Reasons. We ask all of you to be active participants in tweeting. In toms place, let me Say Something i think he might have wanted to say about the importance of race and space and the importance of the ways in which policing have defined the spaces propriety of citizenship, in the United States of america. Ferguson brings us here. Ferguson is just a metaphor for an ongoing history that the state forces, that the white citizens that sees white citizens and class as the defining marker for the ways in which race continues to be made in the united dates of america. That said, i want to thank jim grossman from the American Historical Association for encouraging panels like this that link the past, present, and future. We all know as members of this august association that the American Historical Association has not always been responsive to contemporary moments and sometimes has been on the wrong side of history. We want to applaud the leadership in this moment for allowing us to come together and think seriously about how the past informs this moment. The format of todays panel each speaker will spend about 10 minutes speaking. They have been asked to prepare opening statements, which will range, i assume, from very formal to informal. All of whom will be important for shaping the conversation we will have with. They will speak in the following order. Colin gordon is a professor of history at the university of iowa and writes on the history of American Public policy and political economy. He is the author of american inequality. As well as dead on arrival, the politics of health in the 20th century. He has written for the nation in these times, z magazine, and atlanta city. He is a regular contributor and author of st. Louis and the declining and the state of the city. Colin will be followed by myself. I am the director of the schomburg center. I run my mouth a lot of different places and we will keep it moving. I will be speaking on the history of race and policing in a particular context. I will be followed by heather thompson, associate professor of African American studies at temple university. She will be moving to the university of michigan. She writes about race, labor and social move, and the cultural state in 20th century america. She is an author. She is the editor of speaking out protest, and activism in the 1960s and 70s. She just finished blood in the water, the attica prison uprising of 1971, to be published next year. She will be discussing whiteness and reaction to ferguson. Following heather will be jelani cobb, the director of the Africana Studies institute at the university of connecticut. He is a specialist. He is the author of to the break of dawn, a finalist for the award for arts writing. I have known him for 20 years. I am reading toms introduction. He is editor of the essential harold cruz, a reader. His forthcoming book is antidote to revolution. He is a regular contributor to the new yorker. His work has appeared in via the new york times, and other publications. Our panel will be rounded out i by marcia chatelain. She writes about africanamerican migration women, and girls history, and food studies. She is a member of the British Councils transatlantic network, a 2000 Harry S Truman scholar, and honoree. Her first book, southside girl, is coming out this spring. At the beginning of the academic year, she launched a collaborative online project to grapple with the ways to talk to students from Elementary School through college on the ferguson crisis. That work has been featured on National Public radio, in the pages of publications, and is a collaborative online teaching resource. She will be discussing on the teaching of ferguson. With that, i bring to the mic colin gordon. [applause] i just want to set the background by looking at the developmental history of st. Louis and its inner suburbs. This is, in many respects, a familiar story of sustained segregation in american metropolises, sustained by instruments like restrictive deed covenants and racial zoning , by the infamous fha security ratings, and other policies. I think if i were to fit ferguson into this story, i would underscore three thing. First of all, st. Louis is a starkly segregated setting marked by a northsouth divide you can see clearly on the map. Running out from the city, which the locals call the delmar divide, it is a Stark Division between white and black st. Louis. There is also what was commonly termed as a early and wall between the city and the county. What is interesting about this what we see is both the spectacular success and a spectacular failure of local segregation. Ferguson sits at the intersection of that. The second point that i would make in fitting ferguson into the story is that st. Louis like a lot of and western cities, is a remarkably rackmounted metropolitan sending in terms of politics. This fragmentation is designed to sustain that segregation over time, and in terms of the development patterns, the number of local governments in greater st. Louis, a metro area of under 2 million people, 214 municipalities, 100 of them in st. Louis county alone. The third point i would make is that the consequence of this in greater st. Louis and elsewhere is most starkly the gap between black and white wealth. From the survey of consumer finance, the difference between black and white income. The difference between wealth is much starker. Through the civil rights era, we have made some gains on wages and income, but the wealth gap is growing. That is all about housing. When you combine these stark segregation of uneven and fragmented governance and the wealth gap, you generate the story, i think, of an inner suburb like ferguson. What i show here is a pattern of this Uneven Development and annexation and