By Richard Rothstein

In 1968, Larman Williams was one of the first African Americans to buy a home in the white suburb of Ferguson, Missouri. It wasn't easy - when he first went to see the house, the real estate agent wouldn't show it to him.  

Atypically, Mr. Williams belonged to a church with a white pastor, who contacted the agent on Williams's behalf, only to be told that neighbors objected to sales to Negroes. The pastor then gathered the owner and his neighbors for a prayer meeting, after which the owner told the agent he was no longer opposed to a black buyer.

Williams had been living in the St. Louis ghetto and working as an assistant principal of a school in Wellston, an all-black St. Louis suburb.1 His wife, Geraldine, was a teacher in a Missouri state special education school. Together, they could afford to live in middle-class Ferguson and hoped to protect their three daughters from the violence of their St. Louis neighborhood. They expected that their children would get better educations in Ferguson than in Wellston because Ferguson could afford to hire more skilled teachers, have a higher teacher-pupil ratio, and have extra resources to invest in specialists and academic enrichment programs.

Larman Williams chose Ferguson because he was vaguely familiar with the town. Ferguson adjoined the very poor, all-black suburb of Kinloch where Williams had once lived (California Congresswoman Maxine Waters and the comedian and activist Dick Gregory grew up there). There was a tiny black section of Ferguson, geographically isolated from the main town, but it was the white Ferguson that Williams had come to admire, although he had been permitted to enter only during daytime.  

Ferguson a 'Sundown Town' 

Until the mid-1960s, Ferguson was a "sundown town" from which African Americans were banned after dark. Ferguson had blocked off the main road from Kinloch with a chain and construction materials but kept a second road open during the day so housekeepers and nannies could get from Kinloch to jobs in Ferguson. 

Kinloch and the middle-class white neighborhoods that also adjoin Ferguson were once indistinguishably part of unincorporated St. Louis County, but in the late 1930s, the white neighborhoods formed the city of Berkeley to ensure their schools would remain separate from Kinloch's. With a much smaller tax base, the Kinloch schools were far inferior to those in Berkeley and Ferguson, and Kinloch took on even more of the characteristics of a dilapidated ghetto.  

This arrangement persisted until 1975 - several years after the Williams family moved into their white Ferguson neighborhood - when federal courts ordered Berkeley, Ferguson, and other white towns to integrate their schools into a common district with Kinloch.

Other African Americans followed the Williams family by purchasing homes in Ferguson, but the African American community grew slowly. In 1970, shortly after the family moved to Ferguson, the city's population was less than 1 percent black. But it had some multifamily buildings that attracted renters from St. Louis.  

Then, as public housing in St. Louis was demolished in the 1970s, the St. Louis Housing Authority gave relocation assistance to displaced families. It is likely that some of those families moved to Ferguson and other inner-ring suburbs.  

By 1980, Ferguson was 14 percent black; by 1990, 25 percent; by 2000, 52 percent; and by 2010, 67 percent. Other northern and northwestern suburbs near St. Louis were similarly experiencing an increasing share of black residents during this period. Meanwhile, suburbs beyond the first ring to the south and west of St. Louis have remained almost all white, while the white population share of the city of St. Louis itself has been stable and has even started to grow. St. Louis's downtown area and neighborhoods west of it to the city border went from 36 percent white in 2000 to 44 percent white in 2010. Within that area, whites are now a solid majority in some neighborhoods for the first time in decades.

The following pages tell the story of how St. Louis became such a segregated metropolis, where racial boundaries continually change but communities' racial homogeneity persists. Neighborhoods that appear to be integrated are almost always those in transition, either from mostly white to mostly black (like Ferguson), or from mostly black to increasingly white (like St. Louis's gentrifying neighborhoods).  

Such population shifts in St. Louis and other metropolitan areas maintain segregation patterns established by public policy a century ago. Whereas 20th century segregation took the form of black central cities surrounded by white suburbs, 21st century segregation is in transition - to whiter central cities with adjoining black suburbs, while farther out, white suburbs encircle the black ones.

I tell this story with some hesitation. I do not mean to imply that there is anything special about racial history in Ferguson, St. Louis, or the St. Louis metropolitan area. Every policy and practice segregating St. Louis over the last century was duplicated in almost every metropolis nationwide.  

Yet this story of racial isolation and disadvantage, enforced by federal, state, and local policies, many of which are no longer practiced, is central to an appreciation of what occurred in Ferguson in August 2014 when African American protests turned violent after police shot and killed an unarmed black 18-year-old. Policies that are no longer in effect and seemingly have been reformed still cast a long shadow. ...(Click title for more)