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Topic: Ferguson, like Flint, had decades of racial tension

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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Los Angeles Times
Nation Now


Ferguson unrest reflects decades of racial tension in St. Louis area

By Ralph Vartabedian contact the reporter

This article is related to: Law Enforcement, St. Louis, Racism, History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S. Supreme Court, 2010 Census


The St. Louis metropolitan area has been an extreme of racial segregation for 100 years


The city's economy has failed to benefit from the last several decades of industrialization in the South


There is a debate over whether St. Louis is a Southern city or a Midwest city
August 15, 2014, 7:59 PM




The roots of the racial unrest that has racked Ferguson, Mo., this week go back more than a century in a region that has had one foot planted in the Midwest and another in the South, historians and sociologists say..

"The St. Louis metropolitan area has been an extreme example of racial segregation for 100 years," said Clarissa Hayward, an associate professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis. "St. Louis is the beginning of the West, the nexus of the Midwest and at the border of the South."

The practices and politics of St. Louis created the problems that underlie the tension that boiled out in Ferguson this week, Hayward said.

St. Louis enacted racial zoning laws in 1916 that were struck down the following year, Hayward said. But the city turned to racial covenants on property deeds to preserve its segregation. The system continued until 1948, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down in its landmark Shelley vs. Kraemer decision.


The city's economy has been tied to the Midwest Rust Belt, failing to benefit from the last several decades of industrialization in the South. The metropolitan area lost two Chrysler assembly plants, as well as a Ford assembly plant, among many industrial losses to its economy.

Meanwhile, its repressive social sensibilities pushed its black population into a ring of suburbs that have poorly funded schools and local governments still dominated by white officials.

"Ferguson is part of a suburban ring that was white until the 1970s when the blacks could begin to move," said Margaret Garb, an associate history professor at Washington University. "Many blacks went to Ferguson from north St. Louis, which was devastated by industrial closures and bleak project housing."

The suburban school districts have been so poorly funded that some of them lost their accreditation, the result of funding cutbacks by the state, and students were forced to accept busing to other school districts, Garb said.

A little piece of info. regarding St. Louis. It's been listed by Forbes as among the top 5 most dangerous cities to live in America. Only Detroit and Oakland are ranked higher. Incidentally, St. Louis, Detroit, and Oakland have strict gun control laws....


"There is a debate over whether St. Louis is a Southern city or a Midwest city," Garb added. "The great migration of blacks early in the 20th century had a big impact on St. Louis, which was a stopping-off point for many on the journey to Chicago and Detroit.

"They arrived just as the good jobs were leaving," she said. "That is one of the stories of the black migration."

The city peaked about 1950, when the census reported 850,000 residents. By the 2010 census, it had dropped to just 320,000, even while the metropolitan area had surged to 6 million.

The area's long history with segregation may offer some explanation of why the police tactics this week in Ferguson appeared to inflame residents rather than keep the peace.

"When I learned that the police department was 95% white in a predominantly black city I was surprised," said Clark McPhail, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and one of the nation's top experts on police tactics in controlling assembled groups.

McPhail said his assessment of their tactics was also a surprise. "They were way behind the curve in their training and the way they responded. Tear gas is almost guaranteed to turn the crowd against the police. They were out of it."

McPhail said the police were geared up for a major confrontation when there was little reason to expect a lethal confrontation.

"We have data of tens of thousands of protest events for the 20th century and the 19th century and violence occurs in 10% or 15% of the cases," he said. "If police are not trained that way, they show up scared to death.

"If police grant the protesters some leeway rather than react to trivial violations of the law, it can be possible to defuse it," he said.

Follow @rvartabedian to more national news.


Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times

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Last edited by untanglingwebs on Tue Sep 16, 2014 6:58 am; edited 2 times in total
Post Sat Aug 16, 2014 6:04 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

I was in City Hall when an Afghanistan war veteran went to the Mayor's office to complain about Police misconduct. He was in the wrong office because he was complaining about the State Police.

Pulled over for a malfunctioning tail light, his car was searched. The veteran had a prosthetic leg, which they removed to search. He stated the State Police then threw his leg on the lawn and he was forced to crawl through wet grass to retrieve it. Finding nothing the police gave him a ticket for the light.

If true, this is an example of behavior that could ultimately lead to more racial problems in Flint. Now the State Police are working on community policing efforts while citizens report some are still using heavy handed technics with residents.
Post Tue Aug 19, 2014 7:52 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

In the beginning some violence was lessened with all of the state troopers and a new police chief. Now it is increasing again. A comment to one of the scanner sites indicate recently that we had 20 murders compared to32 at the same point last year. Recent shootings appear to be trying to make up for lost time.
Post Tue Aug 19, 2014 7:55 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

AlterNet / By Joe Conason

Missouri's Shockingly Ugly Racist Past and Present: Why Ferguson's Inferno Is No Surprise

The state has long spawned and attracted virulent racists.