the development and so the red ive just mapped Single Family homes as they are built in greater st. Louis. The yellow are the areas as they are incorporated and here is ferguson, incorporated in 1894. But you can see we get a pattern of private development, really out in the corn fields, that precedes incorporation. So what incorporation is doing is sealing the decisions made by private developers. And what that yields, among other things, in st. Louis county and ferguson is outlined in black and the city is there next to the mississippi, is a pattern by which the older residential footprint in inner suburbs like ferguson is a smaller residential footprint. So there is ferguson and the Square Footage is much smaller than the conventional suburban development. Ferguson incorporated in 1894 as an inner suburb. It is not a suburb in the convention of the word. And what this yields in greater st. Louis, again, combining the Uneven Development and sustained segregation is a pattern of first white flight and then black flight out of the city. And this series of map that go from one census to the next, the black dots increase in black persons and the white an increase in white persons and the decline in red and orange. And what we can see is the city emptying out of the white population. So in 1950 the city of st. Louis had approach legislation approaching 900,000 and now it is approaching 300,000. And what is remarkable, in the orange, you can see the first urban renewal project, the building of the Busch Stadium and clearance of mill creek valley, which expelled much of the black population into the north side of the city and by the time we get into the 1970s across the county line into suburbs like ferguson, the more affordable residential footprint. So what happens in effect, the del mar divide, which runs in this direction, is a hard and fast line of segregation in st. Louis, even today. But the county line is more fragile. And here is the instruments of segregation break down. So as people move out of the city, black and white, they tend to move locally. To africanamericans move out of north st. Louis into the suburbs of north county and whites move into central and south county for the most part. What does this yield . It brings with it a movement of concentrated poverty out of the city and into the north side. The red here are the tracks where income is less than two thirds of the metro average. And you can see concentrated poverty in the city of 1970 but as we scroll, this moves out into the suburbs and the larger outline is the Fluorescent School district and the smaller is the city of ferguson as well. And we can see this in the poverty rate, which is now as stark in north county as in the city itself. We can see it in the patterns of unemployment and especially youth unemployment. But we can see it in the sustained fiscal crisis in these inner suburbs. So here ive mapped the ability of local School Districts that generate revenue per student. And you can see in central county, you have a combination of high revenues per student on a very low tax rate. In north county and in the city, you not only have low revenue per student and high tax rates. It is more expensive to live in ferguson in terms of taxes than in much of central county. And what this fiscal crisis yields in part, which the rest of the panel can fill in the consequences of, is this pattern of what i would characterize as revenue policing in the county and in this recent report of better together, a local group in north st. Louis, shows to the degree that municipalities rely on court fines for a primary source of revenue. It is a bigger source of revenue than the property tax in ferguson. And ill leave it there. [applause] he was just heating up. [laughter] just getting good. [laughter] im getting over bronchitis so the more i talk, the more i cough. So ill mostly read from some things ive written about policing historically, because mostly i think at times we need to really appreciate how rounded a lot of the themes that emerge out of ferguson are. And just as a very quick aside to what colin just ended on, which i think would be a wonderful discussion point later to talk about what emerges in the post south of slavery with regard to profit driven policing and a Correction System designed to save the new south from its debts, from the civil war debts. It goes without saying that this is a long practice of seeing policing as part of a larger political economy. Police in urban black relations out of the south is the most under explored theme in Labor Relations in urban development before the 1960s. In labe and class biased and antipoor and antiimmigrant biases have many authors, more than a generation ago. Until 2009 and 2011, with hicks talk with you like a woman, lanes 1986 work, the roots of violence in black philadelphia was the only work of nonsouthern crime, criminal justice exploration to study americans outside of the south or i refer to here as the north. The urban north. Marilyn john said 2003, a history of Police Violence in new york city is the general policing of history. Given the limited work among historians and i want to emphasize here historians on the topic, the u. S. Riot Commission Report or the kerner Commission Report released in 1968 is the starting point in Public Discourse for untangling poverty and race. The kerner commission, ill remind you, made five recommendations for reforming Police Action in the area and more Police Protection of residents, independent citizen review boards and Citizen Input on new guidelines for aggressive patrol to minimize stop and frisk and five, develop community policing. Based on council before the police represented all of the prejudices of the criminal Justice System. The commission