Finalist: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, by Tony Messenger and Kevin Horrigan
For editorials that brought insight and context to the national tragedy of Ferguson, MO, without losing sight of the community's needs.
Nominated Work
August 11, 2014
(Attributed to the editorial board.)
Michael Brown didn’t get due process.
The still unnamed police officer who shot the 18-year-old black teenager dead in Ferguson will get plenty of it.
This is the root of the frustration that is driving the African-American community to the streets in north St. Louis County over yet another senseless killing of a young black man.
“What do we want? Justice!” chanted a crowd of family, friends and community members who gathered after the Saturday shooting. “When do we want it? Now!”
They may get justice — in the form of a prosecution of the police officer who shot and killed the recent Normandy High School graduate — but the odds aren’t stacked in their favor, and even if it happens, it won’t happen anytime soon.
America’s history is riddled with officer-involved-shootings in which juries give police who perform a dangerous job the benefit of the doubt. Trying to learn from those shootings to prevent further ones is difficult, says criminologist David Klinger, one of the nation’s foremost experts on police shootings.
Mr. Klinger, a former police officer, practices his craft just down the street from Ferguson, at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he is an associate professor in the criminal justice department.
One of the findings in a 2012 study he did of shootings by police in the city of St. Louis could offer some interesting guidance to whomever ultimately investigates the shooting of Michael Brown. Mr. Klinger recommended that the shooting investigations be handled with more transparency, and that ultimately, findings be posted on the department’s website, with the names of officers clearly identified.
Few police departments nationwide operate with such transparency, Mr. Klinger’s research has found, and that means little public accountability when a police officer shoots an unarmed civilian.
It’s no wonder, then, that leaders in Ferguson, including members of the NAACP, have called for the FBI to take over the lead in the investigation into how an unarmed 18-year-old was shot.
That’s a good suggestion, especially considering that the NAACP already has an ongoing federal complaint against the county police department over alleged racial profiling.
While answers are likely not to come in this case as quickly as some would like, appointing a federal agency to oversee the investigation will instill the sort of trust that might calm some of the justified anger over the shooting.
It’s a good first step.
Here’s a second one: Efforts to elevate the importance of annual studies of racial profiling by police in the region and the state should be intensified.
Last year, for the 11th time in the 14 years that data has been collected, the disparity index that measures potential racial profiling by law enforcement in the state got worse. Black Missourians were 66 percent more likely in 2013 to be stopped by police, and blacks and Hispanics were both more likely to be searched, even though the likelihood of finding contraband was higher among whites.
Every year these numbers come out to little fanfare, in part because there isn’t enough political will to do the further study to break them down by precincts and individual officers to determine whether there is a cultural or training problem in entire departments or just a few rogue, racist cops who need to find another line of work.
Perhaps the tragic death of Michael Brown will spur a little political will.
While he wasn’t driving a car when he was pulled over and shot, the concept is the same: Nearly every black man in America has a story of being pulled over, stopped or harassed as a young person for doing something that a white teenager would never imagine might end in being on the wrong end of a police officer’s gun. Driving While Black. Walking While Black. Wearing a Hoodie While Black.
In Ferguson, the city where Michael died, the police in 2013 pulled over blacks at a 37 percent higher rate than whites compared to their relative populations. Black drivers were twice as likely to be searched and twice as likely to be arrested compared to white drivers.
Those statistics don’t prove racial profiling.
But those numbers plus a dead young man in the street make a strong case for deserving a closer look.
August 12, 2014
(Attributed to the editorial board.)
As soon as the unrest in Ferguson is over — and let it be soon — there must be a thorough, independent and timely investigation into how and why it happened and the police response to it. This inquiry would go beyond the parallel criminal investigations and get into the root causes of this madness.
Yes, the immediate cause — the “tipping point” they call it in the literature of civil unrest — was the fatal shooting Saturday of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a still-unidentified Ferguson police officer.
(By the way, the failure to identify the officer violates every principle of transparency recommended by law enforcement experts. Society grants police officers the right to use deadly force. That right carries special obligations, one of which is strict public accountability. The longer the officer stays anonymous, the more public confidence is undermined.)
When the independent investigation deconstructs the Ferguson incident, as it must, it should explore the history and conditions that may have helped precipitate Saturday’s shooting and the subsequent public protests. That includes racial segregation. That includes the training and qualifications of Ferguson police officers. It includes command-and-control decisions by the Ferguson and St. Louis County police forces and the Missouri Highway Patrol.
One big problem with convening such an investigative panel is that it’s not clear who has jurisdiction. The same problem plagues the entire response in Ferguson: Who has command authority? Who is accountable for the decisions that are being made?
The fragmentation may be deliberate; it certainly mirrors the fragmentation that is the bane of the entire region. But the first rule of restoring public confidence is to earn it. Someone must step forward and take responsibility — both for the law enforcement effort that’s currently underway and then for the investigation that must follow.
It will have to be Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, a man whose every instinct is to dodge bad news whenever possible. Sorry, governor. But you asked for the job.
By law, cities and counties are political subdivisions of the state. The state patrol already appears to be taking a lead role in crowd control efforts, though no one is saying so officially.
It can’t be the city of Ferguson. It is one of 90 municipalities in St. Louis County. It has 21,000 residents, two-thirds of whom are black, and a police force of 53 commissioned officers, 90 percent of whom are white.
Nor can it be St. Louis County. The county has more than 800 police officers but no formal jurisdiction over law enforcement in Ferguson. At Ferguson’s request, the county police force is helping out through mutual aid agreements, as are the state patrol and other municipal police forces.
Mr. Nixon is the only public official with the authority to create an independent investigative commission. Public confidence demands that he announce plans to do so immediately. Its membership should be diverse and of unquestioned integrity. Its members should come from law enforcement, civil rights, academia and civic leadership. It’s time to step up.
The police agencies may know who’s in charge, but the public deserves to know, too. At whose order were police dogs brought in? Who authorized the use of tear gas and non-lethal baton rounds?
What central command authority is making sure that officers from multiple jurisdictions are singing from the same hymnal? Is anyone up to speed on the latest thinking in law enforcement about dealing with mass protests?
There is a lot of literature on that subject, dating back to the “police riot” at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago and forward to the 2011 London riots and “Occupy Wall Street” protests.