August 20, 2014 |



The past week's unfolding tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri, with its militarized and overwhelmingly white police force confronting angry and hopeless African-Americans, is not a story unique to that place or this moment. Many cities and towns in this country confront the same problems of poverty, alienation and inequality as metropolitan St. Louis -- or even worse.
But beneath the familiar narrative, there is a deeper history that reflects the unfinished agenda of race relations -- and the persistence of poisonous prejudice that has never been fully cleansed from the American mainstream.
For decades, Missouri has spawned or attracted many of the nation's most virulent racists, including neo-Nazis and the remnants of the once-powerful Ku Klux Klan. Associated with violent criminality and crackpot religious extremism, these fringe groups could never wield much influence in the post-civil rights era. Beyond those marginalized outfits, however, exists another white supremacist group whose leaders have long enjoyed the patronage of right-wing Republican politicians.
The Council of Conservative Citizens, headquartered in St. Louis, is a living legacy of Southern "white resistance" to desegregation, with historical roots in the so-called citizens councils that sprang up during the 1950s as a "respectable" adjunct to the Klan. Its website currently proclaims that the CCC is "the only serious nationwide activist group that sticks up for white rights!" What that means, more specifically, is promoting hatred of blacks, Jews, gays and lesbians, and Latino immigrants while extolling the virtues of the "Southern way of life," the Confederacy and even slavery.
The group's website goes on to brag that the CCC is the only group promoting "white rights" whose meetings regularly feature "numerous elected officials, important authors, talk-show hosts, active pastors, and other important people" as speakers.
Although that boast may be exaggerated, it isn't hollow. Founded in 1985 by the ax handle-wielding Georgia segregationist Lester Maddox and a group of white activists, the CCC remained obscure to most Americans until 1998, when media exposure of its ties to prominent congressional Republicans led to the resignation of Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi as majority leader. Six years later, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit group monitoring racist activity in the United States, reported that the CCC had hosted as many as 38 federal, state and local officials at its meetings (all of them Republicans, except one Democrat) -- despite a warning from the Republican National Committee against associating with the hate group.
Over the years, the CCC's friends in high places included such figures as former Sen. John Ashcroft of Missouri, who shared much of the CCC agenda as governor, when he opposed "forced desegregation" of St. Louis schools -- along with the CCC members who served on the city's school board. When President George W. Bush appointed Ashcroft as U.S. attorney general, the CCC openly celebrated, declaring in its newsletter, "Our Ship Has Come In."
Recently, far fewer Republican officials have been willing to associate in public with the CCC's racist leaders. Then again, however, Ashcroft himself tended to meet secretly with those same bigots while outwardly shunning them. When asked about his connections with the group during his confirmation hearings in 2001, he swore that he had no inkling of its racist and anti-Semitic propaganda -- a very implausible excuse, given the CCC's prominence in St. Louis while he served as governor.
Despite the CCC's presence, Missouri is home to many fine and decent people, of course -- but malignant traces of the group and the racial animus it represents have spread far beyond the state's borders. The most obvious example is Rush Limbaugh, the "conservative" cultural phenomenon who grew up south of St. Louis -- in Cape Girardeau, Missouri -- and who has earned a reputation as a racial agitator over many years on talk radio, where he began by doing mocking bits in "black" dialect.
In 1998, the talk jock defended Lott when other conservatives were demanding his resignation over the politician's CCC connection. Today Limbaugh echoes the CCC line on the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, which suggests coldly that the unarmed teenager deserved his fate because he may have been a suspect in shoplifting or smoked marijuana. Why would a young man's life be worth less than a box of cigars? Back in Rush's home state, the answer is all too obvious.
Post Wed Aug 20, 2014 2:13 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

News from Alternet: Missouri's Shockingly Ugly Racist Past ...


OpEdNews
1 hour ago
News from Alternet: Missouri's Shockingly Ugly Racist Past and Present: Why Ferguson's Inferno Is No Surprise - ...
Post Wed Aug 20, 2014 2:19 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

AlterNet / By Joe Conason


The Poisonous Racism Driving Violence in Ferguson and the Rest of America


Many cities and towns in this country confront the same problems of poverty, alienation and inequality as metropolitan St. Louis -- or even worse.


August 20, 2014 |

The past week's unfolding tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri, with its militarized and overwhelmingly white police force confronting angry and hopeless African-Americans, is not a story unique to that place or this moment. Many cities and towns in this country confront the same problems of poverty, alienation and inequality as metropolitan St. Louis -- or even worse.

But beneath the familiar narrative, there is a deeper history that reflects the unfinished agenda of race relations -- and the persistence of poisonous prejudice that has never been fully cleansed from the American mainstream.

For decades, Missouri has spawned or attracted many of the nation's most virulent racists, including neo-Nazis and the remnants of the once-powerful Ku Klux Klan. Associated with violent criminality and crackpot religious extremism, these fringe groups could never wield much influence in the post-civil rights era. Beyond those marginalized outfits, however, exists another white supremacist group whose leaders have long enjoyed the patronage of right-wing Republican politicians.

