Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
On a September afternoon, in the weeks after Officer Darren Wilson shot 18-year-old Michael Brown, a dozen protesters gathered across from the Ferguson Police Department, where a news van sat nearby.
Two blocks north, a pair of teens ate frozen custard outside the Whistle Stop. A chalkboard near the restaurant’s entrance read “We Are Back!” (A small fire had closed the place the previous day.) “It wasn’t a big deal,” said the waitress. At the next table, a man flipped through Money magazine’s “Best Places to Live in America” issue.
It was here that the community began. A settlement called Ferguson Station sprouted up around the train depot, and in 1894, the city of Ferguson was incorporated. Union Station opened the same year. Ferguson’s depot was among the first stops beyond the city, linking Ferguson and St. Louis for out-of-towners long before international headlines did.
When Charles Henson moved to Ferguson during the ’70s, he was one of the Ferguson-Florissant School District’s few African-American students. Over the next two decades, he watched as many of his white neighbors moved and businesses shuttered. Determined to smooth race relations in the area, he co-founded People Reaching Out for Unity and Diversity. In 2009, he became president of the district’s Board of Education. At his daughter’s graduation from McCluer High School, he noted that his mother—who was 86 and sitting in the audience—couldn’t have attended the school. When Henson and I spoke in 2010, he said with fervor, “Thank God things have changed.”
Of course, that was before Henson lost his reelection bid, before the nearby Normandy School District lost accreditation, before Brown lost his life. This August, the accumulated tensions poured out. Now, finally, we’ve begun to have candid conversations about race relations, about a representative power structure, about how the community can rebuild together. When we talk about Ferguson, we’re talking about more than 6 square miles in North County. We’re talking about community on a much broader scale, across the entire St. Louis metro area.
The wisdom we need was posted for all to see that day in September, on a sign outside an auto shop a few blocks south of the Whistle Stop: “Let’s communicate. Understand. Respond with humility. Pray for each other.”