A “best practices” study published in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin two years ago says it’s generally accepted that “crowd violence escalates if people think police offers treat them unfairly.”
Furthermore, the study says, when a crowd perceives that “officers act with justice and legitimacy,” disorder becomes less likely.
Cops are human beings, and human beings get scared. Their first impulse is to gear-up as if they were patrolling outside Baghdad’s Assassin’s Gate. As in foreign policy, the academic types may say that dialogue and soft power are better, but that defies the average’s cop’s attitudes.
What the public generally regards as “riot gear” — helmets, shields, Kevlar vests — is known in police circles as “hard gear.” Here’s what the FBI bulletin says about that:
“Officers must avoid donning their hard gear as a first step. They should remember the lessons learned from the 1960s civil rights movement and Vietnam War protests. Police should not rely solely on their equipment and tools.”
What we’ve seen in Ferguson is skirmish lines of officers in hard gear and videos of tear gas canisters lobbed onto roofs.
Individual officers generally have shown great restraint. But those images are doing incalculable harm, and not just to community relations in Ferguson. The nation and the world have seen horrible images from St. Louis that suggest that race relations here have a long way to go.
They’re not wrong.
There are people of good will on all sides who want better. Ferguson should be the place where better begins. Mr. Nixon must get it started.
August 13, 2014
(Attributed to the editorial board.)
St. Louis has issues.
It shouldn’t take a visit by the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist, for St. Louis to internalize that very simple statement.
“You’ve got issues in this city,” Rev. Sharpton told a standing-room only crowd Tuesday evening at the Greater St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church near Ferguson.
He wasn’t talking about Ferguson, or Dellwood, or Cool Valley, or Florissant, or any of the other 90 municipalities in St. Louis County.
He was talking about all of us in the greater St. Louis region.
We have issues.
We knew that before Michael Brown’s life was cut short Saturday afternoon by a hail of bullets fired from a police officer’s gun.
Like too many black men in St. Louis, he died too young. He was 18.
Even without that fatal confrontation, statistics suggest Michael Brown would have died earlier than other African-American males just like him who had the good fortune of being born one ZIP code to the south and west.
This is but one of the startling and important conclusions of a recent Washington University study titled “For the Sake of All.”
The landmark study is a picture of what St. Louis has become after decades of white flight, red-lined development decisions, uneven support of public schools and an uneasy racial division that is ever-simmering just below the surface.
Had he lived, Michael Brown’s projected lifespan was about 15 years less than had he lived just a couple of ZIP codes away on the south side of Interstate 70.
In St. Louis, ZIP code is destiny.
Before he died, before his community protested, before angry young men turned to violence and looting, Michael Brown’s journey defined the biggest issues facing St. Louis today.
He lived in an underfunded and unaccredited school district — Normandy — that is centered amid a jigsaw puzzle of municipalities that struggle to provide basic services to a transient population living in concentrated poverty.
Those municipalities often make the poverty worse, by dinging their own residents with red-light and speeding-camera tickets, which help fund police departments that can’t afford to keep and train officers with the quality of the city of St. Louis or St. Louis County police forces.
It’s the luck of the draw that #Ferguson is trending on Twitter instead of any of the other patchwork of small cities where Michael Brown spent his youth.
His story is resonating in St. Louis, and in the nation, and the world, because it is the story of so many African-American men.
Michael Brown’s story is the story of North County.
His story is the story of St. Louis.
It’s our story, past and present.
Yes, we have issues.
Over the past year, we’ve embarked on a series of editorials under the banner “A Greater St. Louis” focusing specifically on these big issues: the need to improve our local schools; the need to unite as a region, both racially and over our arbitrary government boundaries, and the need to get beyond the very economic development policies that contributed to the concentrated poverty in both north St. Louis city and many parts of north St. Louis County.
The series is a call to action for a once-great Midwestern manufacturing hub making progress, albeit slowly, after decades of decline. It is a plea for city and suburban leaders to realize that for St. Louis to be great again, we must realize that we are better together, that we are stronger as a sum of all of our parts.
There are elements of each of these issues in both the journey of Michael Brown and the community’s reaction to his death. One of the key arguments for uniting our region is that for too long, the public policy and perception has been one of isolation. We put up our proverbial (and literal) gates in West County, for example, and separate ourselves from the challenges of the urban core.
Sadly, the looting and violence in Ferguson this week feeds the fear in some mostly white suburbs. Some of them already have registered their official opposition to a movement underway to unite the various factions of St. Louis under a more well-defined regional umbrella.
St. Louis will never be great again if we don’t all take responsibility for the least among us, if we don’t strengthen our core first, if we don’t break down the walls that divide us.
For better or worse, Rev. Sharpton is right: This is now how the world sees St. Louis. Outside of the 314 area code, people don’t differentiate between a QuikTrip in Dellwood or one on Big Bend.
Our issues, our divisions, our poverty, our troubled schools, our crime — all are laid bare. There is no more sweeping them under the carpet.
The challenge now, as the Rev. Starsky Wilson — president of the Deaconess Foundation — wrote Wednesday on his blog, is to “collaborate, not compete.”
Rev. Wilson noted that there were competing prayer gatherings Tuesday, with Rev. Sharpton speaking to a massive and excitable crowd at one church, while Gov. Jay Nixon and other community leaders (most of them white) were speaking at a more somber gathering just a few miles away.
We have separate but equal prayer services. For St. Louis to move forward, those various constituencies need to be talking to each other, not at each other.
Sixty years after Brown vs. Board of Education said separate but equal wouldn’t work for schools, St. Louis is still struggling with the concept.
“The Band-Aid has been ripped off,” Baltimore-based Pastor Jamal Bryant said at the Sharpton event on Tuesday.
St. Louis is an open wound.
August 14, 2014
(Attributed to the editorial board.)
In 1966, as summer race riots were sweeping across the American landscape, civil rights leader the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave an interview to Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes” that produced a memorable phrase that’s been ubiquitous this week in Ferguson:
“I think we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard,” Dr. King said.
In the interview, Dr. King was actually advocating against rioting, against the rising tide of violence. But he was also offering perspective and pointing to the way out of the paralysis that comes with widespread urban unrest.
That’s where we stand today with the unprecedented reactions in the St. Louis region to the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown. What can ease the righteous anger in the streets of north St. Louis County?