The Council of Conservative Citizens, headquartered in St. Louis, is a living legacy of Southern "white resistance" to desegregation, with historical roots in the so-called citizens councils that sprang up during the 1950s as a "respectable" adjunct to the Klan. Its website currently proclaims that the CCC is "the only serious nationwide activist group that sticks up for white rights!" What that means, more specifically, is promoting hatred of blacks, Jews, gays and lesbians, and Latino immigrants while extolling the virtues of the "Southern way of life," the Confederacy and even slavery.

The group's website goes on to brag that the CCC is the only group promoting "white rights" whose meetings regularly feature "numerous elected officials, important authors, talk-show hosts, active pastors, and other important people" as speakers.

Although that boast may be exaggerated, it isn't hollow. Founded in 1985 by the ax handle-wielding Georgia segregationist Lester Maddox and a group of white activists, the CCC remained obscure to most Americans until 1998, when media exposure of its ties to prominent congressional Republicans led to the resignation of Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi as majority leader. Six years later, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit group monitoring racist activity in the United States, reported that the CCC had hosted as many as 38 federal, state and local officials at its meetings (all of them Republicans, except one Democrat) -- despite a warning from the Republican National Committee against associating with the hate group.

Over the years, the CCC's friends in high places included such figures as former Sen. John Ashcroft of Missouri, who shared much of the CCC agenda as governor, when he opposed "forced desegregation" of St. Louis schools -- along with the CCC members who served on the city's school board. When President George W. Bush appointed Ashcroft as U.S. attorney general, the CCC openly celebrated, declaring in its newsletter, "Our Ship Has Come In."

Recently, far fewer Republican officials have been willing to associate in public with the CCC's racist leaders. Then again, however, Ashcroft himself tended to meet secretly with those same bigots while outwardly shunning them. When asked about his connections with the group during his confirmation hearings in 2001, he swore that he had no inkling of its racist and anti-Semitic propaganda -- a very implausible excuse, given the CCC's prominence in St. Louis while he served as governor.

Despite the CCC's presence, Missouri is home to many fine and decent people, of course -- but malignant traces of the group and the racial animus it represents have spread far beyond the state's borders. The most obvious example is Rush Limbaugh, the "conservative" cultural phenomenon who grew up south of St. Louis -- in Cape Girardeau, Missouri -- and who has earned a reputation as a racial agitator over many years on talk radio, where he began by doing mocking bits in "black" dialect.

In 1998, the talk jock defended Lott when other conservatives were demanding his resignation over the politician's CCC connection. Today Limbaugh echoes the CCC line on the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, which suggests coldly that the unarmed teenager deserved his fate because he may have been a suspect in shoplifting or smoked marijuana. Why would a young man's life be worth less than a box of cigars? Back in Rush's home state, the answer is all too obvious.



Joe Conason is the editor in chief of NationalMemo.com. To find out more about Joe Conason, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
Post Thu Aug 21, 2014 2:10 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Salon / By Katie McDonough


The Ultimate White Privilege: Darren Wilson and being “Afraid For Your Life”




Claiming you shot someone out of fear of your life can be a "get out of jail free" card -- depending on who says it

August 21, 2014


On Wednesday, Matt Zoller Seitz shared an anecdote to illustrate how white privilege kept him from getting arrested or otherwise harmed by the police after he started a fight on the street. The full piece is worth your time, since it’s a frank accounting of how whiteness protects in the United States, but the most revealing moment in the story comes when Zoller Seitz — who admits he escalated a confrontation with the stranger, a Hispanic man loitering outside a deli — talks to the cops who arrived on the scene. After telling the two white officers that he had confronted the guy and punched him in the face after the stranger jabbed him in the chest with his fingers, the cops asked Zoller Seitz if he wanted to press charges for assault:


“I don’t think he actually meant to touch me, though,” I said, while a voice deep inside me said, Stupid white boy, he’s making it plain and you’re not getting it.

“It doesn’t matter if he meant to touch you, he hit you first,” he said. He was talking to me warmly and patiently, as you might explain things to a child. Wisdom was being imparted.

“You were in fear of your life,” he added.

By now the adrenaline fog seemed to be lifting. I was seeing things in a more clinical way. The violence I had inflicted on this man was disproportionate to the “assault,” and the tone of this exchange with the cop felt conspiratorial.

And then it dawned on me, Mr. Slow-on-the-Uptake, what was really happening: this officer was helping me Get My Story Straight.

Understanding, at long last.

Zoller Seitz’s story lays bare a reality that we have seen play out over and over again: A white person can get away with a lot if they claim that they were scared of a person of color. White people and law enforcement are allowed to fear for their lives — even if that so-called fear is based on racist perceptions about black and brown criminality or, more often, nothing at all.

