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A poor, segregated, primarily African American inner suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, which is best-known as the site of the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown, and a hotbed of subsequent racial justice activism. Ferguson exemplifies how gentrification creates a new form of urban segregation in the United States: cities redevelop central urban areas primarily for the benefit of middle-class white people, rather than the working-class and poor minority populations who primarily occupy them. As a result, these minority groups are pushed out to “inner-ring suburbs” like Ferguson.
Ferguson, MO Quotes in The Color of Law
The The Color of Law quotes below are all either spoken by Ferguson, MO or refer to Ferguson, MO. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Preface
Quotes
De facto segregation, we tell ourselves, has various causes. When African Americans moved into a neighborhood like Ferguson, a few racially prejudiced white families decided to leave, and then as the number of black families grew, the neighborhood deteriorated, and “white flight” followed. Real estate agents steered whites away from black neighborhoods, and blacks away from white ones. Banks discriminated with “redlining,” refusing to give mortgages to African Americans or extracting unusually severe terms from them with subprime loans. African Americans haven’t generally gotten the educations that would enable them to earn sufficient incomes to live in white suburbs, and, as a result, many remain concentrated in urban neighborhoods. Besides, black families prefer to live with one another.
All this has some truth, but it remains a small part of the truth, submerged by a far more important one: until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. […] Segregation by intentional government action is not de facto. Rather, it is what courts call de jure: segregation by law and public policy.
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Ferguson, MO Term Timeline in The Color of Law
The timeline below shows where the term Ferguson, MO appears in The Color of Law. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3: Racial Zoning
...an unarmed black teenager, and looks at the history of segregation in Brown’s town of Ferguson and the broader St. Louis metropolitan area to which it belongs. First, during the 1910s,...
(full context)
Chapter 11: Looking Forward, Looking Back
...is now forcing African American residents to leave for poor, segregated neighborhoods like St. Louis’s Ferguson.
(full context)