Here was Dr. King’s answer in 1966:
“I think the answer about how long it will take will depend on the federal government, on the city halls of our various cities, and on White America to a large extent,” he said. “This is where we are at this point, and I think White America will determine how long it will be and which way we go in the future.”
The term “White America” might seem jarring in 2014, but it’s no more jarring than the image of a cop in body armor training his sniper rifle through a cloud of tear gas on young, black protesters.
All of a sudden, the ‘60s don’t seem that far away.
Much like then, underlying the events in Ferguson is the inequality of opportunity.
Some of it is income inequality, which President Barack Obama calls the “defining challenge of our time.” Too few people have too large a share of the nation’s wealth. Jobs no longer provide a fair way to distribute the benefits of capitalism.
Some of it is racial inequality. Most African-Americans in Ferguson and throughout St. Louis and the nation don’t have the same shot at decent housing, decent education and decent jobs as most white Americans.
In north St. Louis County, those two issues collide. Since 2000, according to a Brookings Institute report issued last month, the number of people in the St. Louis region living in poverty has increased by 34 percent. The largest increase has been in the primarily African-American North County suburbs. And the concentration of people living in intensely poor neighborhoods has risen since 2000 by 7 percent.
These are the same challenges Dr. King was addressing nearly half a century ago.
Inequality, though, doesn’t entirely explain the death last Saturday of Michael Brown at the hands of Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. Inequality doesn’t entirely explain why some protesters turned to violence and looting.
But inequality is the backdrop for what happened and why. Inequality breeds resentment and suspicion and anger. Inequality is one reason why Ferguson boiled over. Opportunity isn’t equal, and people know it.
St. Louis can’t fix income inequality. We can begin to fix inequality of opportunity for people of color. But we can’t do it with one of those famous “conversations about race” that are generally prescribed for racial tensions.
We must talk, yes. But the result must be something real.
Last Wednesday, this editorial page suggested that Gov. Jay Nixon appoint a “Ferguson Commission” to examine the root causes of the tragedy in Ferguson. We renew that call today.
Further, because education is where opportunity starts, St. Louis should immediately show it’s serious by starting to turn around inequalities in public education.
As to the Ferguson Commission, the governor’s involvement would be welcome, but not critical. The region’s political leaders could tap the resources of St. Louis’ great universities. University presidents and chancellors could take the lead in forming this commission and developing its agenda. Involvement by business, civic and community organizations would be vital.
This list is by no means complete, but here are some questions that should be addressed:
•Would unified government have mitigated the problems in the police response to events in Ferguson?
•Are there ways to create better and more diverse housing opportunities for the working poor in St. Louis?
•How can police-community relations be improved throughout the region?
•And perhaps most significantly, what can be done immediately to address inequities in public education? Economic opportunity begins with educational opportunity. That’s something we can start to fix right now.
It’s telling that Capt. Ron Johnson, the Missouri Highway Patrol trooper who overnight turned a militarized zone into a celebration of the First Amendment, made his first visit upon taking command to an elementary school in the Riverview Gardens School District. He gets it.
Over the past two years, St. Louis and Missouri have been consumed in a fiery debate over how to better educate children in failing school districts in north St. Louis County such as Normandy and Riverview Gardens. The focus continually gets lost in a cloud of competing visions for reform.
The academic research is clear on two simple fixes that can make a difference today: quality early childhood education and better teachers. Both of those things take money. Neither the St. Louis region nor the Missouri Legislature has shown the political courage to find much of that money.
So it’s now in the lap of President Obama, who waded into the Ferguson firestorm last week.
If this were a tornado, the feds would know what to do. The game plan here should be similar. There should be a double-E FEEMA: the Federal Education Emergency Management Agency. Flood the region with quality teachers and licensed early childhood education programs. The young people living in poverty and walking from mama’s house to grandma’s don’t need more tanks and sniper rifles. They need textbooks and teachers. They need hope. Give it to them.
Next, it’s time for the school districts in St. Louis to learn a lesson from their own history in the ‘60s. Amid falling performance and rising racial tensions, the state of Missouri in 1968 commissioned academics and state leaders to study a way to improve urban schools. Their solution, the Spainhower Report, was to consolidate school districts in the divided St. Louis region. The report went nowhere. Why? Because white school districts didn’t want to unite with black ones.
They still don’t.
There is a way to approximate unity, however, without having to erase political boundaries or spend another legislative session talking in circles.
Some school districts in the region — Ladue, University City, Brentwood, and Parkway among them — pointed the way when they voted to accept some transfer students from Normandy this school year, at a reduced tuition rate, even though state law doesn’t require them to.
Three other school districts may be forced to accept transfer students after a judge ruled Friday in favor of several Normandy parents seeking better opportunity for their children.
It is time for every school district in St. Louis County to adopt an open-door policy and accept low-income transfer students at a reasonable rate of tuition. There is no reason for them to keep waiting on the courts or Legislature to force the issue.
Each school board could vote to accept any transfer student from any poorly performing school district who seeks the hope and opportunity a quality education provides. The structure for such a program already exists in the ongoing voluntary choice program operated between the city of St. Louis and most of the suburban districts. Expand it. Make it work for all of north St. Louis County.
This would be real. This could be done today.
St. Louis doesn’t have to wait to determine its own destiny. We don’t have to wait for somebody in Jefferson City to write a law that puts into statute what we know in our hearts to be the right move.
The unheard have spoken. Let’s listen to them.
August 18, 2014
(Attributed to the editorial board.)
In the highly charged moments after her son was gunned down walking to his grandmother’s apartment, 18-year-old Michael Brown’s mother let loose with a cry that should continue to frame the ongoing unrest in Ferguson:
“Do you know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate?” Leslie McSpadden screamed to anybody who would listen, her comments recorded by KMOV-TV as she was held back by family members. “You know how many black men graduate? Not many.”
Last year, against all odds, Mr. Brown graduated from Normandy High School.
His mother is right. It was quite the accomplishment.
The 2013-14 school year was, to put it bluntly, an ugly time in the Normandy School District, and not because of anything the students did. Kids were moved around a political chess board like unvalued pawns. First the district lost accreditation, mostly due to horrendous test scores. Then the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that a long-existing law that allows students from unaccredited schools to transfer to better ones in adjoining districts or counties was constitutional. About 2,000 students from Normandy and Riverview Gardens districts, both in north St. Louis County, applied to go to other school districts.
