Ten years after the death of Michael Brown, the conditions that led to the uprisings remain
By Derek Hyra, author of Slow and Sudden Violence: Why and When Uprisings Occur
April 29, 1992: I am in Harlem, preparing for my AAU basketball team practice in Riverside Church’s basement. As I am warming up, my coach suggests I leave immediately. He had heard unrest was likely to erupt on 125th Street after the acquittal of the police who brutally beat Rodney King in Los Angeles (LA). Harlem did not ignite that night but unrest ripped through LA.
I was eighteen at the time and vividly remember the troubling TV images of LA on fire. I thought something was drastically wrong with America. Despite our ideals of equality, freedom, and democracy for all, we were an intensely segregated nation filled with contradictions tied to our legacy of racial discrimination and inequality.
Fast forward to August 9, 2014. People took to Ferguson’s streets following the tragic police killing of an unarmed, Black young man, Michael Brown. A white police officer shot Brown multiple times for jaywalking and allegedly stealing some cigars. In impoverished Southeast Ferguson, folks converged from across the St. Louis region to mourn Brown’s death and protest unjust police actions. The Ferguson revolt was the start of the Black-led rebellions that rocked America between 2014 and 2020. The police killings of African Americans like Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor triggered one of the largest Black-led revolt movements in American history.
Today is the ten-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s death and a critical moment to reflect on the uprisings. While some view these contemporary revolts as solely driven by police aggression, our modern unrest narrative is more complex. Through interviews for my new book Slow and Sudden Violence, Ferguson and Baltimore community leaders identified police brutality as a cause of the uprisings, but they also voiced other significant frustrations. They felt the uprisings originated not just from sudden antagonistic police actions but from ongoing housing and community development policies that facilitated Black segregation, dispossession, displacement, and gentrification. These policies of slow violence were critical to creating the racially unequal environments; the pockets of Black poverty where police brutality disproportionately impacts the lives of low-income African Americans.
Black poverty was pushed to Ferguson by ongoing violent urban renewal policies that consistently destroyed and re-segregated Black communities in the St. Louis region. The destruction of historic Black communities like Mill Creek Valley, Pruitt-Igoe, the Ville, and Kinloch forced Black redevelopment refugees to suburban Ferguson. Many of Southeast Ferguson’s families with low incomes live in affordable Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) supported units with Housing Choice Voucher rent subsidies. These urban redevelopment and affordable housing policies facilitated Black displacement and advanced neighborhood poverty.
The systematic destabilization of Black communities leads to a displacement pain, what I have coined chronic displacement trauma, among many low-income African Americans. The displacement trauma gets suppressed as people cope and carry on their everyday lives to survive. But sometimes another trauma, police violence, can release generational frustrations. The tragic police killings of African Americans triggered the release of deep-seated frustrations from ongoing policies that displaced people and segregated them in new poverty pockets where they are aggressively policed. Uprisings result from cumulated frustrations tied to violent urban restructuring and policing.
Since 2014, have we addressed aggressive police practices, invested in impoverished Black communities, stopped Black displacement, and signaled with our policy reforms that Black lives, and communities, matter?
No. Of course, following the massive uprising movement, we investigated some police departments, removed the names of known racists from some public schools, and toppled some Confederate monuments; however, our metropolitan landscapes are still racially unequal and filled with aggressively policed Black ghettos.
To tackle the underpinnings of unrest, we must change the community context in which policing occurs. We must minimize racialized spaces of poverty and invest in communities of color to bring greater stability to people in an ongoing cycle of state-sanctioned segregation, dispossession, displacement, and gentrification.
How can we do this? I offer a few policy suggestions. Of course, we need to reform policing, but we must also change our community and housing development policies. We must promote equitable growth that economically improves depleted communities without triggering displacement. We must reinstate one-for-one replacement for demolished public housing units. We must reform the LIHTC and Housing Choice Voucher programs so families displaced from gentrified spaces can find affordable housing in opportunity neighborhoods. We must reduce metropolitan level neighborhood inequality.
In 1992, I drove home from Harlem to a “safe” NYC suburb. In 2014, Michael Brown never made it home. He was killed in “dangerous” Ferguson not solely by the police but by the ongoing harmful American policies that “placed” his family, and many other Black families, in segregated environments where concentrated poverty and aggressive policing co-exist. If we are to ever fulfill the American ideals of equal opportunity, we must reform discriminatory policies that perpetuate racially unequal neighborhood conditions and the context for unrest.
About the Author
Derek Hyra is a professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy and founding director of the Metropolitan Policy Center at American University. His research focuses on processes of neighborhood change, with an emphasis on housing, urban politics, and race. Slow and Sudden Violence: Why and When Uprisings Occur is his latest book.