INTRODUCTION

1. “North St. Louis County” and “North County” are both locally understood designations for roughly the northern third of St. Louis County, Missouri (see maps 2.2 and 2.3), but this is not a legally defined entity.

2. The concept of spatial imaginaries used throughout this book draws from the fields of social philosophy and human geography and asserts that the lived experience of place includes physical, social, political, and symbolic space. See, for example, Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992); Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1994); and Doreen Massey, For Space (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005). George Lipsitz developed the concept of the white spatial imaginary, which is the historically specific understanding of white space in the United States as separate and distinct from Black space. Lipsitz makes the point that while formal laws and policies intended to oppress, exclude, and segregate Black citizens in the United States have been removed, a residual and powerful imagination of space, and specifically the definition and separateness of white space in contradistinction from Black space, remains firmly in place. How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011).

3. The analytical frame of fungibility—as fundamental to the construction of blackness through slavery—proved critical for understanding phenomena found in North St. Louis County. This conceptualization views blackness as an ontological status that maintains the imprint of slavery on Black bodies in order for current organizations and hierarchies of society to remain in place. Beyond creating the capacity to exploit gendered Black bodies, the discursively produced symbolic value of fungible blackness—that which can be made and remade, changed and exchanged—provides unending possibilities to benefit and expand dominant social, economic, and political structures. See, for example, Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Jered Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiculturalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Frank B. Wilderson, III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); and Tiffany Lethabo King, “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight,” Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 1 (2017): 162–85.

4. This list is based on a review of municipal ordinances in the cities that occupy St. Louis County.

5. Resident interviews. Additionally, over fifty media articles have been written on this subject. See, for example, Radley Balko, “Why We Need to Fix St. Louis County,” Washington Post, October 16, 2014; Campbell Robertson et al., “Ferguson Became Symbol, but Bias Knows No Borders,” New York Times, March 7, 2015; Jennifer Mann, “Municipalities Ticket for Trees and Toys as Traffic Revenue Declines,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 24, 2015.

6. This observation is based on interviews with residents, documents obtained from the City of Pagedale, Missouri, documents obtained from a class action lawsuit against the City of Pagedale, and media attention documenting practices in Pagedale. See, for example, Jennifer Mann, “After Code Violation Crackdown, Pagedale Officials Now Threaten to Demolish Homes,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 10, 2015.

7. Broken-windows policing links space to crime and claims that lower-order markers of disorder such as broken windows or misdemeanor infractions like littering lead to more serious crime. George Kelling and James Q. Wilson, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” Atlantic, March 1982, 29–38.

8. David Theo Goldberg has theorized modern racial states as places “where states of being and states of governance meet.” “Racial States,” in A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, ed. David Theo Goldberg and John Solomos (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 236.

9. Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism,’” Antipode 34, no. 3 (July 2002): 349–79.

10. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Color Blindness, History and the Law,” in The House that Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vintage Press, 1998), 280–89. Crenshaw, among others, has shown how formal and informal practices rooted in racialized distinctions coalesce in the public and private spheres, resulting in both blatant and obscured forms of racial discrimination.

11. See, for example, Jodi Rios, “Flesh in the Street,” Kalfou 3, no. 1 (2016): 63.

12. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007): 110–14.

13. Mayors interviewed for this work and quoted in the local media consistently refer to local autonomy as the most important issue surrounding any reform measures. The concept of minority mayors winning a “hollow prize” comes from H. Paul Friesema’s “Black Control of Central Cities: The Hollow Prize,” American Institute of Planners Journal 35 (March 1969): 75–79. Friesema observed that by the time a member of a minority finally rises to the position of mayor, his or her city is very likely to be in decline—and legislatures are unlikely to assist minority municipalities.

14. Nadia Ellis explores these themes in Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). See specifically the chapter “Burning Spear and Nathaniel Mackey at Large,” 147–76.

15. Ellis, Territories of the Soul.

16. The references to haunting, bodies that show up, and a something-to-be-done that are found throughout this book draw specifically from the work of Avery Gordon. See, for example, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity,” Borderlands 10, no. 2 (2011).

17. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.

18. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 65–81.

19. Saidiya Hartman writes, “This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.” Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 6.

20. In the field of geography, topology has come to be understood as abstract, non-representational, and relational space, whereas topography represents or refers to actual physical space. I use topology (pornotopology) as opposed to topography very intentionally to signify the abstracted and relational nature of Black space.

21. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 85.

22. Hartman, 3–4.

23. Hartman, 4.

24. Jodi Rios, “Reconsidering the Margin: Relationships of Difference and Transformative Education,” in Service-Learning in Design and Planning: Educating at the Boundaries, ed. Tom Agnotti, Cheryl Doble, and Paula Horrigan (Oakland, CA: New Village Press, 2011): 39–54; Christine Hoehner et al., “Page Avenue HIA: Building on Diverse Partnerships and Evidence to Promote a Healthy Community,” Health and Place 18, no. 1 (January 2012): 85–95.

25. Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 226. In 1967, Horst Rittel was the first to describe design thinking as a multifaceted approach to tackling “wicked problems,” defined by the fundamental indeterminacy inherent within the problems faced by design. See, for example, C. West Churchman, “Wicked Problems,” Management Science 4, no. 14 (December 1967): B-141–42. Design thinking was soon picked up by other disciplines and the business sector as a methodology for problem solving. J. Christopher Jones, Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1981); Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning” (working paper, Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California, Berkeley, November 1972); Richard Buchanan, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” Design Issues 8, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 5–21; Panagiotis Louridas, “Design as Bricolage: Anthropology Meets Design Thinking,” Design Studies 20, no. 6 (October 1999): 517–35; Anne Rylander, “Design Thinking as Knowledge Work: Epistemological Foundations and Practical Implications,” Design Management Journal (Fall 2009): 7–19; V. P. Turnbull Hocking, “Designerly Ways of Knowing: What Does Design Have to Offer?,” in Tackling Wicked Problems through the Transdisciplinary Imagination, ed. Valerie Brown et al. (London: Earthscan, 2010), 242–50.

26. This trend includes the report issued by the US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, titled The Ferguson Report: Department of Justice Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department (New York: New Press, 2015). This report was released online by the Department of Justice on March 4, 2015, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/pressreleases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf.

27. This conclusion is based on a review of the data regarding demographics and municipal court citations between 2004 and 2014.

28. Saidiya Hartman, Venus in Two Acts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 4.

29. See the discussion of choreopolitics in chapter 6, which borrows from André Lepecki’s “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the Task of the Dancer,” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 13–27.

30. Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness: (Mysticism in the Flesh),” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 737–80.

31. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 171.

32. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection.

33. Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” Social Justice 30, no. 2 (2003): 18.

34. Wilderson, 18.

35. Wilderson, 32.

36. Raúl Fornet-Betancourt et al., “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 12, no. 2–3 (July 1987): 112–31.

1. RACE AND SPACE

1. Saidya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 116.

2. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999).

3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Geographical Basis of World History,” in Eze, 110–49.

4. Eze, 142.

5. Hanna Arendt writes about the rightless condition of belonging nowhere in the world in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973). Georgio Agamben has further theorized political violence in its extreme as the total exclusion from legal protections and thus from personhood. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

6. This phenomenon is discussed later in the chapter.

7. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 287–88.

8. Interview with city official, April 10, 2008.

9. Immediately following the Civil War, the federal government under a Republican-led Congress helped to establish coalition governance in the South in order to amend state constitutions and pass legislation ensuring civil rights for all Black citizens as part of the terms of reentry into the Union by southern states, a process known as Reconstruction. White backlash, including lynchings carried out by the Ku Klux Klan, led to legislative takeover by the Democratic Party and the passage of segregationist policies known as Jim Crow laws in the South. The removal of federal troops from the South through the Compromise of 1877 solidified the defeat of abolition democracy. Black migration to northern cities following the war also led to formal and informal policies and practices in the North that confined Black residents to crowded and subpar urban spaces.

10. Loïc Wacquant discusses the emergence of the Black American ghetto of the Ford-ist United States in relationship to histories of the ghetto as a space of ethnic containment in “A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure: A Sociological Specification of the Ghetto,” in The Ghetto: Contemporary Global Issues and Controversies, ed. Ray Hutchison and Bruce D. Haynes (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012), 1–32.

11. Lee D. Baker, Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 4.

12. An in-depth analysis of the influence and consequences of the work of Franz Boas can be found in Baker, Anthropology.

13. Ruth Benedict, Race: Science and Politics (New York: Modern Age Books, 1940), 154.

14. W. E. B. Du Bois delivered his speech “The Conservation of Races” to the organizational meeting of the American Negro Academy on March 5, 1897. The speech reinforced his support of Alexander Crummell as the first president of the academy and was a refutation of Frederick Douglass’s assimilationist discourse. The speech echoed Crummell’s belief that a return to the culture of preslavery African civilization would uplift the entire race with the help of an elite group of leaders. Du Bois would formalize his notion of the “talented tenth” in an essay of the same name in 1903. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” in Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 38–47; W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-day (New York: J. Pott, 1903), 33–75.

15. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).

16. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).

17. Du Bois.

18. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1925).

19. Scholars such as David Roediger and George Lipsitz have traced how ethnic European and Jewish immigrants to the United States became part of white society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through spatial means and in contrast to the racialization of Black space. See, for example, David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); David Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2006); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Benefit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.

20. Ernest W. Burgess, “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project,” in Park, Burgess, and McKenzie, The City, 56.

21. Lewis Mumford, “What Is a City?,” in The City Reader, ed. Richard T. LeGates and Frederick Stout (New York: Routledge, 1996), 183–96. The maxim “form follows function” is credited to the early modernist architect Louis Sullivan.

22. The urban planning policies carried out by Robert Moses in the tri-borough area of New York City are a good example of this approach. For discussions regarding the politics behind differing views of urban planning in New York City during the Moses era, see Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds., Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).

23. Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (1938): 1–24.

24. Sir Ebenezer Howard published To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1898 in the United Kingdom, initiating his theory of the garden city—a cluster of low-density radiating plans that incorporated housing, industry, and agriculture. The Garden City movement that followed Howard’s ideas influenced planning in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and contributed to what was a growing disdain for urban space and people throughout the century to come.

25. For a discussion of how nature came to signify whiteness (against the urban setting and its dark-complected peoples) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

26. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1939).

