thinks. Sumner’s track team has left, but Gregory is out there alone—until two girls pass by. “He must be training for the big meet,” one says. 

This school year, Gregory, the future comedian and civil rights activist, has new clothes but not enough hot water at home to wash them—or to regularly bathe. The track team gets to shower after practice, he notices, so he asks to join. Coach says no to the team but yes to using the track. 

“Running was only one of the things I did to survive,” Gregory writes in his memoir Callus on My Soul. Soon, Coach asks him to join the team, and by spring 1951, he has become one of the swiftest milers in the country. He longs to see his name and photo in the new Scholastic Track and Field book, but when it comes out, he’s not pictured. “Coach informed me that it was no accident,” he writes. “He told me that you have to run with the White boys to get your name in the book.” 

Gregory joins a march to protest overcrowding at African-American schools: “Not only did I have a chance to tell all of St. Louis that there were eighty students in my classroom that was designed for thirty, I also told them about how my name had been left out of the Scholastic book after giving one of the best performances in the country.” 

Gregory’s protest served as inspiration for 4theVille’s letter to the Board of Education condemning the consolidation plan that would have closed Sumner. “Strong schools are the backbones of strong communities,” it stated. “If you remove the schools, you eliminate that possibility. While we recognize that the current Board and administration are not the perpetrators of the disingenuous education policies of the past, we still believe they should take responsibility for them. It is time for the Board of Education to come up with more creative solutions for our schools to become successful.” 

Says Williams: “As an organization that’s focused on the history of the neighborhood, whenever the history is being threatened, we always speak up.” Williams is the chairman of 4theVille who linked up with Ridgely to write the proposal for Sumner. Williams, who went to Lincoln College Preparatory Academy, a historically Black high school in Kansas City, became interested in The Ville as a freshman at Washington University. He likes it because it reminds him of where he grew up. “I stuck around because of that,” he says. “I have this determination to restore its grandeur or at least restore its dignity. Make people respect it more. That's the driving force behind everything that I do in the neighborhood.”

Williams envisions Sumner’s transformation as a catalyst for the entire neighborhood. Once people are drawn to the school, he hopes, it will bring more business and housing to The Ville. He looks down Dr. Martin Luther King Drive and sees the potential for an entertainment district: jazz clubs, restaurants, shops—not quirky, like a carbon copy of Cherokee Street, but “if you want to experience Blackness in its purest form, you can always start in The Ville.” He wants the line between the school and the community to blur. “Arts performances, museum exhibits; [I see] the students being a part of every piece of it,” he says, explaining his vision. “They’re Sumnerites, even after school hours. They are artists or activists, scientists, mathematicians, because everything that they learned in school, they’re applying out in the community.”

What does he see as the biggest obstacle to achieving his vision? Recruiting students and teachers. “The reason being is not because of the school but because of people’s perception of the school and the neighborhood,” he says. “I just feel like people can't get over this image that our region has made of Sumner and The Ville. 

“We’ll have to put in double time to prove to them that it’s worth sending their students there.”