Around St. Louis, a Circle of Rage
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A version of this article appears in print on August 17, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Around St. Louis, A Circle of Rage Human Rights will be voilated, till the world exists, people are the same every where...they have an attitude of their own...to make them aware of their intentionl or unintentionl humialating & discriminating attitude, frist we will have to accept them, then slowly & gradulatlly reform their attitute. It has become mandatory for the world eduction system to include Human Rights as a component subject in the school curriculiun from an early stage all over the world for our upcoming future genration.
FERGUSON, Mo. —
Garland Moore, a hospital worker, lived in this St. Louis suburb for much of
his 33 years, a period in which a largely white community has become a largely
black one.
He attended its
schools and is raising his family in this place of suburban homes and apartment
buildings on the outskirts of a struggling Midwest city. And over time, he has
felt his life to be circumscribed by Ferguson’s demographics.
Mr. Moore, who is black,
talks of how he has felt the wrath of the police here and in surrounding
suburbs for years — roughed up during a minor traffic stop and prevented from
entering a park when he was wearing St. Louis Cardinals red.
And last week, as he
stood at a vigil for an unarmed 18-year-old shot dead by the police — a
shooting that provoked renewed street violence and looting early Saturday — Mr.
Moore heard anger welling and listened to a shout of: “We’re tired of the
racist police department.”
The origins of the
area’s complex social and racial history date to the 19th century when the city
of St. Louis and St. Louis County went their separate ways, leading to the
formation of dozens of smaller communities outside St. Louis. Missouri itself
has always been a state with roots in both the Midwest and the South, and
racial issues intensified in the 20th century as St. Louis became a stopping
point for the northern migration of Southern blacks seeking factory jobs in
Detroit and Chicago.
As African-Americans
moved into the city and whites moved out, real estate agents and city leaders,
in a pattern familiar elsewhere in the country, conspired to keep blacks out of
the suburbs through the use of zoning ordinances and restrictive covenants. But
by the 1970s, some of those barriers had started to fall, and whites moved even
farther away from the city. These days, Ferguson is like many of the suburbs
around St. Louis, inner-ring towns that accommodated white flight decades ago
but that are now largely black. And yet they retain a white power structure.
Although about two in
three Ferguson residents are black, its mayor and five of its six City Council
members are white. Only three of the town’s 53 police officers are black.
Turnout for local
elections in Ferguson has been poor. The mayor, James W. Knowles III, noted his
disappointment with the turnout — about 12 percent — in the most recent mayoral
election during a City Council meeting in April. Patricia Bynes, a black woman
who is the Democratic committeewoman for the Ferguson area, said the lack of
black involvement in local government was partly the result of the black
population’s being more transient in small municipalities and less attached to
them.
There is also some
frustration among blacks who say town government is not attuned to their
concerns.
Aliyah Woods, 45,
once petitioned Ferguson officials for a sign that would warn drivers that a
deaf family lived on that block. But the sign never came. “You get tired,” she
said. “You keep asking, you keep asking. Nothing gets done.”
Mr. Moore, who
recently moved to neighboring Florissant, said he had attended a couple of
Ferguson Council meetings to complain that the police should be patrolling the
residential streets to try to prevent break-ins rather than lying in wait to
catch people for traffic violations.
This year, community
members voiced anger after the all-white, seven-member school board for the
Ferguson-Florissant district pushed aside its black superintendent for
unrevealed reasons. That spurred several blacks to run for three board
positions up for election, but only one won a seat.
The St. Louis County
Police Department fired a white lieutenant last year for ordering officers to
target blacks in shopping areas. That resulted in the department’s enlisting researchers
at the University of California, Los Angeles, to study whether the department
was engaging in racial profiling.
And in recent years,
two school districts in North County lost their accreditation. One, Normandy,
where Mr. Brown graduated this year, serves parts of Ferguson. When parents in
the mostly black district sought to allow their children to transfer to schools
in mostly white districts, they said, they felt a backlash with racial
undertones. Frustration with underfunded and underperforming schools has long
been a problem, and when Gov. Jay Nixon held a news conference on Friday to
discuss safety and security in Ferguson, he was confronted with angry residents
demanding to know what he would do to fix their schools.
Ferguson’s economic
shortcomings reflect the struggles of much of the region. Its median household
income of about $37,000 is less than the statewide number, and its poverty
level of 22 percent outpaces the state’s by seven percentage points.
In Ferguson,
residents say most racial tensions have to do with an overzealous police force.