27. For an in-depth discussion regarding the contributions of Frazier’s work, see Anthony M. Platt, E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991).

28. Oliver C. Cox, Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1959), xxxi.

29. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Concept of Race,” in Dusk of Dawn (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011).

30. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 89.

31. Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. C. Farrington (New York: Grove Weidenfeld Press, 1991).

32. Fanon, 233.

33. Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2016).

34. Ula Y. Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 2.

35. Oscar Lewis’s ethnography Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty was published in 1959 and argued that generations of poverty create cultural distinctions that preclude individuals and groups from escaping the underclass. Lewis later wrote on Puerto Rican culture in Puerto Rico and New York, arguing essentially the same point. See also Oscar Lewis, “The Culture of Poverty,” Scientific American 215, no. 4 (October 1966): 19–25. For Moynihan’s report, see Office of Policy, Planning, and Research, US Department of Labor, The Negro Family: The Case For National Action (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1965).

36. In his State of the Union address of 1964, Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty,” which was intended to introduce his platform for broad legislation aimed at “curing and preventing” the causes of poverty rather than responding to its effects.

37. Moynihan lays out this argument in chapter 4 of the report, titled “The Tangle of Pathology,” which begins with a section on the problems of Negro “Matriarchy.”

38. Office of Policy, Planning, and Research, US Department of Labor, Negro Family, 18.

39. Jonathan Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011).

40. Four pieces of legislation are considered to be the major policies passed as part of the Johnson administration’s war on poverty: (1) the Social Security Act Amendments of 1965, which created Medicare and Medicaid and expanded Social Security benefits for several vulnerable groups; (2) the Food Stamp Act of 1964, which formalized the temporary food stamp program already in place; (3) the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, establishing the Job Corps, VISTA program, and several other programs including federal work-study for college students and Head Start for children in pre-K; (4) the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which created Title I subsidies for school districts educating impoverished students and other education-focused programs.

41. Dan Baum, “Legalize It All: How to Win the War on Drugs,” Harper’s Magazine, April 2016, 1, http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/1/. The epigraph is from Dan Baum’s 1994 interview with John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s top advisors. Baum interviewed Ehrlichman in 1994 while researching his book Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996).

42. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). See also Jordan Camp, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016); Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

43. First credited to Orlando Patterson, the concept of social death operates as an important frame for many scholars who study processes of racialization and the intelligibility of personhood. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Sharon Patricia Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography,” Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (February 2002): 15–24; Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

44. Cited in Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, 308.

45. The term prison industrial complex is derived from, and related to, the earlier term military industrial complex, famously used by President Eisenhower to describe the link between corporate interests and government policy in expanding military presence and spending. Angela Davis states that “taking into account the structural similarities of business-government linkages in the realms of military production and public punishment, the expanding penal system can now be characterized as a ‘prison industrial complex.’” “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex,” Color Lines, September 10, 1998.

46. For an in-depth discussion of the criminalization of Black women and welfare reform discourse, see Ange-Marie Hancock, The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen (New York: New York University Press, 2004).

47. The most important funding sources that community development agencies could tap were the Community Development Block Grant (1974), the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (1986), and funds from the National Affordable Housing Act (1990). These and other tools were also misused to aid developers, with little impact on low-income communities. The tax increment financing incentive is one example of a tool that can easily be redirected away from its intended use.

48. Mary C. Comerio, “Pruitt-Igoe and Other Stories,” Journal of Architectural Education 34, no. 4 (1981): 26–31; Katharine G. Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 3 (1991): 163–71.

49. Matthew Lassiter and Christopher Niedt argue this point regarding actual suburban diversity in “Suburban Diversity in Postwar America,” introduction to special issue, Journal of Urban History 39, no. 1 (January 2013): 3–14.

50. Sheryll D. Cashin argues that Black suburbs cannot live up to the suburban ideal, and many Black suburbanites may give up more than they gain by moving to the suburbs. “Middle-Class Black Suburbs and the State of Integration: A Post-integrationist Vision for Metropolitan America,” Cornell Law Review 86 (2001): 755–67, 771–74. Interviews with Black residents who moved to North St. Louis County in the 1960s and 1970s and a review of St. Louis County property assessment records and US Census tract data reveal that property values and income have steadily fallen when adjusted for inflation over the past forty years.

51. See, for example, William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York: Norton, 1999).

52. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960’s to the 1980’s (New York: Routledge, 1995).

53. P. Khalil Saucier and Tyron P. Woods, “Racial Optimism and the Drag of Thymotics,” in Conceptual Aphasia in Black: Displacing Racial Formation, ed. P. Khalil Saucier and Tyron P. Woods (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 1–34.

54. Daniel HoSang, Oneka LaBennett, and Laura Pulido, eds., Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “More than Prejudice: Restatement, Reflections, and New Directions in Critical Race Theory,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1 (2015): 75–89; Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation,” American Sociological Review 63, no. 3 (1997): 465–80; E. San Juan, Racial Formations/Critical Transformations: Articulations of Power in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the United States (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1994); João H. Costa Vargas, The Denial of Antiblackness: Multiracial Redemption and Black Suffering (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Joe Feagin and Sean Elias, “Rethinking Racial Formation Theory: A Systemic Racism Critique,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 6 (2013): 931–60; James Thomas, “Affect and the Sociology of Race: A Program for Critical Inquiry,” Ethnicities 14, no. 1 (February 2014): 74.

55. See, for example, Barnor Hesse, “Counter-racial Formation Theory” (vii–xii), Greg Thomas, “No Reprieve: The ‘Racial Formation’ of the United States as a Settler-Colonial Empire (Black Power, White-Sociology and Omi and Winant, Revisited)” (35–50), and Tamara K. Nopper, “Strangers to the Economy: Black Work and the Wages of Non-blackness” (87–102), in Saucier and Woods, Conceptual Aphasia in Black.

56. Saucier and Woods, “Racial Optimism and the Drag of Thymotics,” 10.

57. Saucier and Woods, “Racial Optimism and the Drag of Thymotics,” 13.

58. Saucier and Woods, “Racial Optimism and the Drag of Thymotics,” 12.

59. See, for example, Kim Moody, Workers in a Lean World (New York: Verso, 1997), 119–20; James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality,” American Ethnologist 29, no. 4 (November 2002): 981–1002; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

60. See, for example, David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

61. See, for example, Neil Smith, The Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996); Manuel Castells and Alan Sheridan, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); David Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Human Geography 71, no. 1 (1989): 3–17; Mike Davis, Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control and the Ecology of Fear (Vancouver: Open Media, 1992); Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso Press, 1989); Stuart Hall, et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

62. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

63. See, for example, Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (York, UK: Methuen Books, 1987); Ngûgî wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Press, 1987); Achille Mbembe, “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony,” Journal of the International African Institute 62, no. 1 (1992): 3–37.

64. For example, Patricia Hill Collins conceptualized the “matrix of domination”—comprising race, class, and gender—as interlocking systems of oppression. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990).

65. David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

66. Costa Vargas, Denial of Antiblackness.

67. Charles Tiebout has been cited as theorizing the far end of the spectrum of localism in the 1950s. He first laid out his public choice model in “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures,” in which he argues that citizens are actually consumers who vote with their feet and force municipalities into a healthy competition for ideal residents who choose among various packages of taxes and services. Journal of Political Economy 64, no. 5 (October 1956): 416–24. The legal scholar Gerald Frug is largely credited with reframing the localism debate in the 1990s, arguing that increased democratic participation, community building, and efficiency occur when local governments are given more, rather than less, power. Gerald Frug and David J. Barron, City Bound: How States Stifle Urban Innovation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).

68. Richard Briffault is viewed as one of the major framers of the regionalist argument in the mid-1990s, when he waged a searing critique of localism. Briffault claims that the reason proponents of localism refuse to consider the possibility of a regional scale is purely in order to protect special interests and maintain the status quo for the privileged few at the expense of the many. “Localism and Regionalism” (Columbia Law School, Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 1, August 1999), http://ssrn.com/abstract=198822. Sheryll Cashin also takes this angle, attacking the arguments for localism point by point and arguing through data that roughly 25 percent of the wealthiest municipalities benefit from, and have power in, fragmented governance, while the other 75 percent are milked of their resources. “Localism, Self-Interest, and the Tyranny of the Favored Quarter: Addressing the Barriers to New Regionalism,” Georgetown Law Review 88 (2000): 1985–2048.

69. Kelling and Wilson’s 1982 article on broken-windows policing, mentioned in the introduction, directly linked space to crime and claimed that lower-order markers of disorder, such as broken windows and trash in vacant lots, lead to more serious crime. This fed into an increase in the passing of local ordinances and zero-tolerance policing, which aggressively ticketed or arrested people for creating spatial disorder. The convergence of broken-windows policy, federal and state government retrenchment, and disinvestment has resulted in cities passing laws making it illegal to do some of the most basic things, such as sleeping, eating, or playing in public. Many laws are aimed at particular groups and cultures. Using George Kelling’s extension of the broken-windows theory, the New York City police chief William Bratton, in coordination with then mayor Rudy Giuliani, formalized the most famous example of stop-and-frisk policing policy. The policy took a broad interpretation of Terry v. Ohio (1968), in which the US Supreme Court ruled that individuals’ Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when a police officer stops them without probable cause if he or she suspects them of past, present, or future criminal activity. While most associated with post-1990s New York City, the practice was not new and became common across the United States, resulting in well-known coinages regarding the criminalization of basic activities carried out by people of color, such as “driving while Black” or “walking while Brown.”

70. NAACP, Criminal Justice Fact Sheet, http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet. The 1994 crime bill, or Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, reinforced the popular “tough on crime” idea that the solution to crime is stricter policing and harsher punishments. Two years later, the Clinton administration passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which, as its title suggests, promoted the idea that poverty is caused by lack of personal responsibility. The bipartisan rhetoric around the legislation used tropes of the Black welfare queen to build support for the bill and represented thirty years of discourse around the culture-of-poverty thesis.

71. Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, 25; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012). Elizabeth Hinton’s quote challenges Alexander’s claim that the current era of mass incarceration in a colorblind society is a return to the old Jim Crow era. Instead, Hinton claims that a new era of “urban insecurity” has entered the global stage and that despite its historical background, this era must be understood in its own terms.