A grand jury was seated on Wednesday to consider the circumstances surrounding the killing of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager who was shot six times by Darren Wilson, a white cop. If the case eventually goes to court, no doubt one of the questions that will be put before the jury is whether Wilson could have reasonably feared for his life during his confrontation with Brown. While witnesses to the shooting have indicated that Brown had his hands up in surrender when he was fatally shot, others — mostly other cops — have suggested that Brown charged at Wilson and that the “genesis of [the shooting] was a physical confrontation.”


It’s a strange, sad world where shooting someone four times in the arm and twice in the head could ever be considered a reasonable response to allegedly being lunged at by an unarmed teenager, but that’s where we are. We’ve seen the same argument invoked to defend George Zimmerman, who is white and Latino, after he killed Trayvon Martin. Lawyers for Theodore Wafer tried — but this time failed — to invoke the same defense after he shot and killed Renisha McBride, who had arrived on his porch seeking help after a car accident. Wafer’s defense argued that McBride’s loud knocking so alarmed their client that he felt he had no other choice but to shoot her through a locked screen door.

The lesson of such cases and the many others like them is that the mere presence of a black person is a credible threat in the eyes of the law. And that same racism informs who doesn’t present a credible threat. That same racism defines what kind of person can’t reasonably fear for their lives.

In the case of Marissa Alexander, a black mother in Florida, a man with a documented history of physical violence, a man who told Alexander that he was going to kill her, did not present a credible threat. Alexander’s husband, Rico Gray, broke down the door of the bathroom where she was hiding during a domestic violence incident. He grabbed her by the throat, and choked her as he held her against the floor. Alexander then tried to escape through the garage, but found herself trapped when the door wouldn’t open. She returned to the house having retrieved her handgun from her car and fired at a wall near where Gray stood. No one was harmed. But when Alexander tried to invoke Florida’s “stand your ground” law in her defense, she was denied. Twice. According to State Attorney Angela Corey, Alexander was “not in fear” but “angry“ when she fired the warning shot. She now faces up to 60 years in prison.

This week also marks the eight-year anniversary of the incident that would put the New Jersey Four behind bars for defending themselves against a homophobic assault. As Victoria Law wrote for Salon this week, the seven women — all black LGBTQ women — were confronted and sexually harassed by a man on the street in New York City. “When they told him they were gay, he threatened them with rape and physically attacked them,” Law explained. “He threw his lit cigarette at them, ripped the hair from one woman’s head and choked another woman.” He is also alleged to have told them he would “vulgar language them straight.” The man was stabbed during the altercation. A jury later sentenced Venice Brown, Terrain Dandridge, Renata Hill and Patreese Johnson to prison terms ranging from three to 11 years. We know a lot about anti-LGBTQ violence in the United States, how often LGBTQ people — particularly LGTBQ women of color — are victims of violence. Nonetheless, these women were branded a “lesbian wolf pack” and their claims of fear were rejected by a jury.

CeCe McDonald, a trans woman of color who was assaulted during an anti-LGBTQ attack in Minnesota, faced similar treatment. After being confronted by a group of at least four white people shouting racist and anti-LGBTQ slurs, McDonald had her cheek slit open by a member of the group. McDonald and her friends began fighting back, but eventually tried to escape. McDonald was pursued by one of the men, and stabbed her assailant with a pair of scissors, who later died of his injuries. Despite her adamance that she acted in self-defense, McDonald was charged with two counts of second-degree murder. She would go on to accept a plea offer of second-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to 41-months in a men’s prison facility. She was released last year after serving 19 months.

Luke O’Donovan, a white queer activist in Georgia, was last week sentenced to two years in prison and eight years of probation after he used his pocket knife to stab five men who had confronted him in an alleged anti-LGTBQ hate crime in 2012. Donovan was stabbed three times.

Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson, who was with Brown at the time he was killed, told MSNBC that the police instigated the confrontation. That they were just walking in the street, and almost home when Wilson approached. “I saw the barrel of the gun pointed at my friend,” he said. “Then I saw the fire come out of the barrel.”

Johnson said he feared for his life. There’s no reason to doubt that Brown felt the same way. But are teens like Johnson and Brown allowed to fear for their lives? And who poses a more credible threat? A teenager allegedly armed with a lifted pack of cigarillos or a cop with a gun and a willingness to use deadly force? It seems we are offered the answer to such questions with an alarming frequency. And with the outcome of this week’s grand jury hearing on Wilson’s decision to shoot and kill an unarmed teen looming, Brown’s parents, the residents of Ferguson and the rest of the nation prepare themselves to have that question answered once again.





Katie McDonough is an assistant editor for Salon, focusing on lifestyle. Follow her on Twitter @kmcdonovgh or email her at kmcdonough@salon.com.
Post Thu Aug 21, 2014 2:14 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Ferguson isn’t about black rage against cops. It’s white rage against progress.



By Carol Anderson August 29



Carol Anderson is an associate professor of African American studies and history at Emory University and a public voices fellow with the Op-Ed Project. She is the author of “Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960.”

