I am a white son of Ferguson, Mo.
I am a son of Dellwood, Castle Point, Moline Acres, Jennings, St. Ann, Riverview Gardens, Northwoods and Normandy and north St. Louis County.
I am a St. Louis native. I grew up and lived there until my family moved to Indianapolis in 1976. The answer to my “St. Louis question” is Riverview Gardens High School.
Raised Catholic, my Confirmation and First Communion took place at the now-shuttered St. Sebastian parish on Chambers Road. The first home my parents owned was in the 9800 block of Dennis Drive, less than a mile from Canfield Drive where Michael Brown died.
First off, let’s be clear that when the national media speaks of racism in Ferguson, what is really involved is the whole St. Louis area.
As a native I can confidently say very little “healing” or “change” is likely in St. Louis now or in the future. This is the regrettable reality regardless of any ongoing cross-racial dialogs or federal investigations uncovering what everyone already knows – racists run local governments and the police. For many white St. Louisans that reality is just fine.1
But Michael Brown’s killing lanced an ugly boil of racism that festered for more than a century, a boil constantly irritated by a white power structure led by the local real estate industry.2
St. Louis’ real estate community, embodied by its trade organization, the St Louis Real Estate Exchange, constituted a hoodless Ku Klux Klan.3 Since at least 1915, the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange consistently created explicit and implicit policies “protecting” white neighborhoods from African American “invasion.”4
White hoods are unnecessary when restrictive deed covenants prevent African Americans from “invading” white neighborhoods.5 Business suits trump Klan robes when you want to ensure banks and insurance companies charge black customers higher rates for polices and loans or don’t provide loans and policies at all.6
Real estate, politics and segregation are so intertwined in St. Louis history that Democrat Bernard Dickmann, mayor from 1933 to 1941, was also president of the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange, the organization writing the rules about who could live where.7
Race-based real estate practices became public policy backed by the Federal government: In St. Louis the mere presence of blacks living in an area designated it as “blighted” by federal guidelines.8
There’s also a reason several significant U.S. Supreme Court housing discrimination cases (Shelly v. Kramer 1948, James v. Mayer 1968, Black Jack v. United States 1972) originated in St. Louis. The city was also home of two famous failures in U.S. public housing, Cochran Gardens built in 1953, and the Pruitt-Igoe complex completed in 1956.
Don’t take my word about any of this. Landmark works of social research document exactly how St. Louis’ government used urban planning as a racist tool while its white business community manipulated real estate ownership to keep African Americans literally in their place.
Mapping Decline, St. Louis And The Fate Of the American City, by University of Iowa history professor Colin Gordon, shows exactly how segregation physically shaped St. Louis. 9 An excellent companion to Gordon’s spatial indictment of racist St. Louis is St. Louis Politics: The Triumph of Tradition, a political history of 20th century, written by Lana Stein, political science professor emeritus at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.
Gordon analyzed census data, property transactions and other public records from 1900 through 2000 using computer software that turns place-based information and databases into maps and lists. His maps and data detail how racist policies mixed with industrial decline turning the city into a stew of urban decay.
Mapping Decline, published in 2009 by the University of Pennsylvania Press, concentrates on the tangible role that historic housing segregation played in creating St. Louis’ 21st century racial predicament. You can even view a very informative interactive online map produced by the data analyzed by Gordon.
Stein’s Triumph of Tradition draws a different kind of map. Triumph of Tradition lays out in exquisite detail the development and structure of one of the most dysfunctional local government systems of any large American city.
“St. Louis is an anachronism, a city whose government resembles one from the 19th century, not the 21st,” Stein writes in the conclusion of Triumph of Tradition.
St. Louis’ political structure stayed frozen in the past while cities such as Indianapolis, Minneapolis and Pittsburgh modernized local government to some degree during the second half of the 20th century. The City of St. Louis’ ward-based political system failed to adapt as times changed, Stein points out.10
It is no surprise that since Stein’s book was published in 2002, St. Louis politics remain essentially unchanged.
Further aggravating racial strife and impeding change, St. Louis also suffers from some crippling political deformities. These legislative anachronisms are reminders that people alive today live with the consequences of decisions made as long ago as the Civil War.