“It is the people in a position of authority
in our community that have to come forward,” said Jerome Jenkins, 47, who, with
his wife, Cathy, owns Cathy’s Kitchen, a downtown Ferguson restaurant.
“What you are
witnessing is our little small government has to conform to the change that we
are trying to do,” Mr. Jenkins added. “Sometimes things happen for a purpose;
maybe we can get it right.”
Ferguson’s police
chief, Thomas Jackson, has been working with the Justice Department’s community
relations team on improving interaction with residents. At a news conference
here last week, he acknowledged some of the problems.
“I’ve been trying to
increase the diversity of the department ever since I got here,” Chief Jackson
said, adding that “race relations is a top priority right now.” As for working
the with Justice Department, he said, “I told them, ‘Tell me what to do, and
I’ll do it.’ ”
Although experience
and statistics suggest that Ferguson’s police force disproportionately targets
blacks, it is not as imbalanced as in some neighboring departments in St. Louis
County. While blacks are 37 percent more likely to be pulled over compared with
their proportion of the population in Ferguson, that is less than the statewide
average of 59 percent, according to Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of
criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
In fact, Mr.
Rosenfeld said, Ferguson did not fit the profile of a community that would be a
spark for civil unrest. The town has “pockets of disadvantage” and middle and
upper-middle income families. He said Ferguson had benefited in the last five
to 10 years from economic growth in the northern part of the county, such as
the expansion of Express Scripts, the Fortune 500 health care giant.
“Ferguson does not
stand out as the type of community where you would expect tensions with the
police to boil over into violence and looting,” Mr. Rosenfeld said.
But the memory of the
region’s racial history lingers.
In 1949, a mob of
whites showed up to attack blacks who lined up to get into the pool at
Fairground Park in north St. Louis after it had been desegregated.
In the 1970s, a court
battle over public school inequality led to a settlement that created a
desegregation busing program that exists to this day.
A Ferguson city
councilman caused a stir in 1970 when he used racially charged language to
criticize teenagers from the neighboring town of Kinloch for throwing rocks and
bottles at homes in Ferguson. The councilman, Carl Kersting, said, “We should
call a black a black, and not be afraid to face up to these people,” according
to an article in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
Eventually blacks
broke down the barriers in the inner ring of suburbs, and whites fled farther
out. But whites fought hard to protect their turf.
SLIDE SH7 Photos
In the mid-1970s,
Alyce Herndon, a black woman, moved with her family to what was then the mostly
white town of Jennings in St. Louis County. She said some of their white
neighbors stuck an Afro pick in their front lawn and set it on fire. Ms.
Herndon also recalled tensions flaring between black and white students at her
school after the television mini-series “Roots” first aired in 1977.
For all its
segregation and discrimination, St. Louis did not have the major riots and
unrest during the 1960s that was seen across the country.
St. Louis’s black
leaders “were able to pressure businesses and schools to open their doors to
black people and employers to hire black workers,” Stefan Bradley, the director
of African-American studies at St. Louis University, wrote in an email. “These
concessions may have been enough to prevent St. Louis from taking what many
believed to be the next step toward redress of injustice: violent rebellion.”
But the fatal
shooting of Mr. Brown has brought submerged tensions to the surface.
“St. Louis never has
had its true race moment, where they had to confront this,” said Ms. Bynes, the
Democratic committeewoman. Without that moment, she added, blacks have been
complacent when it comes to local politics. “I’m hoping that this is what it
takes to get the pendulum to swing the other way.”
Ms. Herndon, 49, said
she moved her family to Ferguson in 2003 because she felt it was a good
community, safer than the unincorporated portion of the county where they lived
previously and with better schools for her children.
The town, she said,
offers everything — places to shop, eat and drink. There is a farmers market on
Saturdays. She frequents a wine bar across from a lot where a band plays on
Fridays. She has white and Asian neighbors on either side of her, and there are
other black families on her block. She has not experienced the racial tensions
of her childhood in St. Louis County, she said, but she understands that the
younger generation is living a different experience than she is.
“I understand the anger
because it’s psychological trauma when you see so many people being shot or
people being falsely accused,” said Ms. Herndon, who over the past week has
avoided the streets that have been filled with tear gas and rubber bullets in
clashes between police and protesters.
But now, a population
of young black men who often feel forgotten actually feel that people are
finally listening.
“If it wasn’t for the
looting,” said one man, who declined to give his name, “we wouldn’t get the
attention.”
Mr. Moore went one
step further. He does not condone the violence that erupted during some of the
protests, he said, but he does understand the frustration. And if he were
younger, he said, he probably would have joined them.
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