72. John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch lay out the factors and processes for understanding the political economy of place based on Marxist political economy in Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Logan and Molotch build on David Harvey’s reading of the city as a contested site of labor and capital that produces real and imagined social and physical spaces. David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (London: Edward Arnold, 1973). For a discussion regarding processes of environmental racism, see Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

2. CONFLUENCE AND CONTESTATION

1. The research that went into this chapter made use of many historical archives cited throughout the text; however, I also relied on an extensive analysis of the many histories already written about St. Louis. Some of the secondary sources are more reliable and respected than others; nevertheless, a comparative use of these histories, taking into account when they were written and how they were framed, proved very helpful to this narrative. The secondary sources I consulted for this chapter include the following: Adam Arenson, The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Thomas Barclay, The St. Louis Home Rule Charter of 1876: Its Framing and Adoption (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1962); Henry W. Berger, St. Louis and Empire: 250 Years of Imperial Quest and Urban Crisis (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015); Shirley Christian, Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America’s Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Cyprian Clamorgan, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, ed. Julie Winch (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999); Patricia Cleary, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: A History of Colonial St. Louis (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011); Robert A. Cohn, The History and Growth of St. Louis County, 6th ed. (St. Louis: St. Louis County Office of Public Information, 1974); J. Frederick Fausz, Founding St. Louis: First City of the New West (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2011); Louis S. Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001); McCune Gill, The St. Louis Story (St. Louis: Historical Record Association, 1952); Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2008); Nini Harris, A Most Unsettled State: First-Person Accounts of St. Louis during the Civil War (St. Louis: Reedy Press, 2013); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); E. Terrence Jones, Fragmented by Design: Why St. Louis Has So Many Governments (St. Louis: Palmerston and Reed, 2000); Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2015); Gary R. Kremer, Race and Meaning: The African American Experience in Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2014); Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis 1936–1975 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); George Lipsitz, The Sidewalks of St. Louis: Places, People, and Politics in an American City (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1991); John Francis McDermott, ed., The Early Histories of St. Louis (St. Louis: St. Louis Historical Documents Foundation, 1952); John Francis McDermott, ed., The Spanish in the Mississippi Valley, 1762–1804 (Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974); Charles E. Peterson, Colonial St. Louis: Building a Creole Capital (Tucson, AZ: Patrice Press, 1993); James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis Missouri (Boulder, CO: Pruett, 1981); Eric Sand-weiss, St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Lee Ann Sandweiss, ed., Seeking St. Louis: Voices from a River City, 1670–2000 (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2000); Thomas M. Spencer, ed., The Other Missouri History: Populists, Prostitutes, and Regular Folk (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004); Amos Stoddard, Sketches of Louisiana: Historical and Descriptive (Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books, 2010); Solomon Sutker and Sara Smith Sutker, Racial Transition in the Inner Suburb: Studies of the St. Louis Area (New York: Praeger Press, 1974); William L. Thomas, The History of St. Louis County Missouri: The Story Told 100 Years Ago (Clayton, MO: County Living, 2011); Jo Ann Trogdon, The Unknown Travels and Dubious Pursuits of William Clark (Columbia: University of Missouri, 2015); Julie Winch, The Clamorgans: One Family’s History of Race in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011); John A. Wright Sr., St. Louis: Disappearing Black Communities (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2004); John A. Wright Sr., Kinloch: Missouri’s First Black City (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2000).

2. Auguste Chouteau, “Testimony before the Recorder of Land Titles, St. Louis, 1825,” in McDermott, Early Histories of St. Louis, 91–93.

3. The territory directly across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, which had also been held by France, was ceded to Great Britain at the same time.

4. John Francis McDermott, “The Myth of the ‘Imbecile Governor’: Captain Fernando de Leyba and the Defense of St. Louis in 1780,” in McDermott, The Spanish in the Mississippi Valley, 328.

5. “Census,” website of the St. Louis Genealogical Society, last modified June 30, 2016, http://stlgs.org/research-2/government/census.

6. Luis de Unzaga to Pedro Piernas, 1770, in Lawrence Kinnaird, ed., Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 1765–1794, Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1945 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1946), 190.

7. Amos Stoddard, “State of Slavery in St. Louis,” in Sketches of Louisiana, 331–43.

8. Stoddard, 332.

9. Stoddard.

10. Stoddard, 333.

11. Eric Sandweiss, St. Louis.

12. McDermott, Early Histories of St. Louis.

13. Stuart Banner, “Written Law and Unwritten Norms in Colonial St. Louis,” Law and History Review 14, no. 1 (1996): 38.

14. Banner.

15. Banner.

16. Fausz, Founding St. Louis, 148–50.

17. Fausz, 188.

18. See, for example, Johnson, River of Dark Dreams.

19. Hereafter, I refer to John Baptiste Lucas as J. B. C. Lucas, which is how he is known in this region today.

20. Eric Sandweiss, St. Louis, 30.

21. Eric Sandweiss, 31.

22. St. Louis County, Missouri Fact Book, St. Louis County Research and Statistics Division (Clayton, MO: St. Louis County Planning Department, 2012), ii.

23. Amos Stoddard, “Address to the People of Upper Louisiana: March 10, 1804,” in Lee Anne Sandweiss, Seeking St. Louis, 36.

24. Peter S. Onuf, “Empire for Liberty,” in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, Negotiated Empires (Philadelphia: Routledge, 2002), 302, quoted in Fausz, Founding St. Louis, 189.

25. William E. Foley, “Slave Freedom Suits before Dred Scott: The Case of Marie Jean Scypion’s Descendants,” Missouri Historical Review 79, no. 1 (October 1984): 1–23. See also J. B. C. Lucas 1806 Notes, box 3, Lucas Papers, Missouri Historical Society.

26. Foley, “Slave Freedom Suits before Dred Scott.”

27. Foley.

28. I will return to this discussion in chapters 3 and 4.

29. Foley, “Slave Freedom Suits before Dred Scott.”

30. Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, in Thomas Jefferson, online exhibition, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/159.html.

31. This account is based on historical narratives in box 14, folders 1–18, Normandy Area Historical Association Archives, including “A History of Normandy”; “A History of Greendale”; “Capsules of Normandy History”; Pine Lawn (History)”; “A Tribute to Bellerive Acres”; Robert Hereford, “History of Normandy,” February 23, 1946; Ward Barnes, “The Story of Normandy”; “Normandy History Has Colorful Background,” Community Journal, August 3, 1966.

32. Box 14, folders 1–18, Normandy Area Historical Association Archives.

33. Box 14, folders 1–18, Normandy Area Historical Association Archives.

34. Box 14, folders 1–18, Normandy Area Historical Association Archives.

35. Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).

36. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

37. Quoted in Berger, St. Louis and Empire, 29.

38. Clamorgan, Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, 45–46.

39. Clamorgan, 47.

40. William W. Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1847).

41. Brown, 83.

42. Janet S. Herman, “The McIntosh Affair,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin 26 (January 1970), 126, quoted in Harriet C. Frazier, Lynchings in Missouri, 1803–1981 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 24.

43. Abraham Lincoln, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions: Address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,” January 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln Online, accessed April 18, 2019, http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/lyceum.htm.

44. See, for example, Charles Lumpkins, American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008).

45. Mary E. Seematter, “Trials and Confessions: Race and Justice in Antebellum St. Louis,” Gateway Heritage 12 (1991): 36; Harriet C. Frazier, Slavery and Crime in Missouri, 1773–1865 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), 219–22.

46. Emily August provides a detailed account of these hangings and insightful analysis regarding the spectacular nature of Black suffering that simultaneously obscures the Black body, in “Cadaver Poetics: Surgical Medicine and the Reinvention of the Body in the Nineteenth Century” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2014).

47. US Census Bureau, 1870 Census: The Statistics of the Population of the United States, Missouri, table 3 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), 194.

48. St. Louis Home Rule Charter of 1876, Missouri Republican, August 6, 1876, 2.

49. The 1870s saw a series of labor strikes and agreements across the United States that, to some extent, brought Black and white workers together against industrial management. The Great Southwest Strike of 1876 was a railroad strike involving the Knights of Labor against Jay Gould’s railroad empire in Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois. The following year, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 culminated in the 1877 St. Louis general strike, which galvanized workers across the city. It was ended when an estimated eight thousand troops and police killed at least eighteen people and imprisoned the leaders. Cumulatively, these strikes resulted in a considerable backlash against organized labor and renewed efforts to racialize labor organizing.

50. The character of the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan comes from the Irish poet Thomas Moore, who wrote a poem by the same name published in his book, Lalla Rookh (1817), which depicts a Persian romance.

51. See, for example, Lucy Ferriss, Unveiling the Prophet (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005); Thomas M. Spencer, The St. Louis Veiled Prophet Celebration: Power on Parade (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000).

52. Ferriss, Unveiling the Prophet.

53. Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 241. Civic Progress, to which Lang refers, is an exclusive organization composed solely of executives from the city’s top corporations whose mission is to achieve “world status” for the city of St. Louis. It has been criticized as prioritizing the needs of the city’s most privileged residents.

54. In an article based on interviews with representatives from Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, Feministing reported, “[MORE] is targeting the Veiled Prophet Organization in its inaugural #UnveilTheProfitweek of action to expose the ‘power behind the police’—the corporate executives, developers, bankers, and others who shape (and profit from) people’s lives in Ferguson and beyond.” Dana Bolger, “Removing the Mask: Ferguson Organizers Expose Veiled Profit in St. Louis,” Feministing, 2015, http://feministing.com/2015/07/02/removing-the-mask-ferguson-organizers-expose-veiled-profit-in-st-louis/.

55. Henry J. Schmandt, “Municipal Home Rule in Missouri,” Washington University Law Quarterly, vol. 4 (1953): 385–412.

56. Mo. Const. of 1945, art. VI, § 19(a). This is Missouri’s fourth and current constitution.

57. The city has unsuccessfully attempted to rejoin the county four times since 1876. For a discussion of merger plans, see Peter W. Salsich Jr. and Samantha Caluori, “Can St. Louis City and County Get Back Together? (Do Municipal Boundaries Matter Today?),” St. Louis University Public Law Review 34, no. 13 (2014): 13–50.

58. Annie L. Y. Orff, “From City to Suburb: A Glimpse of the Beautiful Spot in the Shadow of St. Louis,” Chaperone Magazine (1893): 69–71.

59. Wright, St. Louis.

60. “Lots White Men Buy Doubled in Price to Negroes,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 24, 1917.

