Ferguson, MO: Black Town, White Power: Live from La Farine CCCXI: August 19, 2014
Jeff Smith: In Ferguson, Black Town, White Power: "St. Louis County contains 90 municipalities...
...most with their own city hall and police force. Many rely on revenue generated from traffic tickets and related fines. According to a study by the St. Louis nonprofit Better Together, Ferguson receives nearly one-quarter of its revenue from court fees.... With primarily white police forces that rely disproportionately on traffic citation revenue, blacks are pulled over, cited and arrested in numbers far exceeding their population share....
Majority-black Ferguson has a virtually all-white power structure: a white mayor; a school board with six white members and one Hispanic, which recently suspended a highly regarded young black superintendent who then resigned; a City Council with just one black member; and a 6 percent black police force.... The North County Labor Club, whose overwhelmingly white constituent unions (plumbers, pipe fitters, electrical workers, sprinkler fitters)... operates a potent voter-turnout operation that backs white candidates over black upstarts.... When the state patrol and the national television cameras leave Ferguson, its residents will still be talking about how they can move forward. And they may be ready to expand the conversation so that it’s not just about black and white, but green.
Matthew Yglesias: White political domination of Ferguson is doomed: "In Ferguson... African-Americans are not a minority...
...The town is 67 percent black, it just happens to have a government that's overwhelmingly dominated by whites including the mayor, the police chief, the school board, and the bulk of the city council... depend[ing] crucially on an atmosphere of public apathy and mass indifference to local politics.... As Zachary Roth has written, typically, fewer than 15 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in municipal elections in Ferguson. Ian Milhiser observes that the low turnout is in part a consequence of the city choosing to hold municipal elections in April of odd-numbered years. That makes patronage-based get-out-the-vote campaigns incredibly effective in controlling the levers of power...
