Michael Barone: Ferguson and the Historical Racism

12/01/2014 - 10h29

This week American and international news media have been running video of Ferguson, Missouri, where black rioters have burned down a convenience store, nail salon, laundromat, barber shop, bakery and auto parts store.

This is in apparent protest of the decision of a St. Louis County grand jury not to bring criminal charges against white policeman Darren Wilson, who shot and killed black teenager Michael Brown on August 9.

Many news accounts have portrayed that shooting and the violent rioting that followed as evidence on simmering racial hatreds in America today. But the Ferguson rioting tells us more about the history of race relations in the United States than it does about American life today.

Initially Brown was described as an unarmed teenager shot in the back while his hands were in the air signaling surrender. Forensic and eyewitness evidence-much of it from black bystanders-told a different story.

Videotape showed Brown stealing items from a convenience store and roughing up a much smaller clerk just before the confrontation with police. Eyewitnesses said he approached the police car. Forensic evidence supported the policeman's story that Brown attacked him in his police car and showed that he was not shot in the back.

The initial version fit into a theory that whites, especially policemen, frequently and without penalty have been murdering innocent black men in America.

That theory has plenty of support in the history of American slavery, segregation and race relations following the vast migration of one-third of American blacks from the rural
agricultural South to the urban industrial North in the 25 years from 1940 to 1965.

In the South whites murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 after he cast admiring glances at a white woman. His killers were put on trial and quickly acquitted by an all-white jury.

In the North clashes between mostly white police and young blacks grew more common in these years. Blacks rioted in Los Angeles in 1965, Newark and Detroit in 1967, Washington and many other cities in 1968.

Unhappily, crime rates were very high in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, with blacks committing about half of all violent crimes.

Happily, crime rates have fallen sharply, among both blacks and whites, since the middle 1990s. In these years police forces in central cities became racially diverse, while blacks started moving into previously all-white suburbs, like Ferguson, Missouri, outside St. Louis.

But there is little evidence of great tension between new black suburbanites and previously hired white suburban police. More than 90 percent of black homicide victims are killed by other blacks. The shooting of Michael Brown seems an exception, not the rule.

"Michael Brown, Emmett Till, how many blacks are you going to kill?" chanted demonstrators on Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue earlier this month.

But their deaths occurred 59 years apart, in very different Americas. Till's murder was part of an ongoing system of racial oppression. Brown's death, as the grand jury decided, seems an unfortunate result of a response to petty crime.

The rioters are protesting a racism that has, happily, mostly vanished-and are hurting black storeowners and neighbors in the process.

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