61. “Lots White Men Buy Doubled in Price to Negroes.”

62. Argus, circa 1915, Missouri Historical Society Library.

63. Harold M. Rose, “The All-Negro Town: Its Evolution and Function,” in Black America: Geographic Perspectives, ed. Robert Ernst and Lawrence Hugg (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1976), 352–67.

64. 1960 Census of Population, Advance Report, Missouri, table 3, (US Census Bureau: December 2, 1960), 23; 2010 Census of Population and Housing Units: 1990 to 2010, Missouri, table 9, (US Census Bureau: September 2012), 72.

65. Wm. K. Bixby to unnamed neighbors, February 5, 1915, http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu/_includes/documents/rp_doc6.pdf. This letter can be found in the documents section of the website for Colin Gordon’s book Mapping Decline.

66. Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1916), ruling November 5, 1917.

67. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948). This Supreme Court ruling, which originated in St. Louis, rendered racially restrictive housing covenants unenforceable in state courts.

68. Gordon, Mapping Decline.

69. I discuss this process in Jodi Rios, “Everyday Racialization: Contesting Space and Identity in Suburban St. Louis,” in Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America, ed. John Archer, Paul J. P. Sandul, and Katherine Solomonson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 185–207.

70. See David R. Roediger’s study regarding the formation of white working-class racism in the United States and specifically his discussion of Irish-American white racial formation in David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991), 133–66. See also George Lipsitz’s discussion of labor politics and the relationality of identities in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Benefit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 48–69.

71. John Keaser, “The Town That Started from Scratch: How City Fathers of Bellefontaine Neighbors Guided It from Dormant Village of 766 Persons to Population of 5200 in 18 Short Months,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 20, 1952.

72. This observation is based on interviews with St. Louis residents and my own experience of living in the region for twenty years.

73. E. Terrence Jones looks at this phenomenon in Fragmented by Design.

74. “Warnings on Sales of Jennings Homes in Panic,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 10, 1964.

75. “Warnings on Sales of Jennings Homes in Panic.”

76. “Negro Guarded in Bomb Threats,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 9, 1964.

77. “Normandy’s Black History,” oral history, Normandy Historical Society Archives, Missouri Historical Society Library.

78. Section 235 of the Fair Housing Act shifted funding from public housing projects to subsidies in the private housing market. Studies have shown that white homebuyers were able to use subsidies to buy new housing in the outer suburbs while Black homebuyers were limited to buying older housing stock in the inner-ring suburbs. See, for example, Kevin Fox Gotham, “Separate and Unequal: The Housing Act of 1968 and the Section 235 Program,” Sociological Forum 15, no. 1 (2000): 13–37.

79. Rick Corry and Tom Dyer, University of Missouri–St. Louis report, Factors in Suburban Blight: A Study of Housing in Northwoods, Pine Lawn, and Hillsdale (June 1973); Normandy Municipal Council report, Citizens’ GOALS Project, Don Moschenross, director (November 1973); University of Missouri–St. Louis study report, Households in the Normandy School District, supervised by Sarah Boggs and E. Terrence Jones (November 1974); Sutker and Sutker, Racial Transition in the Inner Suburb ; University of Missouri– St. Louis Study report, Local Government Intervention in the Face of Mortgage Disinvestment: The Case of Normandy, conducted by Bryan Downes, Joan Saunders, and John Collins, revised working draft, January 1976, box 14, folder 11, archives of the Normandy Municipal Council, Missouri Historical Society Library.

80. See, for example, “Normandy High Gets Tough,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 28, 1970; Normandy Calm after Warning,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 30, 1970; “Classes Resume at Normandy High,” St. Louis Globe Democrat, November 30, 1970; “Normandy High Reopens—Police Patrol Campus,” St. Louis Globe Democrat, December 1, 1970; “Parents of Blacks at Normandy Meet,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 7, 1970.

81. Eric L. Zoeckler, “Split on Ending Blockbusting,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 29, 1973.

82. This account is based on statistics published by the Normandy Municipal Council in a report titled A Look at the Normandy Area: A Study Compiled for the Normandy Residential Services (July 1975).

83. Downes, Saunders, and Collins, “Local Government Intervention.”

84. See, for example, D. D. Obika, “Beverly Hills Woman Says Realtor Lied about House,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 7, 1976.

85. For discussions of discrimination practices in mortgage lending, including higher requirements for nonwhite borrowers of Federal Housing Administration and Home Owner’s Lending Corporation loans, see Douglas S. Massey et al., “Riding the Stagecoach to Hell: A Qualitative Analysis of Racial Discrimination in Mortgage Lending,” City & Community 15, no. 2 (June 2016): 118–36; Amy Hillier, “Redlining and the Homeowners’ Loan Corporation,” Journal of Urban History 29, no. 4 (2003): 394–420.

86. Downes, Saunders, and Collins, “Local Government Intervention.”

87. Downes, Saunders, and Collins.

88. Tim Fischesser, interview by author, March 10, 2010.

89. Courtney Barrett, “An Alliance of Diversity,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 30, 1981.

90. Barrett.

91. Barrett.

92. See Sidney Plotkin and William E. Scheuerman, Private Interest, Public Spending: Balanced-Budget Conservatism and the Fiscal Crisis (New York: Black Rose, 1994), for a discussion of how every subunit of government has been pitted against every other subunit in response to vase decreases in public funding from federal and state revenues.

93. Better Together report, The Will to Change: Why Does a Region with World-Class Resources Struggle to Thrive? (May 2016), 5, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59790f03a5790abd8c698c9c/t/5c49665b4fa51a8e6ec61a4a/1548314246674/BT-Will-to-Change-Final.pdf.

94. This overview is based on resident interviews and a review of municipal property tax rates for St. Louis County. Adding to the fierce competition between jurisdictions and the creative measures to raise revenue was the passage of the 1980 Hancock Amendment to the Missouri Constitution, which limits the tax revenue the state can collect from personal income, prevents the state from imposing laws on local governments without funding them, and bars local governments from levying or increasing any tax without voter approval.

95. TIF is the ability to capture and use most of the increased local property tax (and, in Missouri, sales tax) revenues from new development in a defined district for a defined period of time. The cost of the development is paid back after the project is built, making it an attractive development tool. The intended uses of TIF are for the revitalization of depressed areas, to build affordable housing, create jobs, and remediate areas with environmental issues, although these uses are often liberally interpreted.

96. Better Together St. Louis, Will to Change, 5.

97. Better Together, Tax Increment Financing Map, accessed January 6, 2017, http://www.bettertogetherstl.com/tax-incremental-financing-map.

98. This conclusion is based on a comparative data analysis of sales tax revenue and revenue generated by court fines and fees, 2005–10.

99. T. E. Lauer, “Prolegomenon to Municipal Court Reform in Missouri,” Missouri Law Review 31, no. 1 (Winter 1966): 69–97.

100. Lauer, 91.

101. Lauer, 75.

102. Lauer, 77.

103. This conclusion is based on analysis of court records for municipalities in North St. Louis County that show a disproportionate number of citations issued to Black individuals and numerous media articles and segments since the death of Michael Brown Jr., focused on the racial implications of policing in North St. Louis County.

104. Analysis of municipal court records across St. Louis County and the state looking at arrests with jail time and the percent of municipal budget funded through court fines and fees between 1970 and 2015. It should be noted that, although there is a state-wide decrease in these two factors, some small cities across Missouri continue to implement jail time for minor offenses and use predatory policing practices for the funding of municipal budgets.

105. Analysis of St. Louis County municipal court records.

106. These statements are based on a review of municipal ordinances in North St. Louis County, an interview with a municipal alderperson on March 12, 2010, media and witness accounts of the day Michael Brown Jr. died in Ferguson, and the court transcript of the grand jury testimony of Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Brown.

107. US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, The Ferguson Report: Department of Justice Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department (New York: New Press, 2015). This report was released online by the Department of Justice on March 4, 2015, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/pressreleases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf.

108. The data and circumstances regarding these practices are discussed in chapter 3.

109. Depending on the source and how boundaries are drawn, the St. Louis region is said to include twelve to seventeen counties. The fifteen counties included in map 2.1 have economies that are highly dependent upon the St. Louis metropolitan area.

110. US Census Bureau, 2012 US Census of Federal, State, and Local Governments, “Government Facts,” accessed January 29, 2019, https://www.census.gov/govs/.

111. US Census Bureau, 2013–2017 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates—St. Louis City, “Community Facts,” accessed January 29, 2019, https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/community_facts.xhtml.

112. The numbers in this paragraph were updated in 2019; however, municipal disin-corporations and the merging of cities and services continue to occur.

113. US Census Bureau, 2010 Demographic Profile—St. Louis County, “Community Facts,” accessed January 29, 2019, https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/community_facts.xhtml.

114. US Census Bureau, 1960 Census of Population, Advance Report, Missouri—Table 3 (December 2, 1960), 23; US Census Bureau, 1980 Census of Population and Housing, Census Tracts, St. Louis, MO.-Ill—Section1: Table P-7 (July 1983), 140–153.

115. Stated by Thomas Harvey in an interview with the author on November 4, 2014. Harvey was relaying his experience of explaining predatory policing practices in North St. Louis County to leaders at the Southern Poverty Law Center and the responses he received.

3. RACIAL STATES AND LOCAL GOVERNANCE

1. These differences are discussed later in the chapter.

2. See, for example, Walter Johnson, “Ferguson’s Fortune 500 Company,” Atlantic, April 25, 2015.

3. George Lipsitz developed the concept of white and Black spatial imaginaries, which are the historically specific understanding of white space in the United States as separate and distinct from Black space. How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011).

4. Michel Foucault, “Michel Foucault: La Justice et la Police,” video interview (1977), accessed November 10, 2019, http://www.ina.fr/video/I06277669/michel-foucault-la-justice-et-la-police-video.html, cited in Lepecki, “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics,” The Drama Review 57, no. 4 (2013): 19.

5. Of the more than one hundred people interviewed randomly over the course of eight years, more than half had been stopped more than eight times for traffic violations, and 40 percent had received a property violation citation. Of those receiving property violations, 90 percent had received between five and ten violations in one year. Of the more than one hundred people interviewed at court nights in sixteen municipalities, more than half had been stopped more than five times while driving in North St. Louis County.

6. Multiple people being held for minor traffic offenses in the last ten years have died by hanging themselves in municipal jails in St. Louis County, including in the towns of Jennings, Pine Lawn, and Pagedale.

