We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (11 page)

Prince George’s County’s crisis played out against a tectonic demographic shift in Chocolate City itself. Sometime in early 2011, Washington, D.C.’s Black population dropped below 50 percent for the first time in over a half century. The non-Hispanic white population had grown by more than a third over the previous decade. During that time, one study found, Washington, D.C., had lost “virtually all of its low-cost housing in the private market,” while the stock of high-end rentals nearly tripled.
³¹

When beloved go-go bandleader Chuck Brown passed away in May of 2012, Black D.C. was stunned. Four generations of Chocolate City grew up with his music, a regionally distinct concert sound he had almost single-handedly created of funk, jazz, Afro-Cuban, and rhythm and blues. Among Brown’s best-known sets was a genius medley of “Go-Go Swing” (a rewrite of D.C. native Duke Ellington’s classic “It Don’t Mean a Thing”), Lionel Hampton’s “Midnight Sun,” Eddie Jefferson’s “Moody’s Mood for Love,” and the
Woody Woodpecker
theme, bridged by roaring percussive breaks during which he shouted out people in the audience by name and neighborhood. In his later years, Brown mostly played in the clubs of P.G.C., hollering the names of boondocks burbs as much as the old Southeast and Northwest streets.

Brown was the beating heart of Chocolate City, and when that heart stopped, people celebrated his life publicly with spontaneous block parties and joyful dancing that wouldn’t stop. But the city had changed. The old spots—a P.A. tape spot here, a BBQ spot there—seemed to be disappearing. Million-dollar lofts were going up on U Street. Underneath the grief over Chuck’s passing was a root-shock-level anxiety that a whole way of life might have been passing.

IV.

During the 1990s and 2000s, many big cities actively depopulated themselves of people of color and the poor.

They moved first to destroy the major housing projects that had characterized the breakdown of the postwar modernist dreams, the collapse of grand social engineering into difficult and often dangerous realities. St. Louis, typically, had been among the first cities to act. The dramatic 1972 demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe projects eliminated homes for 15,000, and evoked for many Black residents the memory of Mill Creek Valley.

City leaders wanted to replace decaying low-income housing with mixed-income housing. The idea was sound: economic integration would give impoverished residents better opportunities to succeed, and establish more diverse, stable communities. But its execution accelerated resegregation. In 1992, Congress authorized the HOPE VI program to facilitate this transition. Chicago destroyed its Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes and used HOPE VI funds to begin redevelopment. Similarly, San Francisco used HOPE VI funds to eliminate housing projects in the Mission and the Western Addition. But the replacement housing also reduced population density, exacerbating the shortage of affordable housing. Worse, only a portion of the new public housing went to old residents. The rest were forced to find affordable housing on their own. Many were scattered to the suburbs.

At the same time, development-minded city leaders pushed their police departments to focus on low-level “quality of life” crimes and nuisance abatement, while they also authorized all-out wars on drugs and gangs. Across the country, such politics led to urban policing driven by a sweep mentality, in which the poor, the jobless, the homeless and near-homeless, immigrants, and youths of color were criminalized, harassed, and arrested in their own neighborhoods. Routine brutality made victims of everyday people like Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima.

All the bodies swept up by these politics of containment had to go somewhere. So state and federal leaders authorized an explosion of prison building, infrastructure projects that largely escaped pork-barrel scrutiny. The declining suburbs and rural towns received their trickle-down. New carceral economies produced new relations of segregation, while the creative cities were cleared for gentrification.

V.

Since the 1970s, American neighborhoods have become dramatically segregated by income. A study of metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 people by Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff found that, in 1970, 17 percent of Americans lived in the highest-income neighborhoods and 19 percent in the lowest. By 2012, those numbers had almost doubled—30 percent of U.S. families lived in the highest-income neighborhoods and another 30 percent lived in the lowest.

The latter number signaled especially troubling declines in opportunity, particularly for children living in the poorest neighborhoods. But Reardon and Bischoff argued that “the rising isolation of the affluent” also harmed the poor. “Segregation of affluence not only concentrates income and wealth in a small number of communities, but also concentrates capital and political power,” they wrote. It also eroded “the social empathy that might lead to support for broader public investment in social programs to help the poor and the middle class.”
³²

But even if the suburbs had been colorized, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians were more isolated from whites than they had been in the 1990s.
³³
As demographer John Logan put it, “Suburban diversity does not mean that neighborhoods within suburbia are diverse.”
³⁴
The steep growth of Latino and Asian populations partly explained why. But white flight was the other key factor. In 2010, even low-income suburban whites lived in neighborhoods that were more than 69 percent white.
³⁵
Blacks and Latinos were 40 percent more likely to live in more impoverished suburbs than whites.
³⁶
Put another way, poor people of color tended to live in suburbs that were less white and more impoverished, while poor whites tended to live in suburbs that were more white and less impoverished. During the post–civil rights era, resegregation along both class and race lines intensified.

In the St. Louis metro area, where resegregation began almost as soon as desegregation efforts were successful, African American precarity was not only economic. It extended from bodily safety to the community’s very existence. “The starting place,” the St. Louis writer and activist Jamala Rogers wrote in
Ferguson Is America: Roots of Rebellion
, “is making sure there’s never any permanency in where Black people live.”
³⁷

After the late 1960s, two legal cases accelerated the opening of St. Louis County to Blacks. In the first, an interracial couple tried to buy a home in Paddock Woods, an unincorporated area. When they were denied, they sued the developer. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of them in 1968’s
Jones v. Mayer
, affirming the right to buy or rent a home without regard to race. Then in 1975, a court ordered Berkeley, Ferguson, and other nearby North County towns to desegregrate their schools. Black migration finally began to flow out of the city, west toward the Missouri River and north into the county.

