East St. Louis was home to a pioneering Black construction company. Few know about it today

A group of cousins, known as the Prestons, often text each other with pictures or documents related to their late uncles and fathers.

The family group chat has made the cousins closer since the deaths of the men who raised them, while fostering a deep appreciation for the legacy they left in East St. Louis. The cousins are beginning to understand that a group text isn’t capacious enough to store their family’s history.

But understanding a family’s history is difficult when forced to learn about it on your own instead of hearing from the relatives who lived it.

“They were big family men, and I think I had the best father,” Patrice Preston Rogers, one of the cousins, said. “I think the problem is they were focused on family, so they really didn’t make a big deal out of what they did, so they really didn’t talk about it. It was more of just this is a job, and all of them kind of fell into it because that’s what their dad did, so I don’t know if they had much of a choice.”

https://news.stlpublicradio.org/culture-history/2022-02-22/east-st-louis-was-home-to-a-pioneering-black-construction-company-few-know-about-it-today