The Ferguson Uprising through a Historical Lens

[Jefferson23]

Scholars Clarence Lang and Ashley Howard explain the historical and national context in which the recent protests against the killing of an unarmed African-American teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, have unfolded - September 3, 14

Bio

Clarence Lang is an Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies at The University of Kansas, and a former Langston Hughes Visiting Professor. Professor Lang's main research and teaching areas are African American working-class and labor history, the Black Freedom Movement, and black urban communities in the twentieth-century Midwest. He is the author of Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), and co-editor with Robbie Lieberman of Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: "Another Side of the Story" (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). He has published articles and reviews in academic and popular venues including The Journal of African American History, Journal of Urban History, Journal of Social History, The Black Scholar, New Politics, Against the Current, Race & Society, and The Chronicle Review.

Ashley Howard is an assistant professor of African American History at Loyola University New Orleans. Her research interests include the black Midwestern experience and the global history of racial violence. Her forthcoming book Prairie Fires analyzes the 1960s urban rebellions in the Midwest, grounded in the way race, class, gender, and region played critical and overlapping roles in defining resistance to racialized oppression.

Transcript

snip* NOOR: So I just returned from Ferguson, and one of the things that kind of hits you in the face when you land even at the airport is how segregated all of St. Louis County is. And even within Ferguson itself you see the deep divisions in just the housing across the community. And so that led to conversations with white members of even Ferguson that had no idea that issues like racial profiling were such a problem for African-Americans.

Lang, you've called this area a "national laboratory of residential segregation" going back to 1916, when St. Louis became the first city to pass housing segregation through a city ordinance and a direct vote. Give us some historical context. How did things get so segregated in St. Louis County and in St. Louis?

HOWARD: That's a good question in terms of where it comes from. I mean, what we can say is that St. Louis, I mean, it's been a pioneer in many of these methods of racial apartheid and housing. So there is the ordinance that you mentioned in 1916. There were restrictive covenants. St. Louis was a pioneer in restrictive housing covenants, whereby owners were legally barred from selling their homes to people of color or to Jews or whomever. And it's no surprise that St. Louis, that area, also becomes a place where some of the landmark cases combating housing discrimination issue from--so Shelley v. Kraemer, 1948, which rules--where the Supreme Court rules that restrictive covenants are unenforceable in court; Jones v. Mayer, 1968; the city of Black Jack, Missouri, 1974. So there's a long and infamous history of a very virulent forms of spatial, racial, and economic separation in the region, St. Louis city as its center, but we also see as well that occurring in areas of St. Louis County.

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[marym625]

1. so sad that this forefront story

Is already being forgotten. What has to happen to keep anyone's attention for more than 5 minutes?

[Jefferson23]

2. We have so many problems...but I don't think this will be forgotten. Hopefullly it will

become part of the discussion this election season..it needs to be.

[marym625]

3. I hope so. eom.