[From “The Cost of Accomodation”]

What a difference a century makes. Here is one example:

It must have been in 1964 when I first walked into the Cleveland Rexall Pharmacy on South Grand Boulevard in south St. Louis[…]The Cleveland Pharmacy was midway on the path I walked

I bought magazines there in 1965-’67. A radiator stood in a corner near the window. The magazine rack was to the left as you walked into the store. It was a very modest affair, compared with today’s magazine displays festooned with sensation, filth and ugliness[…]
Years went by, and then decades. I stopped at the Cleveland Pharmacy less often. My last visit there was in the 1980s or early 1990s. It was still pretty much the same as it had been in the 1960s. But the neighborhood around it was changing–gradually at first, and then increasingly obviously but not for the better[…]The old setting and neighborhood were all-White. The new setting and neighborhood were being made increasingly Black. I did not realize it at first, but I was now witnessing the surrender of an orderly neighborhood to an undeclared “public-private partnership” of thugs (on the streets) and excuse-makers (in the legislature and the courts)[…]
In the 1950s, my grade school classmates and I became experts in walking the streets and alleys in the neighborhood around that drug store. We were too young to know anything about the building’s history. It was called the Roosevelt Apartments and it opened in 1927[…]The building was advertised as “One of the most notable improvements of the South Grand district… It is fireproof”[…]
A century later, “One of the most notable improvements” had been made into a jungle habitat on a busy commercial street in a neighborhood that was once clean and orderly[…]
There is not a trace remaining of the authority, knowledge, confidence and pride of White men like those who designed and built the Roosevelt Apts. Instead, today’s White men exude appeasement, apologies, and accommodation