In 1861, correctly fearing that Union sympathizers would seize the city’s arsenal, Missouri’s pro-slavery state government took control of the St. Louis police force.11 St. Louis and its arsenal remained in Union hands throughout the war. But when the war ended the St. Louis Police Department remained under the legislature’s control, a law unchanged to this day. The city’s police department is so dysfunctional that white and black police officers belong to separate unions.12
The area’s strange political system spawned in 1876 when St. Louis city and the county were separated in what was America’s first municipal home-rule charter.13
Under the charter the city could never expand beyond its 61-square-mile 1876 borders. Unable to grow physically as its population grew, the city’s economic options became increasingly limited. With the city unable to expand, surrounding St. Louis County grabbed an increasing share of the local economy.14
In the 1876 city-county divorce, the state mandated that the city take on both city and county government functions. That created a layer of “county offices” – including courts and magistrates – elected on an at-large basis, but paid by the state.15
Further complicating the political structure, these “county” office holders are in no way beholden to city’s mayor and board of alderman.16 The governor can make appointments between elections for any vacancy, with the exception of the office of city treasurer, according to Stein.
After 1950 the city shriveled while the county boomed. St. Louis’ population peaked in the 1950 census at 856,796. It was the nation’s 8th largest city. By the 2000 census St. Louis was 48th among American cities, its population down 59 percent from 1950, the largest percentage decline of all large U.S. cities, including Buffalo, N.Y., Pittsburg, Pa., and Detroit.17
Meanwhile, St. Louis County added 225,000 new single-family homes between 1950 and 2000.18 The number of incorporated cities in the county grew from six in 1900 to 90 in 2000. More than half of the cities formed after 1940. Twenty-one municipalities have fewer than 1,000 residents, including the village of Champ, population 13 in 2010.19
Each municipal entity competes for revenue. The City of St. Louis competes with the county. Each of the county’s 90 cities competes with each other and the city. The city, St. Louis County and its cities compete with 11 other counties in the metro area, including a portion of Illinois.20
In an area opposed to taxes many of these cities make money with tickets and fines. In Ferguson that meant that African Americans get ticketed and fined much more than any other racial group, according to the U.S. Justice Department’s recent report on policing in Ferguson.21
A 2014 Washington Post article uncovered how St. Louis County’s cities profit from poverty, harassing mainly black lower income residents with traffic fines and fees for non-traffic offenses such as not subscribing to the city-approved garbage collection service.22
Many of these towns are tiny yet all have mayors, town councils and city managers. Most of the cities maintain police forces mainly to generate revenue from traffic violations collected via one of 79 municipal courts.23 According to the Washington Post some St. Louis County cities depend on fines and fees for 40 percent of total revenue.
And then there is the mindset of many white locals.
St. Louis is a case where a significant number of people willfully do not want to learn from history or change their thinking about race in any way. There's a very distinct class of white racist St. Louis who doesn't want peace with the black community, much less integrated neighborhoods.
Many St. Louis whites grow up with a deep hatred (and fear) of African Americans, or what they perceive as a class of African Americans seen as "niggers." In the racist white St. Louis mindset there is often a distinction between “good” black people who work hard and have jobs and niggers. Niggers "ruin" things in the eyes of white St. Louis, especially if they move into a previously all-white area.
The attitude is "why can't they just act and live like us" whites? The answer to that question is simple: Because whites won't allow blacks in St. Louis "act and live" like whites. Since the Civil War "they" have been systematically denied decent housing, good schools and subjected to constant police harassment.24
Many St. Louis whites prefer their racist mindset no matter what the outcome. To them whites are in no way to blame for what is happening. ‘It’s all the niggers’ fault.’
Witness the recent interview with former Ferguson court clerk Mary Ann Twitty about the numerous racist emails she shared with the city’s police officers.
A reporter from St. Louis CBS affiliate KMOV asked Twitty whether she thought the emails were funny. Her response?
“Funny as in humor wise? Yes. Not because it was racist or biased, just funny because it was just funny jokewise,” Twitty said during a televised interview. “I feel bad because that's not, I don't want people to look at me and say ‘she sent those racist jokes out because she's racist or biased.' I am not.”
Apparently unable to even recognize the possibility that she is racist, Twitty feels she is a victim, someone who was just doing what everybody else was doing. This is typical of racist white St. Louis thinking and is another reason to doubt the possibility of progress.
Other than somehow becoming whites of another color, the black community cannot win in racist white St. Louis. Anytime that African Americans in St. Louis seek any kind of progress white racists accuse them of wanting “special treatment.”25
From the viewpoint of many racist white St. Louisans the protests and rioting spawned by Michael Brown’s shooting is the race war white leaders warned of, and helped create, during the past century.
Decade after decade through the 20th century the St. Louis story repeated itself: Every time it seems social progress is being made, it is undone or negated in some way.26
I don't foresee race relations in St. Louis improving in any real way without some sort of prolonged outside intervention, which is highly unlikely.
The fragmentation of local government is unlikely to change since a lot of money and political control hinges on this fragmentation.
