The Story Behind Ferguson Summary

In the Educational Leadership article entitled “The Story Behind Ferguson” the author, Richard Rothstein, states, “Avoidance of our racial history in the United States is pervasive. And by failing to give our students the facts, we are ensuring that this avoidance will persist for subsequent generations. ” In this article, Rothstein is investigating the racial history of Ferguson, Missouri, a city now infamous for the tragic death of Michael Brown. Ferguson, despite it being casted as a white suburb, is an “urban ghetto.” Rothstein provides statistics such as Ferguson schools have eighty-five percent black people and eighty-three of their students need either free or discounted lunch. Student achievement has been at all time lows with thirty percent of them being proficient in math and twenty-five percent being proficient in reading. The author saw how odd it was how a city like Ferguson could be so segregated and so decided to investigate further on the racial history of the metropolitan area.

Black and white families were segregated into the north and south side respectively, as this was prior to the Civil Rights Movement that would take place in the 1960s. The subdivision of the suburbs that belonged to the African Americans were constructed poorly, while the white subdivision was better constructed with more perks. It was not until 1949 that there was a fight by conservative Republicans to integrate public housing, however it fell short as the 1949 Housing Act favored segregated public housing. This led to the development of the Pruitt towers, the houses for black families, and the Igoe towers, reserved for the white families. Due to the lack of white people in the Igoe tower and more black people in poverty, the Pruitt and Igoe towers would combine to become a black ghetto “housing the lowest income families who had no other