But it did not get far. After school desegregation, white violence erupted. So many Black families along the North County racial border suffered vandalism, gunfire, and firebombings that they organized themselves into a group called People United for Home Protection, pressuring police to protect them and threatening to invoke the right to armed self-defense.
³⁸
But policing—which had always been white—could also be too heavy-handed. As early as 1970, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission heard a Black resident in Kirkwood say, “I don’t think there’s a Black man in South St. Louis County that hasn’t been stopped at least once if he’s been here more than two weeks.”
³⁹

Blacks were seen as movable and removable. City, county, and business leaders targeted Kinloch, the nearly all-Black town from which white residents had broken off to maintain segregated schools, for destruction to make way for the expansion of Lambert–St. Louis International Airport. Another historically Black town, Meacham Park, was annexed by its white neighbor, Kirkwood, then cleared for a Walmart complex. In Creve Coeur, authorities enforced code violations, denied building permits, and bought up lots to turn them into public parks in an effort to push out Black homeowners.
⁴⁰
And when all else failed, whites fled deeper into the county.

By August 9, 2014, St. Louis County was more than 70 percent white and less than 24 percent Black. But one in four African Americans lived below the poverty line, more than double the ratio of whites. Most were concentrated in the North County. In Ferguson, three in ten neighborhoods had poverty rates of more than 40 percent.
⁴¹
Yet power in most of these municipalities remained in the hands of whites. They reorganized their entire systems of policy making, policing, and justice to exploit the poor, predominantly Black populations.

St. Louis remains one of the most hypersegregated regions in the country, alongside Baltimore, Cleveland, and Detroit—all key nodes on the map of the Movement for Black Lives. Of the fifty largest metropolitan areas in the country, St. Louis ranks forty-second in intergenerational economic mobility.
⁴²
Resegregation matters because it pulls communities and regions downward, and because it impacts us not just right now, but the life chances of those not yet born.

And yet, too few of us were paying attention until Michael Brown was shot. In Ferguson, Black resistance revealed the structure of what America had become, and began to point toward new ways of envisioning our shared future.

HANDS UP

ON FERGUSON

Saturday, August 9, 2014. The area forecast had warned of storms, which might have brought small relief from the relentless heat, but as if in deference to the drama developing below the clouds, the lightning and thunder never came.

At a minute after noon, Michael Brown Jr. and his friend Dorian Johnson were stopped by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for jaywalking on Canfield Drive. Two minutes later, a resident of the Canfield Green apartments named Emanuel Freeman, under his handle @TheePharaoh, posted to Twitter: “I JUST SAW SOMEONE DIE OMFG.” Then: “the police just shot someone dead in front of my crib yo.” Through his balcony fence, Freeman took a photo of two policemen standing watch over Brown’s lifeless body. With that image he posted the words “Fuckfuck fuck.”

That started the flow of pictures, horrifying images traveling at tachyon speed over the Internet.

First, the young Black man, lying facedown on the boiling asphalt, head tilted to the left, left arm turned under him, right forearm with its “Big Mike” tattoo splayed away, blood from his head pooling and trailing down the pavement.

Then the picture of his stepfather, standing silent, defiant alongside a line of patrol cars holding a piece of cardboard on which he has scrawled: “FERGUSON POLICE JUST EXECUTED MY UNARMED SON!!!” And finally, the pictures of his mother in her unaccountable grief, asking the sky, “Why? Why did they do that?” These pictures were how millions who had not known him in life first came to know Michael Brown Jr.

Brown lay in the middle of a road that divided his apartment complex in half. Yellow tape was unfurled around the officer’s SUV and the light posts, enclosing the young man’s body and 800 square feet near the very center of the complex. Police cars filled the street in both directions.

People drew in. They congregated on the lawns and in the narrow shade of trees behind the police line—neighbors, family who knew him as Mike-Mike, friends who knew him as Big Mike, and many who didn’t know him at all. Tweets cascaded in real time, pictures and videos taken from balconies and sidewalks, images and words trying to accrete into meaning.

Police placed orange cones near Brown’s upturned baseball cap, bracelets, and stray slippers. But it would still be at least twenty minutes before they covered his body with a white cloth that was quickly stained red. As with Trayvon Martin’s, Mike Brown’s body was too big. His legs, bright yellow socks, and the Nike slippers that his companion Dorian Johnson had complimented him on just a couple of hours before, could not be contained by their cover.

TV cameras arrived. Witnesses—including Johnson—told reporters that Mike had had his hands up, but still the cop had shot him dead. Ninety minutes after the shooting, forensic detectives finally appeared.

Officers turned away Brown’s uncles, his grandmother, and his stepfather, Louis Head, from the young man’s body. His mother, Lezley McSpadden, rushed down to Ferguson from her job in Clayton, and when she too was told she could not go to him, she paced along the border of yellow tape, holding her head and crying and cursing at the impassive cops. Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson came and took McSpadden by the arm and walked her along the perimeter. The crowd surged and yelled epithets at the cops. She pleaded to the crowd, “All I want them to do is pick up my baby. Please move back.”

Michael Brown Sr. arrived. He later wrote:

To this day, I don’t know how or why I didn’t explode into a murderous rage when cops held up their hands to stop me from getting to Mike.

“That’s my son!” I screamed over and over, as if those words would mean something.

They didn’t. I had to stand there like everyone else.… There I was, a semi-truck’s length away from my son, seething with impotence and telling myself he wasn’t really dead.
¹

By now, even the children had seen the body and blood of their neighbor and friend. Dozens more cops were assembling to secure the scene—a white policeman’s killing of an unarmed young Black man—as if this street was theirs, as if the young man’s body had never been anything but a mere stage prop in a performance of racial authority. None of these facts were lost on the crowd.