Citizen Brown

The 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, ignited nationwide protests and brought widespread attention to tragically relevant issues like police brutality and institutional racism. But Ferguson is not alone. As Colin Gordon shows in this urgent and timely book, the events in Ferguson exposed not only the deep racism of the local police department, but the ways in which decades of public policy effectively segregated and curtailed citizenship across the St. Louis suburbs... Citizen Brown uncovers half a century of private practices and public policies that resulted in bitter inequality and sustained segregation in Ferguson and beyond. Gordon shows how municipal and school district boundaries were pointedly drawn to contain or exclude African Americans, how local policies and services--especially policing, education, and urban renewal--were weaponized to maintain civic separation. He also makes clear that the outcry that arose in Ferguson was no impulsive outburst, but an explosion of pent-up rage against longstanding local systems of segregation and inequality--of which a police force which viewed citizens not as subjects to serve and protect, but as sources of revenue, was just the most immediate example. Worse, Citizen Brown illustrates the fact that, though the greater St. Louis area provides some extraordinarily clear examples of fraught racial dynamics, it is hardly alone among American cities and regions.