When Robert Parson Jr. decided to run for Florissant City Council, Michael Brown Jr. was an unknown teenager and Ferguson and its neighboring municipalities were not on the radar of national civil rights organizations like the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Parson lived in Ward 8 in Ferguson in April 2013, when longtime incumbent council member Mark Schmidt was reelected with less than 500 votes without any opposition.
“When I saw the incumbent ran unopposed, at that time I really made up my mind to run,” Parson told The American. An attorney in private practice who is now 46, Parson had never run for public office before. He previously had been elected board president for a condominium owners association and was serving on Florissant’s Environmental Quality Commission as an appointee of then-Mayor Robert G. Lowery. But his name had never been on a public ballot.
He made that decision in the spring of 2013, looking forward to the municipal general election four years in the future. Parson’s name was indeed on the ballot for Ward 8 Florissant council member on April 4, 2017, when he handed the incumbent, Mark Schmidt, a sound whipping, 514 votes (58 percent) to 364 votes (41 percent). He was the first African American ever voted onto the Florissant City Council
At the 2010 census, Florissant had more than 50,000 residents, nearly 27 percent of them black.
“Being the city’s first black city councilman is a privilege that I am grateful to have,” Parson said. “When I won the election and began to talk with people in the community regarding the results, it felt as if the whole black community won the election.”
Of course, between Parson’s decision to run in 2013 and his decisive campaign victory in 2017, Ferguson erupted after the police shooting of Michael Brown Jr. As Ferguson stayed in the national spotlight for months, national media and civil rights attention spread from Ferguson proper to the jigsaw puzzle of St. Louis County municipalities and police departments, especially the North County municipalities with sizable African-American populations but little or no black political representation.
Advised by local advocates, including the Missouri State Conference of the NAACP and the Mound City Bar Association, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) began to investigate voting districts for city councils in the county and how they impact African-American voters’ equal access to the political process. On April 15, 2015, just a week after another municipal general election in St. Louis County, Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the LDF, and three other LDF attorneys sent a letter to the mayor, clerk and all nine council members in Florissant. They argued that the city’s voting districts violated the one-person, one-vote rule prescribed by the U.S. Constitution and concentrated black voters in a way that diluted black voting strength.
“We thought that these council seats are an important role because the councils oversee many aspects of governance, including policing and public safety issues,” Victorien Wu, a signatory on the LDF letter to Florissant who worked on the redistricting issue, told The American. “We were hopeful that black candidates could get elected if there were a higher concentration of black voters, and that black council members would be able to give voice to the concerns of their constituents.”
They succeeded. After more than a year of advocacy by the LDF, the Florissant City Council voted to approve a redistricting plan on May 23, 2016.
“They redrew the lines for districts to remedy the violation of the one-person, one-vote rule, which is a constitutional requirement that had to be addressed under the constitution,” Wu told The American. “And in the process of the negotiation, the city was able to increase the percentage of African Americans in two wards, in Ward 8 and Ward 9, and to strengthen the position of black voters to give them a genuine opportunity to elect the candidates of their choice.”
The next municipal election was April 4, 2017, and for the first time, Florissant elected a black council member – in one of those two wards, Ward 8. The LDF does not support political candidates and did not support Parson. Parson sees how the organization’s work benefitted him and future black candidates, though he also sees in his 150-vote margin over the incumbent an election he would have won without redistricting.
“I believe their work and the redistricting contributed some,” Parson told The American. “I was able to get more votes in a new area of Ward 8 where a new subdivision was added, but a lot of people of all races in the area were ready for change. What LDF did was useful, but I believe I could have won without redistricting.”
Wu hopes that black residents of Ward 9 in Ferguson are looking toward the next council election, when their voting strength will be improved. He said the LDF also is monitoring voting districts elsewhere in St. Louis County. Hazelwood, University City and St. Ann were hit with letters about redistricting from the LDF, just like Florissant, but have not been as willing to negotiate, Wu said, and have not passed redistricting measures.
No African American has ever served on the city councils of Hazelwood, which was 30 percent black in the 2010 census, or St. Ann, which was 22 percent black in the 2010 census. In University City, which was 41 percent black in the 2010 census, only two of the six members of the council are African-American.
As for Parson, his concerns are directed toward Florissant and his ward.
“While I am proud to be the first African-American elected to the council, I do believe my being elected shows that I am qualified,” he said. “I don’t want to particularly dwell on race. People in the ward got to know me and elected me. And hopefully there will be more African-American representation in our city in the future.”
