After John Buckner was lynched in 1894, a mob left the 21-year-old’s body to hang from a bridge over the Meramec River.
More than 130 years later, Buckner’s killing is being memorialized through a new historical marker in Buder Park in St. Louis County.
“We wanted to place the marker somewhere near the location of the lynching,” said a Geoff Ward, a professor at Washington University. “We've considered some other locations, private property where people might agree to install the marker, but nothing really seemed quite fitting.”
The memorial’s final location was reached after years of back-and-forth discussions between nonprofits and officials from St. Louis County and Valley Park. In 1894, Valley Park was named in multiple newspaper reports as a key location for the organization of the lyching, with articles describing a mob capturing Buckner in a cellar after he was accused of rape and arrested.
The mob took Buckner and hanged him from a bridge 12 hours later. A front-page story in the Jan. 17, 1894, edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called it “swift punishment by a county mob.”
The Equal Justice Initiative, the nonprofit leading efforts nationwide to place memorials to lynching victims, held a remembrance ceremony for Buckner in 2022. The group said that Buckner was one of at least 68 victims of lynching in Missouri between 1863 and 1950.
At the time, Ward and representatives from Great Rivers Greenway were in talks with Valley Park officials about placing the memorial. One year later, St. Louis Public Radio reported how those talks broke down over disagreements about the exact location of the lynching, as well as opposition by some residents to placing a memorial that would appear to honor a person accused of sexual assault.
Valley Park argued that the memorial would create “an unnecessary rehashing of events that end up dividing a community.”
After the 2023 report by STLPR, Ward said talks restarted, briefly, between Valley Park and the Reparative Justice Coalition of St. Louis, which is working with the Equal Justice Initiative to place local memorials. Ward said he tried to address the city’s concerns by explaining that Buckner’s marker is intended “not to so much honor victims of lynching” but to “recognize and to reassert our collective interest in equal justice and equal protection.”
From Ward’s perspective, Valley Park officials “just stopped answering our emails.”
On Tuesday, city attorney Tim Engelmeyer confirmed that Valley Park ultimately turned down the memorial proposal over concerns about the marker’s accuracy and location. But he contested Ward’s description of an abrupt break in communications with Valley Park’s Board of Aldermen.
“We've heard their request for reconsideration,” he said. “It's not like we've just ignored it. We've had numerous discussions.”
Engelmeyer said the memorial’s proposed location, at the Arnold’s Grove Trailhead of the Meramec Greenway, would place it near a levee and require coordination with the Army Corps of Engineers. The Board of Aldermen turned the idea down.
Engelmeyer said that he informed the Reparative Justice Coalition of the board’s decision, but that the group continued to ask about the memorial despite the rejection.
“I wasn't sure how to say ‘no’ to them any more clearly. It's not that we cut off communications, it's that we discussed it numerous times and told them the answer.”
He added, “I don't think they liked the answer, and they kept asking.”
On Monday’s show, David Cunningham, a Washington University sociologist, joined St. Louis on the Air’'s discussion of the effort to place new public memorials in response to historic injustices. Cunningham’s career includes research into the history of the KKK and the impact of contemporary efforts to remove Confederate monuments.
It can seem tempting, Cunningham said, for governments and organizations to focus on only the positive sides of history. He said that markers to historical events like the lynching of John Buckner represent more than just an effort to draw attention to a past tragedy — they can address the harm that still remains.
“Places that have been marked by acts of historical, racist violence today continue to exhibit higher levels of racial inequality, [economic inequality], higher levels of violent crime, higher rates of political polarization,” he said. “There's a corrosive effect to these histories when left unaddressed, that we continue to feel.”
Related event:
What: John Buckner historical marker dedication ceremony
When: 10 a.m. Oct. 18
Where: Lydia D. Buder Park North (See event page for map and precise directions.)
To hear the full conversation with professors Geoff Ward and David Cunningham about John Buckner, as well as the challenges involved in creating memorials to racial violence, listen to “St. Louis on the Air” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube, or click the play button below.
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. The production intern is Darrious Varner. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr.
