Our honorable Mayor Slay spent part of his Monday at Lewis Place, an historic African-American neighborhood north of the Central West End that was hit hard by the infamous New Year’s Eve tornados. The neighborhood is an important one for the area because…
The first black families to buy homes on Lewis Place ran into property-deed covenants that prohibited owners from selling to blacks. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned those covenants in a landmark 1948 case known as Shelley v. Kraemer, which involved a home at 4600 Labadie Avenue, less than a mile north of Lewis.
The mayor, joined by members of the local United Way visited the neighborhood, inspected the damage, talked about a donation drive and while they were at it, named Monday, January 17th, 2011 “Lewis Place Day,” which was fine because Monday, January 17th, 2011 wasn’t already anything else so it worked out perfect. Nope, nothing else at all…completely unclaimed. We can’t think of any related holiday that occurred on Monday, January 17th, 2011. Can anyone else? Show of hands.
You sir! There in the front. Oh it’s already “your” day? Keep dreaming pal.
Seriously though, we get that the Mayor probably thought it was cute naming a Martin Luther King Jr Monday to also be “Lewis Place Day”, but naming days are cheap can’t you just give them Tuesday? What you think the rest of the week is for white people?! Every day is “White people day” Mr. Mayor! (Except for May 5th and whenever Diwali is.) There’s no reason to “stack” holidays celebrating minorities like your trying to brush them out of the way! Was today already taken by “White People Can Always Seem to Find a House Pretty Easily” day?
Are you planning to start trying to “stack” up Yom Kippur and Hanukkah next, maybe concentrate those holidays in the summer like some kind of Jewish holiday summer camp? We’re not sure why you would call it that, but it would be in really poor taste.
via STLToday