A bestselling memoir of a vibrant childhood spent in a thriving St. Louis African American community before urban renewal changed everything.
Vivian Gibson grew up in Mill Creek Valley, a segregated working-class neighborhood in St. Louis that was razed in 1959 to build a highway, an act of racism disguised under urban renewal as progress. A moving memoir of family life at a time very different from the present,The Last Children of Mill Creekchronicles the everyday lived experiences of Gibsons large familyher seven siblings, her crafty, college-educated mother, and her hard-working fatherand the friends, shop owners, church ladies, teachers, and others who made Mill Creek into a warm, tight-knit African American community. In Gibsons words, This memoir is about survival, as told from the viewpoint of a watchful young girla collection of decidedly universal stories that chronicle the extraordinary lives of ordinary people.
Winner of a Missouri Humanities award for literary achievement,The Last Children of Mill Creekis an important book for anyone interested in urban development, race, and community historyor for anyone who was once a child.
Praise forThe Last Children of Mill Creek
2022 Missouri Author of the Year Winner
Missouri's Great Reads from Great Places Selection for the 2023 National Book Festival
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This is a story borne aloft by the sheer human joy of storytelling, of memory, of tender love for a mother and a father and for a vanished time and place. It is a book that, while steadfastly refusing the American fiction of color blindness, just as steadfastly refuses to portray Black life through the single warped lens of white-induced pain. TheLos Angeles Review of BooksVivian Gibsonwas raised on Bernard Street in Mill Creek Valley, and has lived in New York City and Liberia. She started writló(
![The Last Children of Mill Creek [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/4/4/4/2_4309047.jpg "The Last Children of Mill Creek [Paperback]")