So which is it? Is St. Louis worth fighting to save? Or is the bombed-out psyche of the region too far gone to do anything but walk away from it?
The downside is obvious: We have a violent and desperate surplus labor black underclass doing its best to commit mass suicide; a city with a murder rate 12 times that of New York; a downtown with vacant skyscrapers; a white culture of flight and anger; 40 thousand regional lost jobs since the recession; and, since Ferguson, a region with an international reputation for racism, political dysfunction and police violence.
St. Louis also has an obvious upside, most of it due to institutions put in place generations ago. We have museums and cultural institutions free and open to all, fascinating 19th century architecture (even in abandoned neighborhoods), one of the world’s great symphony orchestras, a tradition in American music stretching from Scott Joplin to Miles Davis to Chuck Berry, a nationally recognized culinary scene and a comparatively low cost of living that’s the envy of Boston and San Fran.
Despite those advantages, St. Louis has stagnated and declined for decades, largely because of deindustrialization, white abandonment of huge swathes of territory, and an insular where-did-you-go-to-high-school culture that can ostracize newcomers and makes it more difficult to attract fresh blood to counter cultural arteriosclerosis.
Another contributor to decline is a top-down Big Daddy culture that herded well-known bold-face names together to hatch plans for everything from interstates slicing apart downtown to high-rise housing projects. This created a top-down model of governance made up of Civic Progress executives, government leaders, and just enough black clergy and civil rights leaders to keep the whole thing from being too monochromatic. Some cities, like Atlanta, got that combination to work. St. Louis did not.
Still, the Gateway City region was content to slog along, treating the area’s institutional racism and divided governments as little family quirks that didn’t have anything to do with the region skidding slowly into irrelevance in the new global economy, and quietly pleased that we had enough big names to step up and take care of things like stealing the Rams from L.A. or refurbishing Forest Park.
But when Darren Wilson emptied the 9mm clip of his Sig Sauer P229 into Michael Brown Jr., the usual suspects from Civic Progress, the NAACP, the Urban League and the corridors of government became as irrelevant as electric typewriters. Twitter, the invention of a native St. Louisan, became the weapon several hundred everyday St. Louisans used to call St. Louis’ racism to the world’s attention and pulverize the top-down paradigm that had allowed the usual suspects to control St. Louis’s agenda for over a century.
Thanks largely to Twitter, Jack Dorsey’s newsroom-in-your-pocket, Ferguson news and the Ferguson narrative was seized by the very kinds of people St. Louis had always marginalized – young, black, gay, transgender, atheist, angry, loud, impolite and most decidedly unimpressed by the usual suspects. And these new unusual suspects could be St. Louis’ last, best hope of crawling out of a morass of complacency that has stymied growth, community development and job creation.
That’s because everything – everything – that has happened since Michael Brown Jr. was killed is the direct result of the street demonstrations and protest actions organized and driven by a motley coalition of young multi-racial activists who would be equally unwelcome in the Missouri Athletic Club or a Missionary Baptist Church.
Without them, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights would not be at UMSL on February 23 to examine the relationship between Missouri cops and people of color; the Ferguson Commission would not exist; the regional conversation on racism and police behavior would have never started; white flighters in JeffCo and St. Charles would be unaware that something desperately needs fixing; people from Boston to Bangkok would not know about the St. Louis area’s racial mess; and bills to fix St. Louis County’s municipal court scams would not be fast-tracking through the Missouri General Assembly.
St. Louis will not thrive through grandiose top-down plans. It will succeed through bottom-up efforts, the kind policy wonks have dubbed “tactical urbanism.” St. Louis’ Mardi Gras did not become one of the nation’s largest because of corporate focus groups. St. Louis did not become a premier tech start-up hub as a result of a master urban plan. St. Louis’ restaurants did not attract national attention because corporate and government suits created a restaurant scene study. All of them grew and thrived from the bottom up.
And that bottom-up activism born on Canfield Drive and in the tear-gassed streets of Ferguson may be the best chance the entire region has to move ahead on issues of race, class, and economics. If not that, what?
Charles Jaco is a journalist, novelist and author who has worked for NBC News, CNN, Fox 2, KMOX and KTRS.
