Major League Soccer’s newest club, due to begin play in 2023, is using its platform to tell a virtually unknown part of Black history – and living its community-led values other ways too
When Major League Soccer decided to build Centene Stadium in St Louis, the first priority was honoring the “the hard truths of past”. The 22,500-seat soccer-specific stadium is designed with canopy shading and is 40ft below street level. It also sits on the same block that was once a part of Mill Creek Valley, the predominantly Black neighborhood on the Southwest end of St Louis once home to 20,000 residents, 800 businesses and more than 40 religious institutions. In addition to Madame ‘CJ’ Walker, America’s first Black woman millionaire, Mill Creek was also home to Josephine Baker, Scott Joplin and General William Tecumseh Sherman. Even poet Walt Whitman was known to visit the thriving Black community. But in the summer of 1959, the residents of Mill Creek Valley were displaced and the neighborhood demolished in the name of “urban renewal”.
Now the embryonic MLS club St Louis City SC and Great Rivers Greenway are using the stadium as a platform to tell the story of Mill Creek Valley.
