Metropolitan Policy Center’s Urban Speaker Series featuring
Colin Gordon
Before Ferguson: Race and Inequality in Greater St. Louis
(Details below)
Thursday, October 20, 2022, 5:30PM - 6:30PM (ET)
American University, Kerwin Hall, Room 301
The border city of St. Louis is, by any measure, one of the most depopulated, deindustrialized, and deeply segregated examples of American urban decay. "Not a typical city," as one observer noted in the late 1970s, "but, like a Eugene O'Neill play, it shows a general condition in a stark and dramatic form." The Gateway City’s decline is rooted in the complicity of private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, and federal housing policies in both "white flight" from the central city, and in the systematic exclusion and exploitation of African Americans in the region’s patchwork suburbs. The fate of St. Louis (and cities like it) is not just a consequence of economic and demographic change; it is also the most profound political failure of our recent history.
Colin Gordon is the author of Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs (University of Chicago Press, 2019); Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality (Institute for Policy Studies, 2013); Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health in Twentieth Century America (Princeton University Press, 2003), and New Deals: Business, Labor and Politics, 1920-1935 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). He has written for the Nation, In these Times, Jacobin, and Dissent (where he is a regular contributor). He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2021-22) and is currently a visiting scholar fellowship at the Russell Sage Foundation.