Then the school boards tried to limit their choice. Some suburban school districts failed to fully open their arms to students and parents seeking educational opportunity.
The Missouri Legislature failed to fix an inequity in the law that would cause Normandy, a poor, underfunded district, to pay financially sound school districts in the white suburbs nearly twice the amount in tuition that they were paying to educate children like Michael Brown in the first place.
Normandy was on the verge of bankruptcy, and the state took over. It tried to limit the ability of some students to transfer. Some suburban school districts — Francis Howell in St. Charles County, Ritenour and Pattonville in St. Louis County — shut the door on others.
Now, the courts say, those doors must reopen.
Oh yes, there is a lot of righteous anger among African-American parents who simply want to get their children through school and keep getting met with pleas of “there’s no room at the inn.”
On Monday, the renamed and now state-run Normandy Schools Collaborative opened its doors on the new school year. (The neighboring Ferguson-Florissant School District, which is accredited, has delayed its opening because of ongoing unrest.)
The first day of school is like spring training in baseball: Hope abounds. Every student has a chance to succeed. But in light of last week’s court ruling on the most recent lawsuit concerning Normandy transfer students, administrators and community leaders are scared to death about what happens next.
True chaos is possible unless every school district that receives transfer students agrees to drop its tuition rate to about $7,000, as recommended by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. The state also must find a little bit more money to help pay for transportation costs and prop up Normandy’s finances.
There is a very real possibility, school leaders tell us, that unless that happens, the money will dry up and the state will shut down the Normandy schools.
Last year, suburban school districts serving predominantly white middle-class children soaked Normandy for $15,000 to $20,000 per student to educate their children. That leaves less money for those kids who are left behind. Why did they do that? State law says they can.
If that happens again, the anger in Normandy will be palpable. The state must find a way to educate these children. Too many generations already have been lost to inequities in state funding.
Beyond the police shooting an unarmed boy, beyond the racial disparities, beyond the anger over economic inequity, this is a key underlying cause of righteous indignation in the African-American community in St. Louis. Most black parents living in poverty spend a considerable amount of their energy and resources just trying to get their children to the finish line of a high school education.
The system is making it harder for them, not easier.
It is absolutely imperative that St. Louis leaders, and the state, respond quickly and decisively to the most recent court ruling regarding transfers.
Here’s what must happen, lest failure contribute to more chaos in north St. Louis County:
• Every suburban school district must accept any student seeking to transfer from Normandy and Riverview Gardens and the same $7,000 tuition suggested by the state.
• The state should not appeal the court’s most recent ruling. The Supreme Court has ruled over and over again in favor of the transfer law. Choice for parents isn’t a panacea to fixing public schools, but they should have the ability to opt out of failing schools.
• Gov. Jay Nixon and the Missouri Legislature, pulling from the Rainy Day Fund or some other source, must find the money to pay for both the transportation of transfer students and to prop up Normandy students. The Normandy district’s leaders must be able to assure parents of educational stability, at least for a year.
In the moments after her son died, Ms. McSpadden finished her comments on why it is so difficult for black men to graduate from high school with these words:
“Because you bring them down to this type of level, where they feel like they don’t got nothing to live for anyway. They’re going to try to take me out anyway.”
Right or wrong, that anger and frustration is playing out in the streets of Ferguson for the world to see.
The path to peace is paved with diplomas.
August 22, 2014
(Attributed to the editorial board.)
St. Louis is celebrating the 250th anniversary of its founding with birthday cake.
Make that fiberglass birthday cakes — 251 of them — decorated by local artists and installed all across the St. Louis region at landmarks, businesses and cultural sites.
Just one of these 251 cakes is in Ferguson.
After two weeks of protests in the African-American community following the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, the fact of this single cake tells us a little bit more about our region’s history than perhaps we’d like to ponder.
Take a look at the map of the cakes at stl250.org and compare it to the maps of the city’s development history in Colin Gordon’s 2008 book “Mapping Decline.” The pattern is nearly identical. The maps and charts in Mr. Gordon’s book show overlay after overlay of public policy investments in the central corridor of St. Louis. The same properties often received multiple tax abatements over several decades, even as vast swaths of the north side of the city were ignored.
This is the story of St. Louis.
The anger that simmered and then exploded in Ferguson has its roots in something more than a white cop from a force that doesn’t look like its community killing — however it happened — an unarmed black kid. The root cause goes back further than a decision earlier this year by an all-white school board to fire a black superintendent who had welcomed black transfer students from the unaccredited school district where Michael Brown graduated from high school. It stretches beyond the demographic changes over the past 25 years that had Ferguson turning from a majority white to a majority black inner-ring suburb of St. Louis.
Night after night in the past two weeks, as protesters marched southeast down West Florissant Avenue toward a line of mostly white police officers dressed for war, they were tracing the history of St. Louis going back more than 150 of its 250 years. Had they kept marching roughly in a straight line, they would have eventually hit the infamous Pruitt-Igoe site, an abandoned, forested reminder of the city’s neglect of African-Americans as equal partners in the city’s growth.
In the 1950s, Pruitt-Igoe was going to be a great public housing program to help pull blacks out of poverty. But it was badly conceived — stacking poor people vertically turned out to be a terrible idea wherever it was tried. It became a milestone in a history of investing in primarily white institutions, and cordoning off black communities.
Pruitt-Igoe was razed in 1972. Nothing has happened to it since then.
Following a straight line of history from Pruitt-Igoe, marchers would eventually end up at the Mississippi River at the foot of Arsenal Street. It is called that for a reason, because there stood the Union Arsenal that in 1861 was targeted for takeover by Missouri’s Gov. Claiborne Fox Jackson. He was a slaveholder and Southern sympathizer who wanted the weapons in the arsenal to help implement his plan for Missouri to join the Confederacy.
Four weeks after Fort Sumter, S.C., was bombarded and the Civil War began, Union soldiers, with the help of German immigrant volunteers, routed Jackson’s Confederate troops at a site near what is now St. Louis University’s main campus. Federal troops were bought in to restore the peace.
To some extent or another, St. Louis has been fighting some version of the Civil War ever since.