When we look back on what happened in Ferguson, Mo., during the summer of 2014, it will be easy to think of it as yet one more episode of black rage ignited by yet another police killing of an unarmed African American male. But that has it precisely backward. What we’ve actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless.

Protests and looting naturally capture attention. But the real rage smolders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. It goes virtually unnoticed, however, because white rage doesn’t have to take to the streets and face rubber bullets to be heard. Instead, white rage carries an aura of respectability and has access to the courts, police, legislatures and governors, who cast its efforts as noble, though they are actually driven by the most ignoble motivations.

White rage recurs in American history. It exploded after the Civil War, erupted again to undermine the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision and took on its latest incarnation with Barack Obama’s ascent to the White House. For every action of African American advancement, there’s a reaction, a backlash.


The North’s victory in the Civil War did not bring peace. Instead, emancipation brought white resentment that the good ol’ days of black subjugation were over. Legislatures throughout the South scrambled to reinscribe white supremacy and restore the aura of legitimacy that the anti-slavery campaign had tarnished. Lawmakers in several states created the Black Codes, which effectively criminalized blackness, sanctioned forced labor and undermined every tenet of democracy. Even the federal authorities’ promise of 40 acres — land seized from traitors who had tried to destroy the United States of America — crumbled like dust.


Influential white legislators such as Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (R-Pa.) and Sen. Charles Sumner (R-Mass.) tried to make this nation live its creed, but they were no match for the swelling resentment that neutralized the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, and welcomed the Supreme Court’s 1876 United States vs. Cruikshank decision, which undercut a law aimed at stopping the terror of the Ku Klux Klan.

Nearly 80 years later, Brown v. Board of Education seemed like another moment of triumph — with the ruling on the unconstitutionality of separate public schools for black and white students affirming African Americans’ rights as citizens. But black children, hungry for quality education, ran headlong into more white rage. Bricks and mobs at school doors were only the most obvious signs. In March 1956, 101 members of Congress issued the Southern Manifesto, declaring war on the Brown decision. Governors in Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia and elsewhere then launched “massive resistance.” They created a legal doctrine, interposition, that supposedly nullified any federal law or court decision with which a state disagreed. They passed legislation to withhold public funding from any school that abided by Brown. They shut down public school systems and used tax dollars to ensure that whites could continue their education at racially exclusive private academies. Black children were left to rot with no viable option.

A little more than half a century after Brown, the election of Obama gave hope to the country and the world that a new racial climate had emerged in America, or that it would. But such audacious hopes would be short-lived. A rash of voter-suppression legislation, a series of unfathomable Supreme Court decisions, the rise of stand-your-ground laws and continuing police brutality make clear that Obama’s election and reelection have unleashed yet another wave of fear and anger.


It’s more subtle — less overtly racist — than in 1865 or even 1954. It’s a remake of the Southern Strategy, crafted in the wake of the civil rights movement to exploit white resentment against African Americans, and deployed with precision by Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. As Reagan’s key political strategist, Lee Atwater, explained in a 1981 interview: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N-----, n-----, n-----.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n-----’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights’ and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that.” (The interview was originally published anonymously, and only years later did it emerge that Atwater was the subject.)

Now, under the guise of protecting the sanctity of the ballot box, conservatives have devised measures — such as photo ID requirements — to block African Americans’ access to the polls. A joint report by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the NAACP emphasized that the ID requirements would adversely affect more than 6 million African American voters. (Twenty-five percent of black Americans lack a government-issued photo ID, the report noted, compared with only 8 percent of white Americans.) The Supreme Court sanctioned this discrimination in Shelby County v. Holder , which gutted the Voting Rights Act and opened the door to 21st-century versions of 19th-century literacy tests and poll taxes.

The economic devastation of the Great Recession also shows African Americans under siege. The foreclosure crisis hit black Americans harder than any other group in the United States. A 2013 report by researchers at Brandeis University calculated that “half the collective wealth of African-American families was stripped away during the Great Recession,” in large part because of the impact on home equity. In the process, the wealth gap between blacks and whites grew: Right before the recession, white Americans had four times more wealth than black Americans, on average; by 2010, the gap had increased to six times. This was a targeted hit. Communities of color were far more likely to have riskier, higher-interest-rate loans than white communities, with good credit scores often making no difference.

Add to this the tea party movement’s assault on so-called Big Government, which despite the sanitized language of fiscal responsibility constitutes an attack on African American jobs. Public-sector employment, where there is less discrimination in hiring and pay, has traditionally been an important venue for creating a black middle class.

when you think of Ferguson, don’t just think of black resentment at a criminal justice system that allows a white police officer to put six bullets into an unarmed black teen. Consider the economic dislocation of black America. Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin interacted, thus transforming a 17-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a loaded gun becomes a victim. Remember the assault on the Voting Rights Act. Look at Connick v. Thompson, a partisan 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2011 that ruled it was legal for a city prosecutor’s staff to hide evidence that exonerated a black man who was rotting on death row for 14 years. And think of a recent study by Stanford University psychology researchers concluding that, when white people were told that black Americans are incarcerated in numbers far beyond their proportion of the population, “they reported being more afraid of crime and more likely to support the kinds of punitive policies that exacerbate the racial disparities,” such as three-strikes or stop-and-frisk laws.

