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Determined not to allow a past vibrant community to have “erasure”, Vivian Gibson authored a true story about growing up in segregated St. Louis entitled, “The Last Children of Mill Creek” documenting an era and a community that is now often forgotten or denied.
Native St. Louisan Vivian Gibson grew up in Mill Creek Valley, a neighborhood razed in 1959 to build a highway. Her family, friends, church community, and neighbors were all displaced by an act of "urban renewal." In a moving memoir, Gibson recreates the everyday lived experiences of the Ross family, including her seven siblings, her crafty college-educated mother, who moved to St. Louis as part of the Great Migration, and her at-times forbidding father, who worked two jobs to keep them all warm and fed.
With a detail-oriented story, Vivian sketches scenes populated by her friends, shop owners, teachers, and others who made Mill Creek into a warm, tight-knit, African-American community, and reflects upon what it means that Mill Creek was destroyed in the name of racism disguised as "progress."
Now 70, Gibson started writing short stories about her childhood memories of the dying community after retiring at age 66. In Gibson's words, "This memoir is about survival, as told from the viewpoint of a watchful young girl -- a collection of decidedly universal stories that chronicle the extraordinary lives of ordinary people." The Last Children of Mill Creek was published April 20, 2020 by Belt Publishing.
Visit St. Louis's Missouri History Museum where an interactive exhibit on Vivian's family, titled The Ross Family has been part of the Reflections Gallery collection for 18 years.