Consider this: That same year Jackson attacked the Arsenal, he ordered state control of the city’s police department, a decision rife with racial undertones. The city didn’t regain control of its own police department for more than 150 years, until 2013, following a statewide vote.
As we write this, the protests in Ferguson have slowed down, the National Guard has been withdrawn, a fragile peace is returning, and the cable talking heads who invaded our city have turned to debating the intricate and mostly rumored details of a prosecution that may or may not ever take place.
Our community’s challenge is to keep the focus where it should be, on recognizing that the protests in Ferguson can be a turning point for a city with a regrettable history of marginalizing its black citizens.
The sad but undeniable truth is that St. Louis has long devalued African-American lives. For some, it’s difficult to admit. For others, it’s hard to see. We don’t do empathy very well.
It’s easier to focus on distracting details of a shooting, or political battles between a governor and a prosecutor, and safe in our suburban enclaves, turn the page on Ferguson and pretend it was all a hazy hallucination.
This was not and is not a dream.
St. Louis earned this moment by spending too much of its history refusing to invest in communities dominated by African-American citizens and refusing them admittance to neighborhoods dominated by whites. Those decisions became the oxygen that fed the flame of protest: concentrated poverty, not enough jobs, separate and unequal schools, poor health care.
In the first editorial this page wrote on the Michael Brown case, we noted that the likelihood of a conviction in the case is extremely low. That remains true. It is the simple reality of most police shootings. But there can be an important conviction: The conviction of a city to change.
There is a serendipity in the historic line that connects Ferguson to Pruitt-Igoe to the Arsenal.
The current tenant of the federal property at the foot of Arsenal Street is the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which is looking for a new home for its 3,000 jobs, with more promised down the road. The city’s choice to compete among others in the St. Louis region is the former Pruitt-Igoe site, located in the center of Paul McKee’s NorthSide Regeneration development. NorthSide is the first and only large-scale proposal in the city’s recent history to bring massive public and private investment to a community that has been ignored.
Imagine the hope that would follow the addition of 3,000 jobs at the intersection of Jefferson and Cass avenues, about 10 miles away from where Michael Brown was killed. Those employees will need gas and food, a QuikTrip perhaps, or maybe a Reds BBQ. Some of those employees will want to live close to work. They’ll need houses. Maybe they’ll look to Ferguson.
With a little federal investment, with some introspection that allows us to both recognize and learn from our region’s still strong racial divide, with an unwavering focus on educational equality that values young African-American students no differently than white ones, the final chapter of the Ferguson story can be a hopeful one.
It will be written long after a tragic shooting, long after the protests have subsided, long after a legal case has been dissected and political grudges settled. The next chapter starts on Monday, when we mourn a black teenager who died too young.
No matter the details of his death, Michael Brown’s life had value. Many young people hoping to avoid his fate held up protest signs in Ferguson this week with a simple message: “Black lives matter.”
When all of St. Louis can agree on that, the next step in a difficult journey can begin.
September 26, 2014
(Attributed to the editorial board.)
There are seven leaders in Missouri who have not yet been called on to address the long-long-buried problems that have been exhumed since the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown and the subsequent protests in Ferguson and elsewhere in the St. Louis region.
The seven are a diverse group who, for the most part, rise above the political bickering that infests most of our other government institutions. Here are their names:
Mary R. Russell, Paul C. Wilson, Zel M. Fischer, George W. Draper III, Laura Denvir Stith, Patricia Breckenridge and Richard B. Teitelman. These are the judges of the Missouri Supreme Court.
They can and should play a major role in bringing about significant change to the broken government systems in north St. Louis County. Tens of thousands of Missouri’s citizens, most of them African-American, have been disenfranchised by the government that is supposed to serve them.
With a pen and not a sword, the Missouri Supreme Court can help rebuild Ferguson and pave a path toward justice.
Of all the societal issues that have bubbled up as a result of Ferguson’s summer of unrest — including racial strife, underfunded schools, divided government, police brutality and hostility — the one that might be easiest to fix is a municipal court system that treats traffic fines as an ATM for city treasuries and a clique of lawyers. Fixing the municipal courts could have a wide-ranging positive effect on other issues.
Already, various municipalities, including Ferguson, are seeking to make changes to a court system that sometimes, in effect, jails people for being poor. Separately, the officers of the various courts, municipal judges, lawyers and prosecutors, have formed a committee to recommend changes, most of them headed in the right direction.
But the Supreme Court should not let the fox do repairs on the hen house. Ferguson’s City Council announced its changes from on high without any public meetings, probably in violation of the Sunshine Law, thus invalidating changes that don’t go far enough anyway.
One of the biggest problems with the courts is the rampant conflict of interest between attorneys who often fill multiple roles — prosecutor in some of the county’s 81 municipal courts, judges in others. This is a system set up less to administer justice than to fill municipal coffers and enrich a few key players. Those players should not be trusted to fix what is broken.
Missouri’s Constitution entrusts that power to the Supreme Court. Article V, Section 4 of the constitution is clear: “The supreme court shall have general superintending control over all courts and tribunals. … Supervisory authority over all courts is vested in the supreme court, which may make appropriate delegations of this power.”
By law, municipal courts are extensions of the circuit courts and thus under the purview of the Supreme Court. And municipal courts, like so much of the fractured municipal governance in St. Louis County, are broken.
The nonprofit defense lawyers at Arch City Defenders have produced an outstanding white paper on this topic. It details the harassment — much of it outside existing constitutional protections — facing poor, black citizens in north St. Louis County. If the judges on the state’s highest court haven’t read it, they have failed in their duties to administer a fair and impartial court system. If they have read the report, but refuse to act, then they should consider retirement.
If the Supreme Court doesn’t act to respond to clear violations of civil rights, others will. Already, Arch City Defenders and two St. Louis University law professors, Brendan Roediger and John Ammann, are prepared to sue the municipal courts to protect the constitutional rights of citizens.
If various reform efforts don’t work, “we are prepared to file litigation and it won’t be six months from now,” Mr. Roediger said.
We realize there are some people who don’t see the fundamental injustice. Yes, if you’re caught speeding, you should pay the fine. If you’ve got the money, you hire a traffic lawyer who’s part of the clique and can grease the system.