Only then does Ferguson make sense. It’s about white rage.

outlook@washpost.com
Post Tue Sep 16, 2014 6:57 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

U.S. News


How a century of racist policies made Ferguson into a pocket of concentrated despair
Joshua Holland, Moyers & Company
28 Oct 2014 at 07:40 ET


Demonstrator Keisha Gray cries while protesting the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri August 13, 2014. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni
Demonstrator Keisha Gray cries while protesting the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri August 13, 2014. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni


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Ferguson, Missouri, was a powder-keg waiting for a match long before August 9 and Michael Brown’s fateful encounter with Police Officer Darren Wilson. It is one of many predominantly black communities across the United States plagued by highly concentrated poverty, and all of the social problems that accompany it.

White America has come up with a number of rationales for these enduring pockets of despair. An elaborate mythology has developed that blames it on a “culture of poverty” — holding the poor culpable for their poverty and letting our political and economic systems off the hook. A somewhat more enlightened view holds that whites simply fled areas like Ferguson — which had a population that was 99 percent white as recently as 1970 — because of personal racial animus, leaving them as hollowed-out, predominantly black “ghettos.”

But a study by Richard Rothstein, a research fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, comes to a very different conclusion. In his report, “The Making of Ferguson,” Rothstein details how throughout the last century a series of intentionally discriminatory policies at the local, state and federal levels created the ghettos we see today. BillMoyers.com spoke with Rothstein about the report. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.





Joshua Holland: Most people believe that Ferguson became so racially polarized because of “white flight” — white people fled the area because of personal prejudice against African-Americans. In your report, you argue that this misses a crucial point. What are we overlooking?

Rothstein: The segregation that characterizes Ferguson, and that characterizes St. Louis, was the creation of purposeful public policy. We have a segregated nation by design.

The St. Louis metropolitan area was no different from most metropolitan areas of the country. The ghetto in the central city of St. Louis was redeveloped for universities, and for a number of other uses, and the African American population in the central city was shifted to inner ring suburbs like Ferguson.

It was done primarily with two policies: First, public housing was segregated, purposely, by the federal government, so that what were previously somewhat integrated neighborhoods in urban areas were separated into separate black and white public housing projects.

And then, in the 1950s, as suburbs came to be developed, the federal government subsidized white residents of St. Louis to move to the suburbs, but effectively prohibited black residents from doing so. The federal government subsidized the construction of many, many subdivisions by requiring that bank loans for the builders be made on the condition that no homes be sold to blacks.

Because black housing was so restrictive, there were so few places where African-Americans could live in St. Louis. So what was left of St. Louis’ African-American community became overcrowded. City services were not readily available. The city was zoned so that the industrial or commercial areas were placed in black neighborhoods but not in white neighborhoods. So the industrial areas, where African-Americans lived, became slums.

And then white residents in places like Ferguson came to associate slum conditions with African-Americans, not realizing that this was not a characteristic of the people themselves, but rather it was a creation of public policy.

This is a somewhat oversimplified description of a complex array of policies. But every policy that I described in this report can be found in every other metropolitan area throughout the country. These policies applied in the New York City area, and they applied in the liberal San Francisco area. It’s a story that characterizes the entire country, but you cannot understand what’s going on with Ferguson today without knowing this history.

Holland: Who was Adel Allen, and why is his story — which took place in nearby Kirkwood, Missouri — important for understanding how Ferguson came to be the city it is today?

Rothstein: Adel Allen was an African American engineer for the McDonnell Douglas Corporation. He was recruited from Kansas to work in the St. Louis metro area. When he got there, he couldn’t find housing anywhere in the suburban areas near the plant. He was about to move back to Kansas, because the only place he could find housing was in overcrowded conditions in the central St. Louis ghetto.

He finally got a white friend to buy a home for him in the town of Kirkwood. He moved into a block that was overwhelmingly white. There were 30 white families. Seven years later, there were 30 black families and two white families on that block. And this was largely because of practices in the real estate industry.

Realtors engaged in a practice which came to be known as “blockbusting.” When a black family moved onto a block, like Adel Allen did in Kirkwood, the real estate agents would go door to door and try to panic their white neighbors into selling their homes at very reduced prices, with the idea that property values were going to be destroyed because African-Americans were moving into their neighborhood.





Those real estate agents then bought those properties at very low prices and resold them to African-Americans, who had to pay very high prices because they had no other housing options.

