How a Century of Racist Policies Made Ferguson Into a Pocket of Concentrated Despair
Ferguson, Missouri, was a powder-keg waiting for a match long before August 9 and Michael Brown’s fateful encounter with Police Officer Darren Wilson. It is one of many predominantly black communities across the United States plagued by highly concentrated poverty, and all of the social problems that accompany it.
White America has come up with a number of rationales for these enduring pockets of despair. An elaborate mythology has developed that blames it on a “culture of poverty” — holding the poor culpable for their poverty and letting our political and economic systems off the hook. A somewhat more enlightened view holds that whites simply fled areas like Ferguson — which had a population that was 99 percent white as recently as 1970 — because of personal racial animus, leaving them as hollowed-out, predominantly black “ghettos.”
But a study by Richard Rothstein, a research fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, comes to a very different conclusion. In his report, “The Making of Ferguson,” Rothstein details how throughout the last century a series of intentionally discriminatory policies at the local, state and federal levels created the ghettos we see today. BillMoyers.com spoke with Rothstein about the report.The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.
Joshua Holland: Most people believe that Ferguson became so racially polarized because of “white flight” — white people fled the area because of personal prejudice against African-Americans. In your report, you argue that this misses a crucial point. What are we overlooking?
Rothstein: The segregation that characterizes Ferguson, and that characterizes St. Louis, was the creation of purposeful public policy. We have a segregated nation by design.
Read More http://billmoyers.com/2014/10/27/century-racist-policies-created-ferguson/
= new reply since forum marked as read
First, when I got home from work I saw a post of yours about your tracing your genealogy. It stops when your ancestors were stolen and sold. You have a void in your family history after 1930 that you will never be able to fill. That was taken from you as it was from your ancestors, their lives were stolen.
Yes, I find that sad and unbearable.
Second, as for the easy books for children of color, of all color to read about their past, our past to learn and to understand. Yes we are lacking of black history.
I have a suggestion. Start writing them bravenak. Do it now. Talk to your mother and grandmother and start telling the story. You write well and with passion. Tell the story bravenak. I know you can.
Do it.
Love ya! 
Snip from your link.. Damn..
"Realtors engaged in a practice which came to be known as “blockbusting.” When a black family moved onto a block, like Adel Allen did in Kirkwood, the real estate agents would go door to door and try to panic their white neighbors into selling their homes at very reduced prices, with the idea that property values were going to be destroyed because African-Americans were moving into their neighborhood.
Those real estate agents then bought those properties at very low prices and resold them to African-Americans, who had to pay very high prices because they had no other housing options."