But what if you don’t have $150, plus court costs, and the court won’t give you time to raise it? What if a speeding ticket is stacked on top of failure-to-appear warrant on a violation in another municipality? Pretty soon you’re $800 or so in the hole, and you go to jail and have to pay incarceration costs. You find yourself afraid to drive.
Most north St. Louis County municipalities actually issue more warrants for arrest each year than they have residents. Their police departments are tasked with writing tickets to offset declining sales and property taxes.
This is a much larger issue than a few people being unwilling or unable to pay fines. If the courts are ignoring constitutionally established restraints because they are using the court system as a fundraising tool, then this is the government tyranny that tea partiers worry about. These courts are an embarrassment to Missouri’s judicial system.
“You cannot take somebody into custody because they walk in and say I can’t pay my fine today,” said Sue McGraugh, supervisor of the criminal defense clinic at St. Louis University. You can, however, put them in jail if they skip a court date because they don’t know that.
“These municipal courts are the face of the court system,” said Michael Wolff, dean of the St. Louis University Law School and a former Supreme Court judge. “And some of it is pretty disgraceful.”
This is why the Supreme Court must act. Abuses in municipal courts in St. Louis County threaten faith in the entire system.
Here is what the court should do:
First, it should implement by rule a series of immediate reforms called for by SLU law professors and the Arch City Defenders, raising the standards of all municipal courts. Among those reforms:
• Order courts to cease issuing warrants on the charge of failure to appear unless defendants will receive the same protections they would receive in circuit court, including the appointment of public defenders.
• Order all municipal courts to operate openly.
• Order that in all cases, defendants are brought before a judge within 72 hours, or 24 hours in cases where an arrest is made without a warrant.
Second, the Supreme Court should appoint a special master, or a panel of such appointed judges, to convene a study of the St. Louis County municipal court system. That study should determine how many courts in the county have been or are continuing to fail to meet the constitutional standards met by circuit courts in Missouri. Any court that can’t meet the new standards established by the Supreme Court should close.
Finally, after receiving such a report, the Supreme Court should suggest to state lawmakers in their co-equal branch of government that the Legislature reform the courts, and consolidate all, or nearly all of them, under the umbrella of the existing 21st Judicial Circuit.
Imagine the domino effect of the Supreme Court simply moving to protect the judicial system from operating outside constitutional boundaries. Police can get back to the job of public safety. Courts can return to justice. Arbitrary boundaries in communities of poverty being used to rob Peter to pay Paul will be erased.
The Missouri Constitution is clear. The courts do not exist to be revenue-generating tools for cash-strapped cities. It’s time for the Missouri Supreme Court to exercise its constitutionally enshrined power and give the courts back to the people.
October 21, 2014
(Attributed to the editorial board.)
When a white fan of the St. Louis Rams tried to steal an American flag from a black Ferguson protester outside the Edward Jones Dome on Sunday, the image of the interaction caught by Post-Dispatch photographer David Carson reminded Patricia Bynes of a poem by Langston Hughes.
Ms. Bynes, a Democratic committeewoman in Ferguson, has been a fixture at the Ferguson protests since Aug. 9, the day 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot. At times she has been a quiet, calming voice. At times she has sounded a passionate trumpet for change, showing the world the various sides of the black experience in north St. Louis County.
“I, too, am America,” wrote Mr. Hughes, who was born in Joplin. An African-American, he was one of the country’s great 20th century poets. “I am the darker brother,” the poem continues.
•••
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
•••
Over the past two and a half months, black St. Louis and white St. Louis have recognized in meaningful ways that regardless of one’s views on the still undetermined specifics of how and why Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson shot Mr. Brown, racial disparity has fed the community’s narrative for too long.
The Ferguson movement, in its various forms, has grown strong enough that on Tuesday, Gov. Jay Nixon used the power of state government to give St. Louis the opportunity to change itself, to heal, to move forward, to find unity in our historical division.
The governor has been criticized, including by this editorial page, for being slow to recognize the historic opportunity for change that the Ferguson protests offer the St. Louis region. But he’s here now, and in creating a Ferguson Commission, he has set the table for important, potentially groundbreaking conversations.
“To move forward, we must transcend anger and fear. We must move past pain and disappointment,” Mr. Nixon said on Tuesday. With a touch of humility rarely shared publicly by the governor, he recounted his own upbringing in rural De Soto, with whites living on one side of the railroad tracks, blacks on the other. “We must open our hearts and minds to what others have seen, what others have lived, and respect their truth. That is the challenge that lies before us.”
Now comes the heavy lifting.
The governor has given the community a charge: Examine the social and economic conditions “underscored by the unrest” and make specific recommendations to create “a stronger, fairer place for everyone to live.” That’s a broad but immensely important task. For the Ferguson Commission to be successful, the first step will be the hardest. Who gets a seat at the table?
•••
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
‘Eat in the kitchen,’
Then.
•••
The Ferguson Commission will need to be led by the region’s great academic institutions, by professionals who will let the research lead them, by people who are used to listening and appreciating competing points of view. But it can’t be an echo chamber.
Some Ferguson protesters will have to get past their mistrust of Mr. Nixon and accept that he is responding to the community. Politicians, particularly, will have to get past decades of grievances that have nothing to do with Ferguson. They must make sure that all elements of the community have a seat at the table.
What does that mean? That means young, black protesters will have to share a seat at the table with law enforcement officials who might believe that Mr. Wilson is innocent. It means state senators such as Maria Chappelle-Nadal and Jamilah Nasheed, both of whom have made a few outlandish remarks during the protests, will have to be represented in some capacity on the commission, and they’ll have to step up their game.
It means rivals like Mayor Francis Slay and 21st Ward Alderman Antonio French will have to work together. It means business leaders like Civic Progress and community activists who have protested at corporate headquarters will have to shake hands and agree to help the community move forward.
Hugh Grant, the chairman and CEO of Monsanto, and president of Civic Progress, knows that St. Louis stands at a precipice that will determine the city’s future for decades.
“Ferguson,” he told us, “is the fracture point that fundamentally changes St. Louis, or else everything crystallizes and nothing changes. In our lifetime, you might not ever have another chance to swing at the fences.”