Now, this was something that was not considered unethical until the 1970s. In fact, licenses would be suspended by the state real estate commission if a real estate agent sold a home to a black family in a white neighborhood — until the first one sold, and then it was considered perfectly ethical for real estate agents to turn an entire block into an African-American block.

Once they moved into that block, all of a sudden, over the course of a few years, city services began to decline. Other parts of Kirkwood which were overwhelmingly white continued to get good services, but the African-American neighborhoods were denied. The rest of the city got sidewalks and curbs; the black blocks did not.

Holland: You also write, “State sponsored labor and employment discrimination reduced the incomes of African-Americans relative to whites in St. Louis.” So as a result, even absent these kinds of housing policies you describe, African-Americans would be hard-pressed to afford to live in a decent white suburb.

Rothstein: That’s right. In St. Louis, African-Americans were excluded from good-paying jobs for most of the 20th century. They opened up only beginning in the 1970s. For example, construction jobs during the enormous housing boom that created the suburbs in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s were completely closed to African-Americans because they could not be admitted to construction unions, and the federal government certified every one of those segregated unions as the exclusive agent for their trades in those construction sites. So it’s not simply the result of private discrimination by the unions. This was something that was sanctioned by the federal government. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the National Labor Relations Board first withdrew certification from a segregated union and the policy didn’t become widespread for at least another 10 years or so.

There are many other examples I could give you. During the enormous employment boom during World War II, St. Louis was a big center of arms manufacturing. Lots of workers flooded to St. Louis from the Ozarks and other areas, black workers as well as white workers. But the largest ammunition producer would not hire African-Americans until the war was almost over.

So all of those lost opportunities for employment created a situation where African-American incomes were much, much lower than white incomes.

Holland: I’m going to ask you to connect some dots. Many of the things you describe in the paper haven’t been legal for quite a bit of time. How does this legacy of institutional racism in the past set up the unrest that has played out in Ferguson after the shooting death of Michael Brown?

Rothstein: As we know from a lot of recent research, intergenerational income mobility in this country is quite low. If you’re born into a low-income family, the chances are very, very great that you yourself will have a low income. We don’t have nearly the kind of mobility that is mythical in this country.

So after a century of policies which denied African-Americans access to jobs that pay decent wages, the likelihood is that their children and their children’s children will still be paying the price for those policies that held their parents and grandparents behind for so long.

And then there are the housing policies. Let me take the example of the suburb of Kirkwood. In the 1950s, when Kirkwood was being developed, those homes were selling for about $8,000 dollars each, which was about two times the national median income at that time. Working families could afford to buy a home for twice median income, but only whites were permitted to buy into Kirkwood. Any white working family could’ve afforded to buy those homes, and very often, they were further subsidized by the federal government — veterans could buy with no down payment, and obtain loans at very low interest rates.

Those families then benefited from a half-century of equity appreciation in their homes. If they moved, they profited on the sale. And they were able to transmit that equity to their children. Their children were secure. Their children were able to go to college.

Today, those same homes that sold for $8,000 in the 1950s sell for $400,000, which is about six or seven times national median income. So today, working families, whether white or black, can’t afford to buy in Kirkwood. Fifty years ago, when whites similar to them in every other respect except their race were populating the suburbs, African-American families were not permitted to do so, so the legacy of that discrimination continues to this date. Poor African-Americans got crowded into ghettos — into all black, low-income neighborhoods like Ferguson.

And because the Federal Housing Administration refused to guarantee mortgages for African-Americans and would only guarantee mortgages for whites, black people who could afford to buy homes couldn’t get mortgages for them. So speculators sold those homes to them on contract, like on an installment plan. And if they were ever late with a payment, their house would be immediately repossessed and resold again on contract to someone else. In order to be able to make these contract payments, which were very high because the demand for housing was so great relative to the supply available to African-Americans, families doubled up, they subdivided their homes, they rented out parts of their homes. That’s a great example of how public policies led to the formation of slums.

This then became a multigenerational problem.

Download Rothstein’s report, “The Making of Ferguson,” at the Economic Policy Institute or read his article from the Fall 2014 issue of The American Prospect entitled “The Making of Ferguson: How Decades of Hostile Policy Created a Powder Keg.”
Post Tue Oct 28, 2014 9:12 am 
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http://globalgrind.com/2014/08/27/my-st-louis-then-and-now-by-thabiti-lewis-blog/


My St. Louis Then and Now by Thabiti Lewis

Aug 27, 2014

By Thabiti Lewis

Outrage In Missouri Town After Police Shooting Of 18-Yr-Old Man

When the city of Ferguson exploded into protest over the brutal killing of unarmed teen Michael Brown, it hit close to home. As a native of St. Louis, I returned this year to spend time as a Visiting Scholar at Washington University—after roughly a 20-year hiatus. During my childhood years, my uncle briefly lived in the very complex where Mr. Brown was murdered. Most of this summer three times each week I took my daughter to Forest Wood Park in Ferguson for tennis lessons, about three-quarters of a mile from the spot where Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown. More than the daily demonization of black men in the nation’s psyche, in reflecting on Brown’s senseless death, my thoughts drift toward my youth as a black male trying to safely navigate my way through and out of St. Louis to college in New York.