7. Interview with North St. Louis County resident.

8. Interview with North St. Louis County resident.

9. Interview with North St. Louis County resident.

10. Interview with municipal judge who spoke on condition of anonymity, August 10, 2015.

11. The original Macks Creek Law (302.241.2 RSMo) set the limit for the amount Missouri cities could collect from fines and fees to 35 percent of the annual general operating revenue of the municipality. A reform bill, House Bill 103, became effective in August 2013 and lowered the amount to 30 percent of the annual general operation revenue.

12. Interview with John Amman, March 13, 2015.

13. Ryan J. Reilly and Mariah Stewart, “How Municipalities in StL County Use Police as Armed Tax Collectors,” St. Louis American, April 2, 2015.

14. Hall et al. use a Marxist theorization of wagelessness, or the wageless class, as the necessary production of a disposable reserve labor force inherent to capitalist societies. The wageless class, or Black subproletariat, is tied to both the history of slavery and the history of labor in the United States—where surplus labor intersects with racialized rationalizations of wageless labor within slave society. This combination of race and class, which Hall et al. describe as “secondariness,” is acutely visible in North St. Louis County, where Black residents experienced few economic advantages in the era of economic growth in the 1990s and early 2000s and have significantly added to the wageless class in the wake of recent economic downturns. Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

15. Interviews with North St. Louis County residents.

16. See, for example, Better Together, Public Safety—Municipal Courts Report (October 2014); Editorial Board, “The Problem is Bigger than Ferguson,” New York Times, March 12, 2015; Jennifer Mann, “Municipal Courts Operate in Secret and Work Hard to Keep It That Way,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 15, 2015; Erica Hellerstein, “‘It’s racist as hell’: Inside St. Louis County’s Predatory Night Courts,” ThinkProgress, April 10, 2015.

17. Missouri Courts, traffic and nontraffic ordinance filings, 2005–15; see, for example, “Annual Judicial and Statistical Reports,” accessed May 3, 2019, http://www.courts.mo.gov/page.jsp?id=296.

18. US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, The Ferguson Report: Department of Justice Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department (New York: New Press, 2015). This report was released online by the Department of Justice on March 4, 2015, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/pressreleases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf.

19. US Department of Justice, 32.

20. US Department of Justice, 20.

21. US Department of Justice. See also Campbell Roberts, “A City Where Policing, Discrimination and Raising Revenue Went Hand in Hand,” New York Times, March 4, 2015.

22. Data reported to the Missouri state courts by the municipal court of Pine Lawn for 2014 and analyzed by author.

23. Data reported to the Missouri state courts by the municipal court of Ferguson for 2014 and analyzed by author.

24. In 1983, the US Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to jail someone claiming the inability to pay fines and court fees without holding a hearing to investigate such claims. Bearden v. Georgia, 461 U.S. 660 (1983).

25. This observation is based on court records and interviews with residents of North St. Louis County.

26. Jennifer Mann and Jeremy Kohler, Municipal Courts: Progress Report, special publication, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 20, 2015, http://graphics.stltoday.com/apps/muni-courts/.

27. Thomas v. City of St. Ann, Eastern District of MO (U.S.) 4:16-cv-01302, 78 (2016).

28. Thomas v. City of St. Ann.

29. Interview with North St. Louis County resident.

30. Michael McLaughlin, “St. Louis County Police Fatally Shoot Man Carrying Knife, Bible in Jennings,” Huffington Post, April 18, 2015.

31. Interviews with North St. Louis County residents.

32. Interview with North St. Louis County resident.

33. Interviews with North St. Louis County residents.

34. Interview with North St. Louis County resident.

35. See, for example, Eyder Peralta and Cheryl Corley, “The Driving Life and Death of Philando Castile,” National Public Radio, July 15, 2016, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/15/485835272/the-driving-life-and-death-of-philando-castile.

36. Interviews with North St. Louis County residents.

37. Interviews with North St. Louis County residents.

38. Interviews with North St. Louis County residents.

39. Interviews with North St. Louis County residents.

40. Interviews with North St. Louis County residents.

41. Review of municipal court dockets, 2013–14.

42. Interviews with North St. Louis County residents.

43. This conclusion is based on a review of the data reported to the Missouri Attorney General’s Office.

44. Analysis of municipal records from 2015 reported to the Missouri Attorney General’s Office.

45. The Missouri legislature voted on May 12, 2016, to limit the fines cities can charge residents for nontraffic ordinance violations. The new bill also added fines and fees collected from nontraffic violations to the total amount that was capped by Senate Bill 5.

46. This statement, or something similar, was made by more than twenty residents of North St. Louis County during resident interviews.

47. The International Code Council publishes the International Property Maintenance Code for adoption as legally enforced codes by municipalities and associations.

48. The data in this paragraph concerning the city of Normandy were obtained by the author from the Regional Justice Information Service using the Missouri Sunshine Law. The Revised Statutes of Missouri Chapter 610 were signed into the Missouri Constitution in 1973, following the passage of the Freedom of Information Act by the US Congress in 1966. The law expressly states that meetings, records, votes, actions, and deliberations of public governmental bodies are to be open to the public.

49. Interview with municipal leader, April 9, 2012.

50. The information in this paragraph pertaining to population and race is based on data from the US Census Bureau, American Fact Finder, Community Facts, 2010 Demographic Profile, accessed for each city on November 5, 2019, https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml; the information in this paragraph regarding the percentage of nontraffic violations issued to Black residents is based on my analysis of data requested from the city of Bellerive, which I obtained from the Regional Justice Information Service through invocation of the Missouri Sunshine Law.

51. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis.

52. Hall et al., 54.

53. Interviews with public officials and statements made by officials at public meetings between August 2014 and November 2015.

54. Whitner v. City of Pagedale, Eastern District of MO (U.S.) 4:15-cv-01655-RWS (2016), “Deposition of the Honorable Mary Louise Carter,” on behalf of the plaintiffs, July 24, 2017.

55. In an interview, the mayor of Normandy, Patrick Green, repeatedly spoke about the right of his city to secure the level of economic advantages and order enjoyed by its more well-to-do counterparts by policing behavior in public space and protecting the value of private property. In independent interviews, Mayor Green of Normandy, Mayor Mary Louise Carter of Pagedale, and Mayor Viola Murphy of Cool Valley all argued that the seemingly excessive amount of fines collected in their cities, as reported in the media, was due to residents’ inability to follow the law.

56. On the criminalization of poverty, see, for example, Kaaryn Gustafson, “The Criminalization of Poverty,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 99, no. 3 (2009): 643–716; Priscilla A. Ocen, “The New Racially Restrictive Covenant: Race, Welfare, and the Policing of Black Women in Subsidized Housing,” UCLA Law Review 59 (2012): 1565; Suzanne Allen, Chris Flaherty, and Gretchen Ely, “Throwaway Moms: Maternal Incarceration and the Criminalization of Female Poverty,” Affilia 25, no. 2 (2010): 160–72; Jackie Esmonde, “Criminalizing Poverty: The Criminal Law Power and the Safe Streets Act,” Journal of Law and Social Policy 17 (2002): 63–86. On the prison industrial complex, see, for example, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012).

57. Thomas v. St. Ann.

58. Although the conventional understanding of property refers to “things” owned by persons, and the rights of individuals with regard to these things, the concept of property has evolved to include intangible rights as protected by legal ruling. As Cheryl Harris theorizes, property is in this case a right, not a thing, and is metaphysical, not physical. Whiteness therefore includes multiple forms and interpretations of rights and is not just an identity but also a property with inherent, as opposed to explicit, legal status and legal rights. The right to move, the right to exclude, and the right to prosper at the expense of others are all part of the possessive rights of, and investment in, whiteness—itself a defensible property—that have created the physical, social, and political conditions in North St. Louis County. Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–91. Associations between blackness and risk have been theorized by several scholars, including Shona Jackson, “Risk, Blackness, and Postcolonial Studies: An Introduction,” Callaloo 37, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 63–68, and Rashad Shabazz, Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicag o (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015). In this case, I am linking associations between blackness and risk as the antithesis to Cheryl Harris’s conceptualization of whiteness-as-property.

59. Harris, “Whiteness as Property.”

60. For example, Guy Stuart traces the racialized social factors that impacted risk assessment by mortgage lenders throughout the twentieth century with a particular focus on mortgage lending practices in Chicago in the 1990s, showing how embedded racialized discriminations continue to produce the spaces of the American city. Discriminating Risk: The U.S. Mortgage Lending Industry in the 20th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

61. According to data collected by the organization Mapping Police Violence, 102 unarmed Black persons were killed by police in the United States in 2015. Following those incidents, charges were brought against ten police officers, and two officers were convicted of crimes. “Police Killed More than 100 Unarmed Black People in 2015,” accessed December 6, 2016, http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/.

62. Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–73, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).

63. Interview with Patrick Green, mayor of Normandy, November 30, 2015. Interview conducted by research assistant Daniel Sachs. Suburban citizenship is discussed in chapter 4.

64. Foucault, 13.

65. Foucault, 12.

66. Governor Jay Nixon commissioned a cross-sectional panel (the Ferguson Commission) to investigate the causes of the Ferguson uprisings. The commission delivered its report, Forward through Ferguson, on September 21, 2015.

67. Ferguson Commission, Forward through Ferguson, 6.

68. Ferguson Commission, 7.

69. Ferguson Commission, 9.

70. Ferguson Commission, 10.

71. Report of the Municipal Division Work Group to the Supreme Court of Missouri (March 1, 2016), https://www.courts.mo.gov/file.jsp?id=9809. With regard to the excessive and inequitable use of municipal fines and fees, the report blames state laws that allow municipalities to fund budgets through the courts and incompetence within the municipal courts.

72. Municipal leaders cited the sovereign right of their cities to exist multiple times in interviews. Mayor Patrick Green of Normandy and Mayor Mary Louise Carter of Page-dale are especially vocal regarding this claim.

73. See, for example, Schmandt, “Municipal Home Rule in Missouri.” In 1868, Judge John Dillon of Iowa ruled in federal court that cities exist at the pleasure of the state. In 1875, Missouri became the first state to establish municipal home rule in St. Louis by constitutional grant. Missouri later extended home rule provisions to smaller cities in the state.