This is what the Ferguson Commission must do: Get the right people at the table and swing for the fences. Much of what must be done is already clear:
• The region must break down a municipal police and court system that preys on the poor, treating them as chickens to be plucked rather than citizens to be served and protected. Last week’s Better Together report added further fuel to that blazing fire, finding that while the 90 municipalities in St. Louis County make up 11 percent of the state’s population, the courts from those municipalities bring in a whopping 34 percent of all municipal court revenue statewide. Twenty of the 21 cities in the county that derive at least 20 percent of their revenue from courts are in areas that are predominantly African-American. This must change. It must change now.
• It’s time to stop tip-toeing around the fact that our region’s division, often along black and white lines, is making us weaker. Call it city-county merger, call it consolidation or collaboration, call it whatever you want. It’s time for a One St. Louis movement to begin. The Ferguson Commission can help us get there.
• Our division feeds another problem: There are too many police forces, some of them lacking accreditation, most of them failing to come anywhere near to representing their community along racial lines. The law enforcement community has already recognized this problem, but it runs deep. It is tied to racial profiling, which must be more closely studied. It is tied to our region’s history of dividing by race. It is tied to a police culture more likely to see a young, black male as a threat than a recruit. It’s tied to a black culture in which helping police solve crimes is seen as “snitching.” Other cities have dealt with these issues, with the help of the U.S. Department of Justice. St. Louis, and the Ferguson Commission, will need such outside help.
• There is the education component. The region has some of the finest public schools in the state and some of the worst. The ongoing tragedy of the transfer crisis at the unaccredited Normandy and Riverview Gardens districts makes that abundantly clear. There must be only one accepted standard for schools: Excellence.
• Race is the fundamental issue. When Ferguson protesters, most of them black, have met white Cardinals and Rams fans, there has been anger. Conflict. Racist remarks caught on video for all to see. This is the ugly underbelly of St. Louis that much of the white community doesn’t want to deal with. But it’s real. In personal, one-on-one conversations, and in big ones under the umbrella of the Ferguson Commission, this is the conversation that must change St. Louis forever.
“Besides,” Mr. Hughes wrote in ending his poem, “I, Too”: “They’ll see how beautiful I am.”
•••
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
•••
Ferguson has brought everybody in St. Louis to the table for a difficult, painful conversation. It is going to take awhile to go beyond conversations to real change. There will be some uncomfortable moments. But our city’s future, not just for African-Americans living in poverty, but for Fortune 500 companies competing globally, depends on us getting it right.
America has seen our shame. Now, as Mr. Nixon said, it’s time to show “the true colors of courage.”
December 16, 2014
(Attributed to the editorial board.)
Depending on which route you take, it is about 25 miles to drive between Pine Lawn in north St. Louis County and Chesterfield in west St. Louis County.
The former is a tiny, troubled, mostly African-American suburb just south and east of Ferguson.
The latter is a thriving, mostly white, growing city with miles and miles of malls and big-box stores and high-end retailers.
The two cities couldn’t be more different, but they share a powerful connection: Both municipalities are a big part of the same problem — the parochial division of our region that stands in the way of St. Louis becoming a metropolitan area that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Let’s start with Pine Lawn. On Monday, the municipality fired Lt. Steven Blakeney amid allegations that he used police resources to drive him to bars in the region picking up women and then asked a subordinate to drive the women home. The Post-Dispatch’s Jeremy Kohler reported Tuesday that two women filed written statements saying they didn’t know how they ended up in Lt. Blakeney’s house.
Lt. Blakeney calls his firing retaliation for his cooperation into a federal extortion investigation into Pine Lawn Mayor Sylvester Caldwell, who, according to the feds, asked for “extra foam” in his cup of Mountain Dew as a code word for cash payments from a towing company.
What a mess. Here’s the thing about Pine Lawn and its 3,200 people spread out over 390 acres: It shouldn’t exist. Neither should Northwoods, or Hillsdale, or Jennings or Dellwood or Moline Acres or most of the 90 municipalities in St. Louis County.
Pine Lawn shouldn’t have a police force or a municipal court system. In fact, its court was one of seven sued last week by the Arch City Defenders and a group of St. Louis University law professors alleging that it basically operates as a debtors prison.
Monday night, the executive director of the nonprofit Arch City Defenders, attorney Thomas Harvey, explained to the Ferguson Commission, which has identified municipal court reform as a priority, what happens in courts like Pine Lawn, where the legal system shakes down poor people for all they’ve got.
“People who are poor in the region and who are African-American in the region know what’s going on in the county’s courts and they’ve known for 50 years,” Mr. Harvey said to loud applause. “They make people poor and they keep people poor.”
This is one of the key issues that has bubbled up since the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown on Aug. 9 spurred months of protest and unrest. In north St. Louis County, and elsewhere, the issue of police brutality can’t be separated from the use of the police and the courts to prop up financially unstable municipalities.
This brings us to Chesterfield. Last week the city of almost 48,000 residents sued the state over the law that forces the too-numerous municipalities in St. Louis County to share sales tax revenue. Chesterfield Mayor Bob Nation wants the city to keep more of the sales tax revenue generated by its large mall and two outlet malls rather than share some of it with, well, cities like Pine Lawn.
In many ways, this is a metaphor for how some people in west St. Louis County and other parts of St. Louis have reacted to the Ferguson unrest. We got ours, they say. We worked hard for it. Now leave us alone.
Mr. Nation is not incorrect when he says the sales-tax pooling law is broken. This editorial page has advocated for a change to the pool system that would raise the standard of participation so a municipality that couldn’t afford to stand on its own didn’t bleed money from cities that were financially stable.
However, Mr. Nation forgets Chesterfield’s own history when he suggests the booming retail center needs to reap all the benefits of the massive development in the Chesterfield Valley. That valley is only available for development because of the expansive Monarch-Chesterfield Levee, rebuilt after the 1993 Missouri River flood left the valley under water. Federal and state taxpayers helped foot that bill, as well as the work on the Interstate 64 Boone Bridge and numerous other highway improvements in the region.
Tax increment finance districts and other tax incentive schemes were hatched to make building massive big-box retail centers in a flood plain more attractive than, say, building along Interstate 70 or Interstate 270 in north St. Louis County.
Chesterfield’s retail growth was built on the backs of other St. Louis County taxpayers, at the expense of revenue that would have gone in a true free market to other municipalities. Now the city wants to pretend none of that history happened and that a glittery retail palace magically grew up all on its own.
This is the story of St. Louis.
