RACE & MEANING: THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN MISSOURI--LAKE PLACID, MISSOURI

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lake+Placid,+Stover,+MO+65078/@38.3790201,-93.0646756,583m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x87c489991b2da9ab:0xe2eab6bc35d3877c I was surprised to learn that, "The WPA had been established by executive order of President Roosevelt on May 6, 1935, with an initial appropriation of nearly five billion dollars," in Gray R. Kremer's chapter on "Lake Placid," a Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, recreational resort founded by two black men: Dr. P.C. Turner, then administrative head of General Hospital #2 in KC, and J.M. Sojourner, a Kansas City, Missouri, printer in the 1930s. Kremer's book, entitled RACE AND MEANING: THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN MISSOURI (2014), goes on to state, "The money was to be spent for relief work : creating public works projects that would serve the common good (roads, schools, hospitals, parks, reservoirs and so on) while employing millions of unemployed Americans. Workers spending their wages, government officials hoped, would help to stimulate the stagnant depression economy. The building of a dam on private property owned by Turner and Sojourner was construed to be a 'public ' project because, it was argued, if water supplies continued to be difficult to maintain in the drought-stricken years of the mid-1930s, the lake formed by building the dam could be opened to 'the public'" p. 173-4. With the aid of prominent Democratic powerbrokers, Harry S. Truman and boss, Thomas J. Pendergast, "The dam was completed during the summer of 1937, and the lake quickly filled, covering approximately fifteen acres." P. 177 So, now, I was trebly surprised! Not only that the WPA had been created by executive order, (Hint! President Obama) but that two KC black men had had a dam built on their private 346-acres of land in the 1930s by the WPA in Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, where very few black people lived, through the indispensable aid of such legendary politicians!