When the Rev. Gerry Kleba invited incoming Archbishop Mitchell T. Rozanski on a tour of St. Louis’ Black history, he had no idea that it and subsequent ones would be the focus of a documentary.
Kleba’s time leading two churches as a white priest from south St. Louis in predominantly Black neighborhoods was a formative experience for him. He learned about St. Louis’ Black history and its ties to the Catholic Church and started the St. Louis Association of Community Organizers.
St. Louis filmmaker Tony West decided to document Kleba's tours in the film “A Black History Tour of St. Louis.” The documentary won awards at the Venice Under the Stars — International Film Festival and the Hidden Universes Independent Film Festival in Melbourne.
The film makes its St. Louis premiere Sunday to a sold-out crowd during the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase. West aims to put the documentary on steaming services in the future.
St. Louis Public Radio’s Chad Davis sat down with Kleba, who's now retired, and West to talk about the film and the tours Kleba led over the past couple of years.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Chad Davis: Can you give a little picture of the film for the audience?
Tony West: I think the uniqueness to it is that Father Gerry combines Catholic history with Black history, and those two are really entwined. I was intrigued by that aspect of it.
Being an African American who grew up in St. Louis and one that works on television, I figured I was going to pretty much know most of the stuff he was going to be talking about. But I didn't. I didn't know a lot of the things he was talking about, and some of the things I just didn't know in that kind of detail.
He talks about the Dred and Harriet Scott case and integration and redlining. And so he covers a wide swath of history for decades.
Davis: What did you learn about the history of those churches, as well as the community surrounding them, during your 20 years leading them?
Gerry Kleba: The most important thing that I learned at Visitation was that in 1944, 12 years before Brown v. Board of Education, there was a really dynamic and courageous pastor there, a priest named John Hamilton Smith who integrated Visitation school. Now that was unheard of.
In the Catholic Church in the United States, the biggest group of priests and sisters and brothers who are worldwide missionaries is a community called the Maryknoll sisters and priests and brothers. And when John Hamilton Smith integrated Visitation school, people sent their kids to Maryknoll by the bus load.
Davis: What are some of the places that you show on your tour in the film?
Kleba: After we spend a little time going through the Central West End and seeing the lovely homes and businesses there, we go on the north side of Delmar. We show you Fountain Park with a Martin Luther King statue in it and with lovely trees in the park and the Centennial Church on the corner still standing there instead of collapsed in, so that's a really important place.
We tell the story of Scott Joplin in the Scott Joplin house. Then we go to confession and we tell [the story] that the archbishops in the Catholic Church who owned enslaved people, the Jesuits who came here to start St Louis University came here with three enslaved black couples. So those are some of the things. And the story of Homer Phillips really gets told better by Jobyna Foster, who studied at the nursing school there and, of course, nobody could tell the story of Dred Scott quite like Lynn Jackson, the great-great-granddaughter of Dred Scott and Harriet Scott.
Davis: You talk about Centennial Christian Church and you talk about how Fountain Park were part of the tour. Those areas have been really, really decimated by the tornado. What does it mean now to have this documentary that shows those parts of St. Louis?
West: For one thing, it's devastating to the people who live there and the loss of life. [Our] hearts go out to them. But one of the things that Father Gerry is doing is he's going through north St. Louis, and he's showing people the beauty of the area.
The shots that I have from that area are some of the last shots you're going to see. People are looking at the news, they're seeing a lot of rubble and stuff like that; they see the aftermath. And in this film, they're going to see how the park and these churches look before that and be motivated to get involved and help these people and rebuild what they can rebuild.
Davis: What's the takeaway that both of you want viewers to have when they watch this film?
West: If you believe in equality and fairness, you can work toward that no matter what race you are or what your economic stance is, you can work toward that.
Kleba: I want people to know when they get on our bus that they're a part of the Freedom Riders and that they're a part of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, that important civil rights things happened on buses in this country. People suffered on buses, and people died on buses and got burned up on buses.
When we stop at the first really nice community garden, I say, “Look at that garden.” Mr. Bartholomew, the city planner who laid out the redlines, didn't really do that singly. He needed to get the Realtors and the bankers and the mortgage lenders and the insurance companies to agree that this is the part of the neighborhood to be divided off and to be undermined in every possible way.
So this community garden here, see the artwork on the fence back there and all the flowers and the tomatoes. See, this wasn't a one-person deal either. People in the neighborhood decided to make this happen, and they persisted at it.
So the challenge now that I ask you to weigh for yourself, as we see dereliction and depression, and as we see developments and hope is, which side are you on? Are you diabolical, or are you divine? That's always the question you have to ask yourself.