74. Twelve North County municipalities filed a lawsuit in Cole County Circuit Court challenging the constitutionality of Senate Bill 5. The plaintiffs include the cities of Normandy, Cool Valley, Velda Village Hills, Village of Glen Echo Park, Bel-Ridge, Bel-Nor, Pagedale, Moline Acres, Village of Uplands Park, Vinita Park, Northwoods, and Wellston. In the lawsuit, the municipalities claim that Senate Bill 5 imposed unconstitutional and unfunded mandates on the St. Louis County municipalities. It also claims that the new law does not apply equally to all municipalities in the state and unfairly targets majority-Black municipalities in St. Louis County. See City of Normandy v. Greitens, supreme court of Missouri sc95624 (May 16, 2016), available at https://www.courts.mo.gov/file.jsp?id=112954.

75. Jennifer Mann and Jeremy Kohler, “Judge Sides with St. Louis County Cities That Claimed Municipal Court Reform Law Is Unfair,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 28, 2016. The state has appealed the ruling, and the state auditor and attorney general are attempting to enforce the provisions of Senate Bill 5.

76. The issues and decisions facing cities in financial distress as well as the racialized factors impacting municipal dissolution are addressed in Michelle Wilde Anderson, “The New Minimal Cities,” Yale Law Journal 123 (2014): 1118, and Michelle Wilde Anderson, “Cities Inside Out: Race, Poverty, and Exclusion at the Urban Fringe,” UCLA Law Review 55 (2008): 1095.

77. John A. Wright Sr., St. Louis: Disappearing Black Communities (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2004).

78. These observations are based on interviews with leaders at Better Together and Arch City Defenders, as well as the author’s attendance at multiple meetings on court reform between October 2014 and December 2015.

79. See, for example, Jason Rosenbaum, “5 Takeaways From a City-County Merger Plan That Never Got to Voters,” St. Louis Public Radio, May 7, 2019, https://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/5-takeaways-city-county-merger-plan-never-got-voters?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=5%20Takeaways%20From%20A%20City-County%20Merger%20Plan%20That%20Never%20Got%20To%20Voters&utm_campaign=newsletter_LRL#stream/0.

80. See, for example, Jeremy Kohler, “North County Cities Sue to Block Law That Limits Revenue from Traffic Cases,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 19, 2015.

81. Sheryll Cashin describes “the tyranny of the favored quarter” as a phenomenon whereby well-resourced areas within metropolitan regions create externalities that are then shifted to areas without resources. Poorer neighbors are burdened by their more affluent neighbors’ ability to capture valuable assets and push out waste, or “unwelcome” types of people and entities that require outside assistance. “Localism, Self-Interest, and the Tyranny of the Favored Quarter: Addressing the Barriers to New Regionalism,” Georgetown Law Review 88 (2000): 1985–2048.

82. David Theo Goldberg has theorized modern racial states as places “where states of being and states of governance meet.” “Racial States,” in A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, ed. David Theo Goldberg and John Solomos (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 236.

83. James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, “Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality,” American Ethnologist 29, no. 4 (November 2002): 981–1002.

4. DISCURSIVE REGIMES AND EVERYDAY PRACTICES

1. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992).

2. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 131.

3. Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, ed. Kobena Mercer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 57.

4. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, and the Discourse on Language, trans. Alan Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1982).

5. Foucault, 61.

6. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960’s to the 1980’s (New York: Routledge, 1995).

7. Hall, The Fateful Triangle, 53.

8. P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods, “Racial Optimism and the Drag of Thymotics,” in Conceptual Aphasia in Black: Displacing Racial Formation, ed. P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 4.

9. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

10. Aihwa Ong, “Cultural Citizenship as Subject Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural boundaries in the United States,” in Race, Identity, Citizenship, eds. Rodolfo Torres, Louis F. Miron, Jonathan X. Inda (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999).

11. Analysis of transcripts from Missouri Senate Education Committee hearings, public hearings sponsored by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and Normandy School Board meetings held between July 2013 and March 2014 that were focused on the crisis of the Normandy School District reveals repeated use of the word urban in reference to the problems, challenges, and character of the district. The quotation attributing a “ghetto mentality” to Normandy residents is from an interview with an administrator from the Normandy School District in 2009. This attitude, framed by the rhetoric of personal responsibility, was also repeatedly expressed in letters to the editors of local news publications concerning this issue. For example, one writer stated, “The citizens of Normandy need to get off their collective butts and start taking responsibility for educating their children. The reason [other school districts are successful] is because the parents have worked hard, are involved, . . . and follow the American tenet of individual responsibility.” Letter to the editor, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 16, 2014. For information concerning violence and drug activity, see the St. Louis County crime-mapping statistics for 2013, http://maps.stlouisco.com/police.

12. Ty McNichol, district superintendent, statement made at a public hearing of the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, November 11, 2013. Persons or families may be classified as functionally homeless if they move often between locations such as the homes of family members or friends, automobiles, or motels. For a discussion of types of housing stability, see Sam Tsemberis et al., “Measuring Homelessness and Residential Stability: The Residential Time-Line Follow-Back Inventory,” Journal of Community Psychology 35, no. 1 (2007): 29–42.

13. Trymaine Lee, “Missouri School Busing Causes ‘Crippling’ Fallout,” MSNBC, December 9, 2013, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/heres-how-not-deal-failing-schools.

14. Stanton Lawrence, “How Missouri Killed the Normandy School District,” Diane Ravitch Blog: A Site to Discuss Better Education for All, June 22, 2014, https://dianeravitch.net/2014/06/22/stanton-lawrence-how-missouri-killed-the-normandy-school-district/

15. See, for example, Editorial Board, “Editorial: Time to Embrace the Best of the State’s Plans for Normandy,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 20, 2014; Jessica Bock, “Francis Howell Officials Say ‘No’ to Normandy Students,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 21, 2014; Elisa Crouch, “Politics and Turmoil Surrounding School Transfers Intensifies,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 23, 2014; Nikole Hannah-Jones, “School Segregation, the Continuing Tragedy of Ferguson,” ProPublica, December 19, 2014.

16. For example, views expressed at the Missouri Senate Education Committee hearing on Senate Bills 624 and 516, February 5, 2014.

17. Quoted in John Eligon, “In Missouri, Race Complicates a Transfer to Better Schools,” New York Times, July 31, 2013.

18. Comments made at Francis Howell School District town hall meeting, attended by author, July 20, 2014. It should be noted that in spite of the many overtly racist statements made by white parents at public hearings, many people in the receiving districts condemned these sentiments, and when Normandy students showed up at Francis Howell schools in August 2013, several groups of students and parents made efforts to welcome them.

19. Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, District Discipline Incidents, Francis Howell R-III and Normandy, 2013, http://mcds.dese.mo.gov/guidedinquiry/District%20and%20Building%20Student%20Indicators/District%20Discipline%20Incidents.aspx.

20. Comments made at public hearings at the University of Missouri–St. Louis (which sits within the NSD footprint), at which the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education introduced its recommendations for how the state of Missouri should deal with underperforming school districts and heard comments concerning its decision. The author was present at these hearings on November 12, 2013, and February 25, 2014.

21. Public hearings at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

22. Eligon, “In Missouri, Race Complicates”; “Still Segregated,” episode 3 in The March @ 50, PBS web series, produced by Shukree Tilghman, September 9, 2013, http://video.pbs.org/video/2365071680.

23. See, for example, Peter Dreier and Todd Swanstrom, “Suburban Ghettos Like Ferguson Are Ticking Time Bombs,” Washington Post, August 21, 2014; Elizabeth Kneebone, “Ferguson, Mo. Emblematic of Growing Suburban Poverty,” Brookings Institute Blog, August 15, 2014; Jonathan Rodden, “Is Segregation the Problem in Ferguson?,” Washington Post, August 18, 2014; Jeff Smith, “In Ferguson, Black Town, White Power,” New York Times, August 17, 2014.

24. Denver Nicks, “How Ferguson Went from Middle Class to Poor in a Generation,” Time, August 18, 2014.

25. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 8.

26. Butler.

27. Dianne Harris, Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

28. Margaret Garb, City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 205.

29. The ghetto, as a stigmatized space of separation and exclusion, can be traced to Venice, where it was adopted in 1516 as a mechanism of Jewish containment and gradually came to represent stigmatized urban space across European cities. In American cities, the Jewish ghetto evolved into a space of ethnic marginalization in the late nineteenth century and eventually became synonymous with African American space. Louis Wirth, The Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), including Robert Park’s introduction; E. Franklin Frazier, “Negro Harlem: An Ecological Study,” American Journal of Sociology 43, no. 1 (July 1937): 72–88; St. Clair Drake, “Profiles: Chicago,” Journal of Educational Sociology 17, no. 5 (January 1944): 261–71; St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945); Robert Weaver, The Negro Ghetto (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948). Weaver was secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

30. The term suburban ghetto has been used to refer to poverty and nonwhite ethnicity for at least four decades and has more recently become part of the urban lexicon. For examples, see Richard Koubek, “Wyandanch: A Case Study of Political Impotence in a Black Suburban Ghetto” (master’s thesis, Queens College, New York, 1971); Mark Gottdiener, “Politics and Planning: Suburban Case Studies,” in Remaking the City: Social Science Perspectives on Urban Design, ed. John S. Pipkin, Mark La Gory, and Judith R. Blau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 310–33; Alexandra K. Murphy, “The Suburban Ghetto: The Legacy of Herbert Gans in Understanding the Experience of Poverty in Recently Impoverished American Suburbs,” City and Community 6, no. 1 (March 2007): 21–37; Ronald E. Wilson and Derek J. Paulsen, “Foreclosures and Crime: A Geographical Perspective,” Geography & Public Safety 1, no. 3 (October 2008): 1–2.

31. A review of literature on urban planning and urban history reveals the many ways nonwhite suburbs are qualified, whereas predominantly white suburbs are not qualified as such in sub/urban scholarship.

32. See, for example, Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Boston: MIT Press, 1983); Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Setha Low, Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America (Milton Park, UK: Taylor and Francis, 2003).

33. Mary Jo Wiggins, “Race, Class, and Suburbia: The Modern Black Suburb as a ‘Race-Making Situation,’” University of Michigan Journal of Legal Reform 35 (2001–2): 749–808.

