The NAACP St. Louis City Branch has released a landmark representation audit titled Field and Cloud: From the Rice Fields to the Cloud. The audit traces Black participation in the two economies that have most shaped American wealth—agriculture and technology—from Emancipation in 1865 to the modern artificial intelligence and clean-energy build-out of 2026.
Accompanied by a five-minute film, an interactive dashboard, and a comprehensive written report, the audit highlights a staggering 9.2-percentage-point gap in the St. Louis tech workforce. It also charts the parallel historical collapse of Black-owned farmland across Missouri and the United States.
The Core Findings: A Tale of Two Sectors
The audit details how systemic barriers have restricted Black participation in both legacy wealth building (land ownership) and future wealth building (technological infrastructure).
1. The Tech-Sector Representation Chasm
While Black Americans represent a significant portion of the local workforce, their representation in high-wage tech jobs is disproportionately low. The St. Louis metropolitan area has a tech gap that is more than double the national average.
| Region | Black % of Overall Workforce | Black % of Tech Workforce | The Representation Gap |
| United States | 11.8% | 7.7% | -4.1% |
| St. Louis Metro Area | 16.8% | 7.6% | -9.2% |
To reach tech-sector parity with the local workforce, the St. Louis region needs to add approximately 8,400 Black tech workers to its current base.
2. The Great Farmland Collapse
The legacy of Black agricultural equity has faced a parallel, catastrophic decline. In 1920, Black-American farmers held roughly sixteen million acres of land. Today, that base has collapsed by more than 98%, representing one of the largest racial wealth transfers in U.S. history.
- National Land Loss: Peer-reviewed research cited in the audit estimates $326 billion in foregone land value (in current dollars) due to land loss.
- Missouri Agriculture: Only 300 Black-operated farms remain in the state of Missouri, representing just 0.34% of the state’s total farms.
- Land Disparity: The remaining Black-operated farms in Missouri (totaling 68,000 acres) are, on average, 26% smaller than the state median.
The Path Forward: A $10 Million Pooled Investment
To bridge this massive workforce divide, the NAACP St. Louis City Branch has issued a direct call to action to regional philanthropies, corporations, and public partners. The audit outlines a plan to establish a pooled $10 million investment targeting three core regional institutions:
- Lincoln University of Missouri: Founded in 1866 by soldiers of the 62nd and 65th U.S. Colored Infantry, Lincoln is Missouri’s 1890 land-grant HBCU. Despite its legacy, a joint federal letter in 2023 documented that the state of Missouri underfunded the institution by $361 million between 1987 and 2020.
- Harris-Stowe State University: St. Louis’s only HBCU. Benefiting from a $2 million IBM investment, Harris-Stowe opened the new College of STEM and the Anheuser-Busch Center for Emerging Technology in 2025 to train the next generation of Black innovators.
- Cortex Innovation District: Cortex’s $7 million Missouri Tech First initiative has successfully placed roughly 350 new tech workers (60% of whom are people of color). However, meeting the 8,400-worker parity goal requires scaling these efforts up dramatically.
“The Carolina rice fields taught us how this ends when technical labor is extracted without equity. The land loss taught us. The tech-sector gap is teaching us again. We are not asking whether the next economy will be built. It is being built now, in this region, on this river. The only open question is who will own a share of it. Field and Cloud is the audit. The next chapter is what our region’s philanthropies, corporations, and public partners fund.”
— Adolphus M. Pruitt II, President of the NAACP St. Louis City Branch
Access the Audit and Interactive Dashboard
The NAACP has made the full suite of “Field and Cloud” materials public to encourage community engagement, researcher evaluation, and corporate action.
- Interactive Dashboard & Media Assets: View live workforce charts, localized ledgers, and the interactive case for pooled institutional investment at field-and-cloud.pplx.app.
- Watch the Companion Film: View the five-minute companion video charting the historical journey from early agronomists to cloud data centers at the NAACP St. Louis AI Project Portal.
- Get Involved & Inquiries: Funder briefings, media inquiries, and requests for the full written audit report can be directed to the NAACP St. Louis City Branch office via email at Pruitt@stlouisnaacp.org or by phone at 314-479-4427.
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