At some point in the first few hours after midnight of “Moral Monday” during the “FergusonOctober” protests this weekend, KMOX radio reporter Michael Calhoun tweeted that #OccupySLU had become the number one trending topic, nationwide, on Twitter. City of St. Louis Alderman Antonio French retweeted Calhoun’s assertion later Monday morning.
On the night that Vonderrit Myers was shot and killed in the Shaw neighborhood, just south of Interstate 44 in the city, “#shawshooting” became the metro area’s top trending topic on Twitter.
Online interest in unrest following local police shootings is quantifiable on Twitter, but it’s too early to use it as a barometer of latent social activism. When “#ShawShooting” was the leading topic, “#American Horror Story Freak Show” was in second place, followed by Kathy Bates, who plays a bearded lady in that TV show. In fourth place was something called “#CircusFreaks2014.”
Later on Monday morning, “#OccupySLU” had slipped out of the nation’s top 10. The new top trend was “#VideoGameHighSchool” followed by “#NoBraDay.”
French has been cast as a social-media Svengali during two months of unrest in Ferguson and Shaw, with his tweets and other online postings swelling his list of Twitter followers to 113,000. He has been profiled by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Washington Post, CNN, and other media outlets. French is behind “#HealSTL,” an effort to address the social issues surrounding the shootings in Ferguson and Shaw. One of the group’s goals was to register voters in Ferguson.
Initially, the St. Louis County Election Board stated that more than 3,200 new voters had been registered in Ferguson. Upon further review, a board spokesman admitted that was a mistake and that only 128 new voters had been registered.
Sound and fury has followed the Aug. 9 killing of Michael Brown with national and world media focused on the protests and arrests. As that attention oscillates, the first sign of the net effect of Ferguson—provided the Grand Jury doesn’t come back with a decision—likely will be the county executive election on November 4 between Democrat Steve Stenger and Republican Rick Stream.
Mike Jones, senior policy advisor to St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley and a member of the state board of education, knows that the current hoopla and histrionics do not necessarily mean real change is coming. “Social media is like the Air Force,” Jones says. “Politics is like the infantry—you grind it out on the ground.”
Jones, a lifelong Democrat and former alderman and deputy mayor in the city, is one of the organizers of the Fannie Lou Hamer coalition, named for a Mississippi civil-rights activist. The coalition of about 20 mayors and other elected officials from North St. Louis County, including St. Louis County Councilwoman Hazel Erby, has endorsed Stream, a Republican.
“We’re looking at the movement of black voters away from the Democratic candidate,” Jones says. “They can express that by actually voting for Rick Stream; they can write in somebody else or just not vote for county executive when they show up. All three of those choices work tactically for Fannie Lou Hamer.”
Jones says the goal is to “is to change the political relationship between the African-American community and the Democratic Party.” Changing that relationship is the main goal, whether Stream defeats Stenger is secondary. “The entrée is us and the Democrats,” says Jones. “Rick Stream is a side order of grits in this whole thing.”
Ken Warren, professor of political science at Saint Louis University and a veteran political analyst and author, thinks the county executive’s race is Stenger’s to lose. He cites that Barack Obama carried the county with 59 percent of the vote in 2008 and 56 percent in 2012. Democrats running for statewide offices, Warren says, have received a 60/40 split in the county in recent elections.
Warren doubts blacks will come out to vote for Stream, though not voting for Stenger is more of a possibility, and that could hurt Stenger’s chances.
“For black voters just not to come out and not vote in the county executive race could cause Stream to win in a close race,” Warren says. “After all, in 2010, [Republican Bill] Corrigan was a very strong candidate, and he only lost by 5 percent. Corrigan was ahead the entire night, until the Northeast St. Louis County vote came in. Dooley pulled it out because of the Northeast St. Louis County vote.”
Election results in 2010 from five townships that are predominately African-American support Warren’s interpretation. Dooley received 89 percent of the vote in the Norwood and Normandy townships. In St. Ferdinand, Dooley had 84 percent; in Spanish Lake, he had 79 percent; and in the University township, he received 86 percent.
In Ferguson, Dooley received 81 percent of the vote. (County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch, running unopposed, received 99 percent, or 9,749 votes, in Ferguson in 2010.)
Jones says Dooley got about 56,000 votes from six North County townships that are among the area’s 28 townships. If the Hamer coalition can shave off 30 percent of those votes, Jones says the race is a “dead heat.” Shave off more, and anything can happen.
“If you shrink the Democratic vote either by not voting in that race or voting for somebody else, it changes the whole dynamic,” says Jones. “Fannie Lou Hamer politicians will be black politicians fighting on black geography against a white Democrat from South County.”
Backing Stream is more about sending a message to the Democratic Party in St. Louis County than it is about getting a Republican elected, he says. “As far as I’m concerned, Stenger and Stream can run for the white county executive’s seat, and it’s a case of Tweedledee versus Tweedledum,” Jones says.
Jones insists this is not about Dooley’s defeat as much as it is about a “totally unproductive” relationship between African-Americans and the county’s Democratic Party. “The contract has to be totally renegotiated,” Jones says. “This is the opportunity to create the kind of pain inside the Democratic Party that will precipitate a different kind of arrangement.”
Whether Stream wins is to some degree a side issue for the Hamer coalition. “Stream has to run a campaign,” Jones says. “He might not be an effective campaigner. He might run a lousy campaign, not raise enough money. Stenger could still win.”
Aside from the upcoming county executive race in three weeks, other efforts are being pursued to investigate or rectify some of the social and political conditions that trouble St. Louis County.
State Auditor Tom Schweich’s office plans to audit municipal courts in 10 Missouri cities, including four in St. Louis County. Those audits could have an impact on the strained relationships between law enforcement and residents, as Schweich looks at amount of money collected from fines, race, and gender bias in the issuing of warrants, embezzlement, and corruption in Pine Lawn, Bella Villa, St. Ann, and Ferguson. Foristell in St. Charles County, as well as Foley and Winfield in Lincoln County, are part of the municipal-courts initiative.
Warren also plans to seek funding for research into the effect of law enforcement in the county’s 90 municipalities. “We want to look at the impact revenue from bench warrants and fines have on communities. We want to look at conflicts of interests too, especially for judges and prosecutors who get their revenue from these fines,” says Warren. “When you look at more than 300,000 bench warrants in St. Louis County, most of those bench warrants are in communities with residents of lower socioeconomic status.”
Audits and research into the underlying causes of unrest and disparity in St. Louis County, along with efforts like #HealSTL are all intended to help address current problems and disparities that drew attention after Aug. 9. In a guest column in the St. Louis American on Aug. 14, Jones admits having had a black county executive in office for the past 10 years was not enough. He stated in that column that black political leadership had failed locally and that people should look at his time in office as a “warning, not as an example.”
Jones ended that column by saying, “we lost our way long before we lost Michael Brown.”
He insists now that opposing Stenger is not directly related to Brown.
“This is not retaliation for Michael Brown, but Michael Brown changed everything. You have to put it in a continuum. That happened, but that has happened before,” Jones says of the killing of the teenager. “Both the official reaction, and the community reaction to the official reaction, changed everything. Today, St. Louis is not the same place that it was before Michael Brown was killed. This will be disruptive, and problematic, and it will afflict the comfortable, but that’s a good thing.”
