Mayor Clarence Harmon
Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Poverty is the biggest factor in the region’s racial issues, followed by a lack of jobs and educational opportunity beyond high school. The other thing is residential-housing patterns and how we have been segregated.
This really involves the larger business community, which understands when a Ferguson happens, it affects business, and when it affects business, we need to do something about it. I’d like to be a fly on the wall when the politicians go before Civic Progress to discuss this. Hopefully, those guys understand how it impacts them.
I have grandkids now, and shortly, I’m going to have the “cop talk” with them. I had it with my sons, but I’m going to have that talk again, about what to do when you come into contact with the police, how you should act.
You need police training. As a policeman, I can’t be forced to love you if you are from a different racial group than I am, but I can be convinced by the need of maintaining my employment as a police officer that I need to treat you right. Police can get out of the car for five minutes, wave to people, talk to the kids, establish a relationship, a trust, and get people to not be afraid to engage in a dialogue with the cops.
It’s a multifaceted solution. It’s a combination of good community leadership, which includes ministers, storeowners, businesses leaders, and political leadership coming to understand, “Look guys, we cannot continue to have this happen.”
A couple of weeks ago, I talked to the highway patrol, two police captains, and two police chiefs, and they are all well-intentioned people. Sometimes, these crises point you to the need to understand what you have to do. They are searching for that.
Harmon served as St. Louis’ police chief from 1991 to 1995 and mayor from 1997 to 2001. He’s now a professor at Saint Louis University.
Mayor Francis Slay
Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
St. Louis should be an integrated community where all people feel safe in their neighborhoods, confident they will have the opportunity to provide for their families, and represented in their government. The death of Michael Brown and its aftermath have displayed to the world that our region does not yet live up to this ideal. Racial economic disparities, segregation, and discrimination in the justice system drive us apart. Unequal educational opportunities fracture the foundation of hope parents have built for their children. Antiquated government structures fragment our region, preventing us from working together as one community. Long ago, these dynamics set the stage for what we have seen in the last few months.
What often happens in difficult times is, people blame others for what has gone wrong. That won’t work here. We each have to identify how we can make things better for everyone and for our region—for our own children, and for everyone’s children.
We could allow Brown’s death to polarize us. Already, many white and African-American people have drawn very different conclusions from what happened in Ferguson. We could choose to ignore the racial disparities and government structures that divide us. We could retreat to the comfort of like-minded neighbors in segregated neighborhoods. We could retweet opinions that validate our own perspective. We could blame others for the problems that plague our region, never once thinking to look in the mirror.
But we could choose another path, and we must. We must choose to work together as one community, as one region. Regardless of the mapmaker’s arbitrary lines, we face common challenges that we can only surmount together. We must use this as an opportunity for the St. Louis region to take a hard look at itself; to engage in conversations about race, racial disparities, segregation, and diversity; to dedicate ourselves to a more just community; and to identify real, evidence-based reforms that provide pathways to prosperity for those who otherwise might be left behind. We have that opportunity. Now let’s seize it—together.
In March, Slay became St. Louis’ longest-serving mayor.