I am surprised but not shocked that the situation is currently at full throttle. The tensions have been mounting for quite some time. As a young teen in the 1980s I was taught when traveling through any one of the ninety or so county townships in St. Louis to watch my speed, make sure my vehicle was free of any violations, make certain my license and registration were accurate, and to watch my speed. The county was a place we ventured to for movies, malls, dining, or the difficult to find jobs that just seemed to be in short supply in the city of St. Louis. The catch was that one had to navigate through the minefield of township police without being stopped, ticketed, or arrested. Indeed, the site of one or more young black male teens in a car was usually sure to draw the attention of police officers. Sometimes one need not even be in a car.

During my senior year, I, along with several friends, was shooting hoops in a Clayton, Missouri school yard when suddenly a police officer drove his car onto the court where we were. He wanted to know if we were residents and claimed that someone had reported that we told a little girl to get out of the schoolyard. After some back and forth we just left. We downplayed the injustice by agreeing the game was nearly done and it was getting late.

Ferguson St. Louis is a microcosm of the nihilism, anger, poverty, and cultural-disconnect that has gripped the country for several decades. These crisis proportion dynamics have been intensifying for the past six or seven years. There are many reports about what has happened in Ferguson but perhaps not enough conversation about what action we need to take to make it end. The simple answer seems to be the lack of jobs, opportunity, respect; a history of injustice, personal responsibility, and cultural. However a much more lengthy and complicated explanation is necessary.

The officer harassing me and my friends did not see his son, his nephew, his neighbor’s sons, nor did the officer who shot Mr. Brown. Instead, through his lens he perceived potential or immediate threats. Over twenty-five years later how much has changed?

The North County has historically been a space where upwardly mobile working class and middle class African Americans from St. Louis city fled to as soon as they could afford it. Nearby North St. Louis county cities like Normandy, Jennings, Riverview, Florissant, and Ferguson offered safe, clean, fairly crime free homes, recreation facilities, and better education for their children.


My recent return to St. Louis has been alarming. I have noticed that the city has undergone a serious shift. As the inner core of the city such as downtown lofts, Soulard, Lafayette, Mid-Town, Central West End and The Grove have been refurbished and made safer for an influx of white residents I wonder where the African Americans and poor white residents that once occupied these spaces have gone. To get a sense of the pulse of the city I rode the Metro Link to Washington University’s campus each day. What I discovered during morning, afternoon, and evening commutes is that these people are getting off in droves in the north county. So when I took my daughter to tennis lessons in Ferguson I understood why I spied so many young African Americans walking along the streets.

However, as many have reported, what has not changed is the ethnic make up of the police force and other public offices. What also has not changed nation-wide is a philosophy among officers to “shoot until the threat is no longer presenting a threat,” explains David Clinger a former police officer and associate professor at University of Missouri in St. Louis. What has not changed since the Civil Rights Act was signed is a significant and lasting economic and political power shift among black Americans.

Washington University in St. Louis houses the Henry Hampton Eyes on the Prize: American Civil Rights Years 1954-1965 archival material. This film footage chronicles some of the most pivotal moments in the civil rights movement. As I think about solutions to the current crisis, I am convinced this is the perfect time to use it to offer programming and discussion for police forces and schools across the nation about one of the most important periods in modern American history. Such programming will allow the nation to see how current behavior such as refusal to allow even peaceful protest, the presence of dogs, assault rifles, tear gas and tanks, creating curfews, and the initial refusal to name the shooter, or release the autopsy report is eerily close to the brutality of the Old South that shook the nation over fifty years ago. But it can also teach lessons to the nihilistic youth of today that change comes from personal responsibility and being informed citizens who change policy through the political process.

The Eyes on the Prize also reminds us of the legacy of the 1964 Summer Project, called “Freedom Schools,” a network 30 to 40 voluntary summer schools that taught subjects such as black history and constitutional rights to help with confidence, voter literacy, and political organization skills, as well as academic skills to students from the very young to elderly adults. A reprisal or something similar to “Freedom Summer” is necessary if we hope to empower citizens like Ferguson’s black populace. St. Louis was not among the larger urban cities rioting during the summer of 1964, but fifty years later Ferguson, Missouri has undoubtedly impacted the question of civil rights, race, the increasing economic inequities and the color of justice in modern America. The reaction of the police to an unarmed youth, the response of an angry populace, the militarized police response to protesters, and the presence of the national guard, FBI, and Attorney General to ensure justice prevails is a truer measure of our progress fifty years later.

Dr. Thabiti Lewis is an Associate Professor of English and Critical Culture Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University and the author of Ballers of the New School: Race and Sports in America. In 2014 he was a Visiting Scholar in the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis.
Post Sun Dec 07, 2014 5:22 pm 
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