Ferguson Is 60 Percent Black. Virtually All Its Cops Are White.

And more shocking stats from a bitterly segregated city.

Robert Cohen, St. Louis Post-Dispatch/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

 

Black residents of Ferguson, Missouri, the working-class city in northern St. Louis county where an unarmed black teenager was shot dead by police officers on Saturday, say the town has been a “powder keg” of racial imbalance for decades. “They treat us like second class all the way down the line,” one black resident told the LA Times. A black city alderman said the ensuing protests are “a boiling over of tensions that had been going on for a long while.”

Here’s a by-the-numbers look at who lives in Ferguson, who’s in charge, who gets stopped by police, and more.

 

 

All icons courtesy of the Noun Project. Houses: Laurène Smith

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the number of black members of Ferguson’s school board. 

 

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate