Mill Creek: An Erased Community, Vivian Gibson

Vivian Gibson will discuss her best-selling memoir The Last Children of Mill Creek that chronicles the triumphs and daily struggles of her large family. You’ll hear about the friends, shop owners, church ladies and teachers who made Mill Creek into a tight-knit African American Community. In 1959, Mill Creek, a segregated working-class neighborhood in St. Louis was razed to build The Daniel Boone Expressway, an act of racism disguised as “urban renewal.”

Vivian Gibson was raised on Bernard Street in Mill Creek Valley and has lived in New York City and Liberia. She started writing short stories about her childhood memories after retiring at age sixty-six. Her work has been produced as part of 50in50: Writing Women into Existence, at the Billie Holliday Theater in Brooklyn, and published in The St. Louis Anthology (Belt Publishing, 2019). She is the 2020 winner of the Missouri Humanities Literary Achievement Award. Gibson lives in St. Louis.

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