Can Black Political Empowerment Help Save
Ferguson?
Ingo Walter
Looking ahead at the future of Ferguson, Missouri after the events of
recent weeks, it seems certain that the overwhelming African-American majority
will press for empowerment in municipal affairs. This transition needs to come
with a parallel effort to strengthen the municipal economy, drawing on any and
all local and external resources to prevent a “politics of scarcity” that can
end badly for the town and its residents.
Drive a short distance west of “ground zero” in Ferguson toward Lambert
St. Louis International Airport, and you will find the overgrown lots, blocked
streets and crumbling building foundations of Kinloch, once an all-black town
of about 10,000 residents – one of nine such cities in the US back in the 1960s. Kinloch at the time was a politically
autonomous black community, created in 1948 by residents of an unincorporated
area of St. Louis County – then a blank space on the map of mainly middle-class
white towns that had incorporated in the region over the years.
Some residents had migrated to Kinloch from the South in the 19th
and early 20th Centuries. Others settled as returning soldiers after
World War I, and some moved from Illinois after East St Louis race riots in
1917. After World War II, new residents often sought refuge from poor living
and housing conditions facing African-Americans in the City of St. Louis,
particularly in the “projects.”
By incorporating, Kinloch residents were fully empowered at the
municipal level, and were free to plan and conduct their own affairs by whatever
means they chose to try improving their conditions of life. Indeed, the town
was established on the premise that, through a substantial measure of
self-determination, African-Americans could gain for themselves what they were
denied in superordinate white-dominated political structures. The town formed a
circumscribed and identifiable political unit, and its well-marked borders formed
social as well as political boundaries. For advocates of separatist-style Black
Power in those years, Kinloch might have provided an ideal beta-test for the
independent development of black-led institutions and separatism.
But in a social and economic
study of Kinloch at a time of serious US racial tensions in the late 1960s,
John E. Kramer – then a sociologist at the University of Missouri - St. Louis –
and I concluded that the overall effect of political autonomy on Kinloch’s
economy was primarily adverse. For all of its political autonomy, Kinloch appeared
to be a strikingly depressed and stagnant zone of economic deprivation even at
its peak, in the midst of a rapidly growing region during the prosperous years
of the 1960s. The social and physical contrasts between it and its immediate
neighbors like Ferguson were remarkable and obvious.
Making sustainable economic
progress proved to be a tough slog for Kinloch. There were new street lights at
street corners, a new fire engine and some other gains, but such progress may well
have materialized anyway if the community had remained an unincorporated area
of St. Louis County. A large 1965 federal grant for sewer construction might
not have been forthcoming had Kinloch remained unincorporated, but the grant seemed
less a consequence of political autonomy and the development of strong
indigenous political institutions than the result of one individual's personal
initiative. Most importantly, the Kinloch schools remained a hopeless exercise
in economic hardship, even as social ties centered on the town’s churches were
impressive and serious leaders emerged from time to time to try and make a
difference.
Meantime local taxes
were much higher than they would have been if the municipality had not been
formed. The tax base was just too small. So Kinloch residents had lower
disposable incomes under home rule and public revenue was woefully deficient.
The sadly inferior schools the town was able to maintain had an evident and
predictably deleterious effect on the academic and vocational skill levels of its
work force at a time of plentiful jobs in the St. Louis region. Perhaps the
most discouraging single image during our research was a large pile of books,
donated by other St. Louis County school districts, piled in the library
basement under a foot or two of water.
In the end, we
concluded that the residents of Kinloch had gained little in a material sense
from political independence, and may have lost a good deal more – we could find
no identifiable connection between political autonomy and improvement of
economic welfare. The economic “air supply” was absent, and there was nothing
on the horizon back fifty years ago that might have given give substance to
hope - the critical sequencing of economic development and political
empowerment suggested in Jason Riley’s new book Please Stop Helping Us (2014) in the case of Kinloch was in effect
reversed.
There is also the irony of attempting a separate-but-equal approach to
civil and political organization even though that same approach had been ruled
unconstitutional and inherently unequal in the educational sphere more than a
decade earlier.
In the 1980s much of
Kinloch’s land was taken over in an Airport noise abatement project and the
most recent data (2010 Census) records a mere 299 residents. So it’s not
possible to assess how Kinloch would have fared during the late 20th
and early 21st centuries.
In today’s coverage of
Ferguson, few media reports mention neighboring Kinloch, and when they do it’s
about unruly kids crossing the town line and vandalizing local homes. Going
forward, developments in Ferguson are uncertain. However, in Kinloch we have a valuable,
nearby warning that empowerment, desirable as it may be, is limited in its
ability to foster development. In the
end, people want to improve their lives. Period. And that involves going back
to the basics of creating marketable labor skills, attracting capital
investment and providing well-funded public services. If the new Ferguson wants
to succeed, an object lesson is right next door. Political empowerment by
itself won’t cut it.
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