Two years after Ferguson, the movement lives.
It breathes and it grows, unites and divides, confounds and comforts.
On Tuesday, it will have been two years since young African-Americans flooded West Florissant Avenue in of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was shot by Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson after a confrontation and struggle on Canfield Drive.
Weeks of unrest and awakening followed. blossomed. There was anger and healing, calls for change and racist backlash. It was a moment that forever changed ºüÀêÊÓƵ and gave birth to a new kind of civil rights movement.
There are times today, in ºüÀêÊÓƵ and elsewhere, when it is easy to see a region and nation in turmoil, divided by race, and wonder whether anything was accomplished. But for all the nativist rhetoric fueled by the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, there are legitimate signs of progress.
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Over the past couple of weeks, federal voter identification laws in four states — Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin and North Dakota — with the court in the North Carolina case most explicitly calling out the underlying racism behind the laws.
In North Carolina, federal judges wrote that Republican lawmakers in that state “targeted African-Americans with almost surgical precision,†seeking to “impose cures for problems that did not exist.â€
To understand the significance of these rulings, it’s important to go back in time, to a year before Ferguson, when the Supreme Court and Chief Justice John Roberts declared that America’s racist past was behind it. “Our country has changed,†Roberts wrote.
Yes, it has.
In the past two years, there has been an awakening to the racial inequity that still pervades an America divided by black and white.
In ºüÀêÊÓƵ, on Tuesday, voters, many of them still old enough to remember an America before blacks had full voting rights, sent a message about that awakening. They elected the city’s first African-American circuit attorney, with over the favorite who had the former circuit attorney’s backing.
In the county, state Rep. Rochelle Walton-Gray in winning a ºüÀêÊÓƵ County Council seat over incumbent Mike O’Mara. There will be two African-Americans on the council for the first time.
On that same election day, the Forward Through Ferguson nonprofit announced a massive regional collaboration will be applying for from the MacArthur Foundation to find innovative ways to improve that status of racial equity in a region with a stained history of division.
“We have the outcomes we have today because of centuries of laws and policies that intentionally denied access to opportunities for some, while putting no barrier to the same opportunities for others,†said Nicole Hudson of Forward Through Ferguson, which grew out of the Ferguson Commission that issued 189 calls to action following the 2014 and 2015 protests in the ºüÀêÊÓƵ region. “This is math. And over the years, that math adds up.â€
How does ºüÀêÊÓƵ get to that equity? It builds mass transit in diverse neighborhoods. It improves educational opportunity for young, black children. It reduces crime in high-poverty neighborhoods. It changes laws so governments stop preying on poor people simply to raise revenue so the governments can continue to exist.
Two years after Ferguson, there is progress being made on some of those fronts.
Government and civic leaders are increasingly applying a racial lens to the region’s problems. Momentum is building toward creating a more unified region by knocking down arbitrary boundaries.
Pastors of churches in West County are challenging their mostly white flocks to understand the daily challenges facing their black brothers and sisters.
Police leaders — many of them anyway — are embracing the sort of reforms that will improve trust with communities of color and also keep officers more safe.
Two years after Ferguson our federal courts have sent a clear message: Yes, America of 2016 is far different than America of 1966, but it has yet to shed the shackles of its racist past. For too many young black citizens, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are just words on paper, ideals that exist outside their hard-luck neighborhoods.
Two years after Ferguson, the movement lives, but its important work has barely begun.