For example, the large number of courts, councils and special districts means that are a large number of local private attorneys are needed. These attorneys and their firms are paid for their services to the communities of St. Louis County. A single attorney working in various roles throughout county is not unusual, according to the Washington Post.
A review of municipal court data by St. Louis Public Radio found that 72 attorneys have a single municipal position, 13 represent three or more municipalities and 20 have two positions. Of those, nine attorneys are judges in one municipality and prosecutor in another.27
The DOJ’s Ferguson report found the city used its municipal court “not with the primary goal of administering justice or protecting the rights of the accused, but of maximizing revenue. The impact that revenue concerns have on court operations undermines the court’s role as a fair and impartial judicial body.”
In the wake of the DOJ report Ferguson municipal judge Ronald Brockmeyer resigned. A prime example of a single attorney filling multiple judicial roles in several cities, Brockmeyer also resigned positions as prosecutor or judge in the cities of Breckenridge Hills, Dellwood, Florissant and Vinita Park.
Three St. Louis-area law firms provide prosecutors or judges for more than a quarter of the county’s municipal courts, according to a recent report in the St. Louis American.28
Where is the motivation to change the system when local lawyers are making good money from the status quo?
These municipalities also require the services of many other vendors, not just law firms, business that also have an interest in making sure change comes as slowly as possible.
Forget about any solutions coming form the state’s Tea Party-dominated legislature and GOP-controlled state government unless there’s something in it form them and there is nothing in this for them.
Any move to streamline government, possibly merging cities and centralize some police functions will be shouted down as “big government” trying to take over.
I'm convinced the black population in St. Louis can never get a fair shake from the local and state powers that be without some form significant and sustained social and political action. Hopefully the African American community can make itself heard without ongoing violence. Hopefully a significant portion of the white community will listen without prejudice.
But don’t hold your breath.
For me the only surprise about the lasting violence in St. Louis is that it took so long to happen. In the 1960s, St. Louis was spared the widespread race riots that shook many other cities. It took another 50 years for significant racial strife to erupt in St. Louis, despite its racist history.
I no longer inhabit the Midwest. I live in San Diego, California, in a racially and economically diverse suburban area. But this is no racial or social nirvana.
In southern California the primary objects of racist white rage are Hispanics, Mexicans in particular. San Diego is not an example of good government or stellar race relations. Here there are bad cops, gangs, illegal immigrants, racial profiling, spectacularly dishonest politicians, open fascists and a clubby insider-style local political power structure.
San Diego boomed after World War II, partly thanks to the Navy and Marine Corps. Today it is the nation’s 8th largest city, the spot St. Louis occupied in 1950. San Diego became one of America’s 10 largest cities at exactly the same time St. Louis shrank off the list.29
San Diego County remains a DoD-dependent, home to the world’s largest concentration of military bases.30 San Diego’s mild climate, abundant sun and beautiful beaches also attract dreamers and entrepreneurs, despite the area’s lack of water and high cost of living.
My neighbors are immigrants from Honduras; a family of Russian/Israeli émigrés; an Indian family; a gay couple; an African American family; a Vietnamese-American family and one has-been NFL player who spent all the money. On any given day I can hear three or four different languages being spoken without leaving my block.
Hopefully my San Diego neighborhood is a vision of a more tolerant future. But it is difficult envisioning St. Louis – locked in racial conflict, monochrome thinking and inbred politics – flourishing in an increasingly diverse America.
Notes:
1 http://news.stlpublicradio.org/...
2 http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu/...
3 http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu/...
4 http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu/...
5 http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu/...
6 http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu/...
7 Triumph of Tradition, page 24
8 Mapping Decline, page 89
9 http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu/
10 Triumph of Tradition, pages 250, 251
11 http://www.slmpd.org/... and http://www.stlmag.com/...
12 http://www.esopinc.com/...
13 https://www.youtube.com/...
14 Mapping Decline, pages 53, 54
15 Triumph of Tradition, pages 3, 4
16 Triumph of Tradition, pages 249, 250
17 Mapping Decline, page 223, Table C. 1. Major U.S. Cities, Population Rank at Decennial Census
18 Mapping Decline, page 11
19 http://factfinder.census.gov/...
20 Mapping Decline, pages 57-69
21 http://www.stltoday.com/...?
22 http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
23 http://www.stlamerican.com/...
24 http://www.diversitydatakids.org/...
25 http://www.stlamerican.com/...
26 Triumph of Tradition, page 204, paragraph 3 (this is just one example. there are more.)
27 http://news.stlpublicradio.org/...
28 http://www.stlamerican.com/...
29 Mapping Decline, page 223, Table C. 1. Major U.S. Cities, Population Rank at Decennial Census
30 https://www.tjsl.edu/...