heard complaints of harassment of interracial couples, dispersal of social street gatherings, and the stopping of negroes on foot or in cars without obvious basis. Simply put to many black residents, police acted as agents of repression. Yet 1968 was hardly the first time liberal policy advisors particularly africanamericans had raised such criticism, with the exception of independent review boards, variations of of all the other reforms had been liberated since the migration period. Then in the wake of the harlem right of 1935, the call for harlem Citizens Police review board was issued. The parallels between mayor, the la guardia findings and the commission are striking. Among the findings and recommendations, note the similarity and tone with the current report. One, they show too little regard for fundament rights of citizens. And two, police aggressions weld the people together for mass action against those responsible for their ills. And three it is clearly the responsibility of the police to act in such a way as to win the confidence of the citizens of harlem and to prove the rights and safety of the community rather than enemies and aggressors. Oppressors. There is no reason to interfere with the rights of negroes. Officers who violate the law should be subject to punishment by the Police Department and action should be taken just as vigorously as others who commit crimes. I read all of those from the harlem riot report. Despite such observations, the author, e. Franklin frazier, the leading sociologist, he is known for his black family studies, not his antiracist critiques of policing. It is clear there was little political will to challenge racial Police Practices and policies in the 1930s. According to anthony plat, fraziers first largescale Research Report was undermined by the politics and the innovative and unique conservation to the literature on riots gathered dust on a shelf in city hall. By contrast, frazier Chicago School mentors Robert Parker and henry mckay spoke of broken home social disorganization is accompanied by personal disorganization and demoralization among negro adult and children, wrote shaw prepared for the wicker sham investigation. In a foot note they added the point of view is added by professor franklin frazier, by then using africanamerican experts to make legitimate common perspectives on black pathology. In the postwar period, following the negro family in the United States, published in 39, he studied black research in 1934 in the dilemma and then the tangle of pathology and so on and so forth elevated his research to a whole new level two decades later. Frazier also played a major part in the silence on his work around climb crime and policing. And in neither did he site the la guardia report. In text, sex or race are not listed in the class and culture integration. This is striking because in addition to leaving out the la guardia study his field notes and investigative reports have numerous examples of police corruption, misconduct and violence. Also telling is the fact that in his dissertation on chicago that shaw mckay paraphrases him from, he cited only once the most important study of Race Relations in the 1920s, the Chicago Commission relations entitled the negro study. The negro in chicago. At the heart of that study is a critique of discriminatory policing and its role of chicagos 1919 race riots. The ideas that showed in the kerner report showed ideas in the la guardia study but were increasingly addressed in the wake of the great migration. During the period, africanamerican liberal social scientists made lasting relations policy especially on the topic of policing. A new cohort of local activists began to take a greater role in the policing of white racism within black communities. Moving to the center of this work, the criminal Justice System particularly the most discriminatory orbs of releasing. There was a common trope of black liminality criminality that was defined in the wake of the end of the civil war than this 1922 report entitled the negro in chicago. Was the result of the stoning to death of a black child on a public beach in chicago, leaving 38 people dead and 537 injured of whom 536 were black. To investigate the right of 1919, the riot of 1919, the governor of illinois appointed a 12member commission, led by a black graduate student at the university of chicago. Johnson announced in the first sentence of the report, the crime rate of negroes is so largely controlled by a tangle of predisposing circumstances that it is hard to measure the factors. Discrediting the use of racial Crime Statistics, he said race was unimportant relative to the level of lawlessness, crime, advice in the whole population. Perhaps the most significant factor in a long list of problems is by a testimony of judges and criminal justice authorities were more likely to arrest negroes than whites and to convict them more readily and to give them longer sentences. One Municipal Court judge said he knew about Certain Police going into negro clubs and arresting black people and bringing them into Court Without a bit of any evidence. And another judge questioned why they were arrested for suspicion with regard to black men than a white man. I think they hesitate a little longer, when a white man is involved. Im certain that it is so. A former chief of police agreed, noting the southern migrants naturally attached greater suspicion then one of the white men who had lived longer the district, and could be more easily identified and traced. Rather than arrest the white man , the police would simply observe him, where is with no doubt if they permitted the colored man to pass, they would lose them completely. Such startling testimony coming from within chicagos white criminal Justi