34. Pertaining to race and urban policy, the term benign neglect was coined by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1970, to whom the culture-of-poverty thesis is also attributed (although Moynihan borrowed the concept from Oscar Lewis). Within urban policy, the term has come to mean the intentional allowance of physical decay in order to eventually build something new. A version of this idea was reconceptualized by the shrinking cities discourse in urban planning, which argues that abandonment is not necessarily a bad thing.

35. The term unfavored quarter makes reference to Sheryll Cashin’s conceptualization of the “favored quarter,” in “Localism, Self-Interest, and the Tyranny of the Favored Quarter: Addressing the Barriers to New Regionalism,” Georgetown Law Review 88 (2000): 1985–2048.

36. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 71. George Lipsitz discusses the work of white and Black spatial imaginaries in How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011).

37. Said, Orientalism, 73.

38. Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 1–2.

39. Interview with an older white resident of Ferguson.

40. This assumption is discussed in detail in chapter 3.

41. Walter Mondale, a cosponsor of the bill that led to the Fair Housing Act, framed many of his arguments for the bill by using the “model Negro citizen” as the example of who would actually escape the ghetto and gain access to desegregated areas. See, for example, Senator Mondale, speaking on the Fair Housing Act of 1967, on August 16, 1967, 90th Cong., 1st sess., 113 Congressional Record 113, pt 17:22840-22842.

42. Gregory, “Imaginative Geographies.”

43. Bryan Downes, Joan Saunders, and John Collins, Local Government Intervention in the Face of Mortgage Disinvestment: The Case of Normandy (report, University of Missouri–St. Louis study, January 1976), box 14, folder 11, archives of the Normandy Municipal Council, Missouri Historical Society Library; Rick Corry and Tom Dyer, University of Missouri–St. Louis report, Factors in Suburban Blight: A Study of Housing in Northwoods, Pine Lawn, and Hillsdale (June 1973); Normandy Municipal Council report, Citizens’ GOALS Project, Don Moschenross, director (November 1973). For example, one of the many fliers at the Missouri History Museum promotes racial zoning in St. Louis city in 1915, stating, “An entire block ruined by negro invasion. Every house marked ‘X’ now occupied by negroes. ACTUAL PHOTOGRAPH OF 4300 WEST BELLE PLACE.” Ta-Nehisi Coates also uses this image in his article “The Racist Housing Policies That Built Ferguson,” leading to a number of reader comments stating that the 4300 block of Belle would be better off today had racial zoning stayed in place. Atlantic, October 17, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/the-racist-housing-policies-that-built-ferguson/381595/.

44. Rhetoric used by the Federal Housing Authority and Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, cited in Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2008), 88–92.

45. E. Terrence Jones, “The Municipal Market in the St. Louis Region: 1950–2000,” in St. Louis Metromorphosis: Past Trends and Future Directions, ed. Brady Baybeck and E. Terrence Jones (St. Louis: University of Missouri Press, 2004).

46. Quoted in Gordon, Mapping Decline, 25.

47. As described in chapter 2, Black residents of St. Louis city and county were instrumental in shaping the region and building communities. The history of Kinloch in North St. Louis County is one such example, although there are others: Webster Groves, Rock Hill, and Meacham Park.

48. Interviews with Normandy residents.

49. Five Black mayors in North St. Louis County granted interviews for this research.

50. Interviews with mayors and alderpersons in North St. Louis County municipalities.

51. Interview with Patrick Green, mayor of Normandy, November 30, 2015. Interview conducted by research assistant Daniel Sachs.

52. Over a period of one year, three research assistants and I approached random people in North St. Louis County and asked whether they would be willing to answer a survey with predetermined questions regarding their experiences and perceptions in St. Louis County and St. Louis city. Their names were not documented; however, they were asked to voluntarily provide demographic information such as age, gender, and race. Locations where people were intercepted included grocery stores, farmers markets, bus stops, light rail stations, and city halls.

53. Interviews with North County residents.

54. This paragraph is based on data collected from resident interviews.

55. Based on data collected from resident interviews.

56. Based on data collected from resident interviews.

57. Based on data collected from resident interviews.

58. Based on data collected from resident interviews.

59. See, for example, Michael Brown et al., Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Howard Winant, The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Goldberg, Threat of Race ; Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and Racial Inequality in Contemporary America, 3rd ed. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Press, 2010); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012).

60. See, for example Jones, “Municipal Market in the St. Louis Region.”

61. Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor, The End of the Segregated Century: Racial Separation in America’s Neighborhoods, 1890–2010, Manhattan Institute Civic Report 66 (January 2012).

62. Michel Foucault develops this concept regarding biopower in Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).

63. Rob Nixon conceptualizes slow violence as the processes of structural racisms and the threats that create vulnerable communities, in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.

5. POLITICS AND POLICING IN PAGEDALE

1. John A. Wright Sr., St. Louis: Disappearing Black Communities (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2004), 64.

2. The gates still exist today.

3. Developer’s advertising pamphlet, circa 1948, Normandy files, Pagedale folder, Missouri History Museum.

4. Greg Squires discusses the political factors and processes of industrial factories moving from suburban areas in US cities to outer exurbs in Urban Sprawl: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Response (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

5. Interviews with Pagedale residents.

6. See discussion in chapter 2.

7. As told to me in an interview on October 2, 2010, with a former University of Missouri extension employee who facilitated town hall meetings in the Normandy suburbs during this era.

8. Interview with former University of Missouri extension employee.

9. “Legal Aid Society May Challenge Pagedale Occupancy Permit Law,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 20, 1970.

10. “Legal Aid Society May Challenge.”

11. See chapter 2.

12. This observation is based on the number of newspaper articles from this period reporting outbursts by leadership at Pagedale city council meetings.

13. “Race Is Not an Issue, Says All-Black Pagedale Slate,” St Louis Post-Dispatch, February 28, 1972.

14. “Race Is Not an Issue.”

15. George E. Curry, “Police Allege Pagedale Mayor Interfered,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 6, 1980.

16. Monte Plott, “Pagedale Mayor Is Ousted; City Hall Now All Women,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 7, 1982.

17. Joe Swickard, “Government Is a Hot Show in a Small Missouri Town,” Detroit Free Press, July 11, 1982.

18. “Town Run by All Women Now Has Three Police Chiefs Hired,” Chillicothe Tribune, June 17, 1982.

19. Michael D. Sorkin, “Pagedale Mayor, Her Choice for Police Chief Arrested,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 17, 1982; Dale Singer and Michael D. Sorkin, “Pagedale Mayor Wants Protection from Chief,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 20, 1982; Michael D. Sorkin and E. S. Evans, “Injunction Is Issued in Pagedale Dispute,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 22, 1982.

20. “Injunction Is Issued in Pagedale Dispute.”

21. See, for example, Jesse Bogan, “Pagedale Alderman Avoids Felony Charges in Plea Deal,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 27, 2019.

22. Interviews with North St. Louis County elected officials.

23. Interview with mayor and city alderperson of Pagedale, May 2010.

24. Pagedale resident, interview by author, April 11, 2011.

25. See, for example, the work of Gwendolyn Wright, Barbara Kelly, Alice Hoffman, Stephanie Coontz, Donna Gaines, Rosalyn Baxandall, and Elizabeth Ewen.

26. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 147.

27. Interview with municipal leader.

28. Wendy Cheng, “The Changs Next Door to the Diazes: Suburban Racial Formation in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley,” Journal of Urban History 39, no. 1 (2012): 22.

29. Whitner et al. v. City of Pagedale, Eastern District of MO (U.S.) 4:15-cv-01655-RWS (2016), http://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/ECF-1-Complaint-FILE-STAMPED-11.04.15.pdf.

30. Pagedale municipal ordinances (past and present).

31. Whitner et al. 4:15-cv-01655-RWS.

32. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).

33. Interview with Pagedale resident.

34. Whitner et al. 4:15-cv-01655-RWS.

35. Interview with Pagedale alderwoman.

36. Interview with Pagedale resident.

37. Whitner et al. 4:15-cv-01655-RWS, “Deposition of the Honorable Mary Louise Carter,” on behalf of the plaintiffs, July 24, 2017.

38. See table 3.1.

39. The concept of the deserving poor is part of the culture-of-poverty discourse, which sets about to distinguish the working poor and those deemed poor through no fault of their own from groups associated with laziness or a lack of moral and cultural values.

40. Common refrain of Pagedale leaders to the author when working in Pagedale, 2004–10.

41. Interview with Pagedale resident, October 12, 2015.

42. Interview with Pagedale resident, August 11, 2015.

43. This account is based on interviews and interactions with leadership and staff at Beyond Housing, 2004–10. It should be noted that Beyond Housing has had a considerable positive impact on this area, and its leadership is committed to alleviating suffering and improving the lives of residents in North St. Louis County on many levels, including housing, health, education, and economic literacy.

44. Christine Hoehner et al., “Page Avenue HIA: Building on Diverse Partnerships and Evidence to Promote a Healthy Community,” Health and Place 18, no. 1 (January 2012): 85–95.

45. Jean Bricmont, Humanitarian Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006). Many have critiqued humanitarian discourse and practice. See, for example, Mah-mood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (New York: Doubleday, 2009); Conor Foley, The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War (New York: Verso, 2010). One example of the critique of early social work organizations and the discourses that accompanied them is Tony Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

46. Cited in Walter Johnson, “What Do We Mean When We Say, ‘Structural Racism’?,” Kalfou 3, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 58.

47. “24:1 Community, Missouri: 2016 RWJF Culture of Health Prize Winner,” Robert Wood Johnson Foundation website, accessed November 27, 2019, https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/features/culture-of-health-prize/2016-winner-24-1-missouri.html.

48. “24:1 Community, Missouri.”

49. J. Justin Wilson, “Federal Court Approves Historic Consent Decree Ending ‘Policing for Profit’ in Pagedale, Mo,” Institute for Justice website, May 21, 2018, https://ij.org/press-release/federal-court-approves-historic-consent-decree-ending-policing-for-profit-in-pagedale-mo/.

50. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 4.

51. Gordon, 5.

52. Gordon.

53. Brittany Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2017).

54. For work drawing on Cooper’s scholarship, see Hazel V. Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (1992): 738–55; Victoria Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Black Feminists and Du Bois: Respectability, Protection, and Beyond,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568, no. 1 (2000): 28–40.

55. Kimberlee Randle-King was arrested in September 2014 by Pagedale police for engaging in a “street fight” with another woman whom she said had jumped her after also threatening her on social media. The other woman was released, but Randle-King was held in jail because of outstanding warrants in other jurisdictions for traffic violations. Randle-King was described by the booking officer as exceedingly distraught over being jailed because she believed she would lose her job and her children. Video cameras reportedly show that within ten minutes of entering the cell Randle-King’s body was lifeless, although it would be another fifteen minutes before anyone checked on her. Reports of Randle-King’s death led to several days of protest outside the Pagedale jail, which coincided with protests in response to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The family of Randle-King sued the City of Pagedale for breaching protocol requiring that inmates be monitored at all times. The city settled the lawsuit for $1.2 million in March 2017. See, for example, “Police Identify Woman Who Hanged Herself In Pagedale Jail Cell,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 22, 2014; Nicholas Phillips, “Why Did This 21-Year-Old Woman Die In the Pagedale Jail?” Riverfront Times, July 2, 2015; Nassim Benchaabane, “$1.2M Settlement Reached In death of Woman Who Hanged Herself In Pagedale Jail,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 31, 2017.

56. Interview with Ferguson protest leader, March 12, 2015.

INTERLUDE

1. State of Missouri v. Darren Wilson, “Testimony of Darren Wilson,” grand jury transcript, vol. 5, September 16, 2014, 207. https://www.scribd.com/doc/248128351/Darren-Wilson-Testimony#fullscreen&from_embed.

2. This was the most common nontraffic violation residents of North St. Louis County cited when interviewed (N=126).

3. Mo. v. Wilson, 212.

4. Mo. v. Wilson, 224.

5. Mo. v. Wilson, 224–25.

6. Mo. v. Wilson, 226.

7. Mo. v. Wilson, 229–30.

8. Mo. v. Wilson, 236.

9. Mo. v. Wilson, 237–38.

10. Mo. v. Wilson, 239.

11. This statement is based on interviews with three Canfield Green Apartments residents and two people who arrived after hearing about the shooting. Key-informant interviews with Ferguson residents.

12. Interviews with Ferguson residents.

13. Interviews with Ferguson residents.

14. Quoted in an interview with Sarah Van Gelder and published in “Reverend Sekou on Today’s Civil Rights Leaders: I Take My Orders from 23-Year-Old Queer Women,” Yes!, July 22, 2015, http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/black-lives-matter-s-favorite-minister-reverend-sekou-young-queer.

15. Interviews with Ferguson residents.

16. See, for example, David Li, “St. Louis Suburbs Erupt in Rioting after Cop Kills Unarmed Man,” New York Post, August 11, 2014.

17. Li.

6. QUEERING PROTEST

1. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 62–63.

2. These observations are based specifically on interviews with women of the Ferguson Protest Movement between September 2015 and January 2016 and with people involved with the movement between August 2014 and September 2015, as well as on a discourse analysis of several thousand statements made by protesters via Twitter during the same time periods.

3. Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

4. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 72.

5. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 4.

6. This observation is based on interviews with core organizers of the Ferguson Protest Movement between September 2015 and January 2016.

7. Seyla Benhabib, Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 84.

8. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

9. Nadia Ellis, Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

10. Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-slavery Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 4.

11. Interviews with Ferguson protesters.

12. The protesters interviewed for this research were chosen either because they were perceived as leaders within the movement or because they had been consistently present and part of the movement for more than a year following Brown’s death. They came from many different backgrounds and experiences that cut across race, age, and gender. The majority of interviews were set up and conducted by Angel Carter, who is also viewed as a leader in the movement and is an accomplished writer and researcher in her own right.

13. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); interviews with Ferguson residents.

14. McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter.

15. Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies 3 (1997): 437.

16. Michael Warner, “Fear of a Queer Planet,” Social Text 29 (1991): 3–17.

17. For example, the Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist organization active in the late 1970s, began its philosophical statement, “The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppressions and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 264.

18. Michael Warner, Publics and Counter Publics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 215.

19. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 185.

20. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens,” 443.

21. There is a rich literature that explores performativity, eroticism, queered politics, and the Black female body in relationship to resistance. While I engage with several of these authors, it was not possible to specifically acknowledge the contributions of all this work because of the limited scope of this section. These works include but are not limited to Jaqui M. Alexander, “Danger and Desire: Crossings Are Never Undertaken All at Once or for All,” Small Axe 24, no. 11 (2007): 154–65; Jafari S. Allen, “ Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Cheryl Clarke, “Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance,” in Feminism and Sexuality: A Reader, ed. Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 155–61; Cathy J. Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics,” Du Bois Review 1, no. 1 (2004): 27–45; Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Nicole Fleetwood, “The Case of Rihanna: Erotic Violence and Black Female Desire,” African American Review 45, no. 3 (2012): 419–35; Rosalind C. Morris, “All Made Up: Performance Theory and the New Anthropology of Sex and Gender,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24, no. 1 (1995): 567–92; Jennifer C. Nash, “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-intersectionality,” Meridians 11, no. 2 (2011): 1–24; Rosemarie A. Roberts, “Dancing with Social Ghosts: Performing Embodiments, Analyzing Critically,” Transforming Anthropology 21, no. 1 (2013): 4–14.

22. The comments sections following several articles in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that featured Ms. McSpadden in the weeks following Brown’s death reflected literally hundreds of heated debates over her culpability and competency as a mother.

23. Interviews with Ferguson protesters.

24. Interview with Diamond Latchison, September 11, 2015.

25. Interviews with Ferguson protesters. Front line and war are words that protesters and institutional leaders used in describing events following Michael Brown’s death. The use of these words differ from the language of war described in chapter 2.

26. Interviews with Ferguson protesters.

27. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 53–59.

28. Lorde, 56.

29. Interviews with Ferguson protesters.

30. Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

31. Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies.

32. Holland, Erotic Life of Racism, 46.

33. See the introduction for a discussion of pornotroping.

34. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 58.

35. Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 6.

36. Fleetwood, 106.

37. Many Black feminist scholars have written about the Jezebel versus Mammy identities conferred on Black women as a means of hypersexualizing and desexualizing Black women’s bodies and as a means of control and dehumanization dating back to slavery and continuing into the present. See, for example, Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2008).

38. Aimee Meredith Cox, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

39. Lepecki, “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the Task of the Dancer,” The Drama Review 57, no. 4 (2013):16.

40. Lepecki, 20.

41. Quoted in Lepecki, 20.

42. Quoted in “Nation Horrified By Murder of Kidnapped Chicago Youth,” Jet 8, no. 19 (September 15, 1955): 8.

43. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 91.

44. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 112.

45. Stuart Hall, “What is the ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Michelle Wallace and Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 21–33.

46. Juana Maria Rodriguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 2.

47. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013), 101.

48. Rodriguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, 5.

49. Lepecki, “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics,” 20.

7. ONTOLOGIES OF RESISTANCE

1. Transcript of Al Sharpton’s eulogy at the funeral for Michael Brown Jr., in Joe Coscarelli, “Watch Al Sharpton Bring the House Down at Michael Brown’s Funeral: ‘This is not about you! This is about justice!,’” New York Intelligencer, August 25, 2014, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/08/al-sharpton-eulogy-michael-brown-funeral.html.

2. Jamala Rogers, testimony to the Public Safety Committee, St. Louis Board of Aldermen, June 24, 2004.

3. Clarence Lang, “Between Civil Rights and Black Power in the Gateway City: The Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes (ACTION), 1964–74,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 3 (March 2004): 725.

4. George Lipsitz documents the culture of opposition in St. Louis in A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).

5. Lang, “Between Civil Rights and Black Power,” 725.

6. In May 2015, Ferguson protesters made their feelings known at meetings of both MORE and OBS, claiming that the funds collected through these organizations in the name of Black struggle in Ferguson were not getting to organizers on the ground and that record keeping for funds spent was not comprehensive or transparent. Using the slogan “Cut the Check,” people representing various grassroots protest communities formed an organizational board intended to hold people and organizations accountable for how they managed funds brought in through protest activities. A statement was issued through social media demanding that MORE and OBS release records regarding how funds had been distributed. MORE responded by releasing a list of people and organizations that had received money. According to research made public by protest organizers, many people listed had not actually received funds. Furthermore, the executive director of MORE, Jeff Ordower, had personally received over twenty thousand dollars for unspecified expenses incurred during Ferguson October, for which there were no records. In June 2015, MORE released funds to at least seventeen protesters, and Jeff Ordower resigned. For the demands of “Cut the Check” and a discussion regarding its importance, see Angel Carter, “Cut the Check,” Liberated Souls (blog), accessed March 12, 2018, https://liberatedsouls.org/ferguson-reflections-2/cut-the-check/.

7. Quotations in this paragraph were transcribed from a video clip of Tef Poe and Ashley Yates speaking at the Mass Meeting on Ferguson, October 12, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McT_yie8R1U&t=88s.

8. Video clip of Poe and Yates at the Mass Meeting on Ferguson. The sequence of events described in this paragraph was reiterated by multiple people who were in attendance and were interviewed by the author.

9. Streamed live on STAR67 with Alexis and Brittany, August 3, 2015.

10. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 147–48; William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

11. This observation is based on interviews with core organizers of the Ferguson Protest Movement between September 2015 and January 2016.

12. Interviews with Ferguson protesters.

13. Stuart Hall, “Culture, Identity, and Diaspora,” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 395.

14. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), vii.

15. For an insightful discussion on these relationships, see Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, introduction.

16. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black.

17. Ula Y. Taylor, “Making Waves: The Theory and Practice of Black Feminism,” Black Scholar 28, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 18–19.

CODA

1. Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1998), 292.

2. Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 2.

3. Avery Gordon, “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity,” Borderlands 10, no. 2 (2011): 2.

4. Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness: (Mysticism in the Flesh),” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (Fall 2013): 742.

5. See the discussion of choreopolitics in chapter 6, which borrows from André Lepecki’s “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the Task of the Dancer,” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 13–27.

6. Frantz Fanon famously developed the concept of the white gaze, which seals blackness into itself and fixes Black subjectivity, in Black Skin, White Mask, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008).

7. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 776.

8. Nadia Ellis, Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

9. Gordon, “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity,” 2.

10. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 778.

11. Judith Butler theorizes the power of precarity in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004).

12. Walter Benjamin, “A Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 236–52: 242.

13. Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 226.

14. Escobar, Deigns for the Pluriverse, 208.