Bad public policies create growth in certain, mostly white, central corridor locations at the expense of growth in communities dominated by African-Americans. It is the subject of Colin Gordon’s excellent book “Mapping Decline,” and it is continuing today, with Chesterfield wanting to erect a gate around its revenue and Clayton offering more tax incentives to developers in its downtown while burned-out buildings still dot the Ferguson landscape awaiting help from the generosity of private individuals.
The region’s poorer cities then rely on lesser-trained police forces and often unethical municipal courts to prey on the poor to fill city coffers. What’s shocking isn’t the naked corruption in Pine Lawn but that we don’t see more of it exposed each and every day.
In describing the municipal courts Monday night, Mr. Harvey could have been describing the entire St. Louis region’s government apparatus:
“This is a system that works for rich people and doesn’t work for poor people,” he said.
This is what our region must ultimately understand, and where the Ferguson Commission can help connect the dots: Fixing the municipal courts without fixing the sales-tax pool sharing just shifts the burden elsewhere. Solving corruption in one of 90 municipalities without actually getting rid of most of the unnecessary cities is akin to playing whack-a-mole. You’re never going to get them all. Eliminating discrimination in courts while allowing it to fester in development patterns just pushes the problem to the next generation.
In the St. Louis region, everything is connected. Pine Lawn’s corruption and Chesterfield’s selfishness are symptoms of the same disease.
December 18, 2014
(Attributed to the editorial board.)
“Shut it down” is one of the more ubiquitous slogans heard among protesters who are part of the Ferguson movement, either in the St. Louis region, or nationally.
Since the protests sprung up after the Aug. 9 killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson, protesters have clogged streets and highways, city halls and Wal-Marts.
“Whose streets?” they will sometimes chant, before answering, “our streets,” and then, the proverbial “shut it down.”
While it is sometimes difficult for the inconvenienced traveler or contractor needing to get a permit or license to see the point of such a protest, shutting down the seat of power, or place of business or transportation hub serves an important purpose in the protest movement.
Think Rosa Parks sitting on a bus.
It’s about shifting the balance of power.
That’s why Attorney General Chris Koster’s lawsuit against 13 north St. Louis County municipalities is so significant. On Thursday, Mr. Koster in effect asked the St. Louis County Circuit Court to “shut down” municipal courts in the St. Louis region that refuse to comply with one specific state law.
The law, known as the “Mack’s Creek Law,” limits the percentage of a city’s revenue collected from traffic violations to 30 percent of its total budget. It has been common knowledge for years that many north St. Louis County municipalities violate that limit, but they have been allowed to do so with impunity because the victims are mostly poor and black.
That status quo has now shifted. The protesters have fought for and won some important ground.
That Mr. Koster announced his lawsuit flanked by the two co-chairmen of the Ferguson Commission is no small matter. That commission, led by Rev. Starsky Wilson and Rich McClure, has quickly identified municipal court reform as a priority. It has demanded that government move immediately to protect the rights of citizens.
The attorney general has answered that call. While Mr. Koster’s lawsuit is not as significant as the seven filed earlier this month by the Arch City Defenders and a group of St. Louis University law school professors, it helps fill in the story of how this injustice came to be ingrained in our community. It’s a story of municipal courts operating as modern day debtors’ prisons.
Here’s how the scheme works. A tiny municipality with little tax base asks its police force to fulfill ticket quotas to balance the city budget. Those mostly white police forces, often unaccredited and not as highly trained as the larger forces in St. Louis, target local citizens — many of them poor and black. When court is in session once a month, a line of black citizens wait to hear a judge tell them how much they owe for their indiscretions, often far more than they can afford, often for offenses such as “improper license plate fastening” that would never see the light of day in many jurisdictions. They are threatened with jail if they can’t pay, or told they can’t bring their children into court. Intimidated, they skip their next court appearance. Later they are picked up on another minor traffic offense — maybe in a neighboring municipality — and they end up in jail on a failure to appear warrant. Fines stacked upon fines end up in the hundreds or thousands of dollars.
It all started because a city — Vinita Terrace, Breckenridge Hills, Moline Acres, Ferguson, and many others of the 90 in St. Louis County — couldn’t pay its bills. The St. Louis legal community has known of this racket for decades, but it turned its back to the injustice because it has helped many of them get rich. Ninety cities offers a lot of opportunities for lawyers to double dip as a judge in one town, prosecutor in the next, as long as they are willing to turn a blind eye to the glaring conflict of interest inherent in the system.
No more. The protesters, the Ferguson Commission, the Arch City Defenders, St. Louis University Law School, Gov. Jay Nixon, Attorney General Chris Koster, Auditor Tom Schweich, Sens. Eric Schmitt and Scott Sifton, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, they have all started to make moves in the proper direction.
Shut it down.
Besides the court actions in the county, the city of St. Louis municipal court formally adopted a new rule this week that requires judges in the court to consider a person’s ability to pay in imposing and collecting a fine.
And in Ferguson, municipal Judge Ron Brockmeyer issued his own order, extending the city’s warrant forgiveness program, wiping out tickets for certain offenses, such as the ubiquitous “license plate not illuminated,” and saying explicitly: “The Court will not incarcerate a defendant who, in the Court’s opinion, does not have the ability to pay fines and costs.”
That a judge feels it necessary to make that point — in bold letters, no less — says a lot about the state of municipal courts in the St. Louis region.
As positive as all of this incremental action is, the Missouri Supreme Court could still make things a lot easier, by adopting a new Rule 37 that would codify that defendants in municipal courts in Missouri have the same civil rights as those in circuit courts. Yes, many municipal courts would be unable to meet the standards of such a rule, which would include providing public defenders to those who couldn’t afford their own lawyers.
So be it. If a court can’t meet constitutional muster, then the state should do precisely that which the protesters have demanded:
Shut it down.
Biography
Tony Messenger has been the Post-Dispatch editorial page editor since July 2012.
Kevin Horrigan came to the Post-Dispatch from the Kansas City Star in 1977.
Winners
Prize Winner in Editorial Writing in 2015:
Kathleen Kingsbury
For taking readers on a tour of restaurant workers' bank accounts to expose the real price of inexpensive menu items and the human costs of income inequality.
Editorial Writing
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in Editorial Writing in 2015:
Jill Burcum
For well-written and well-reported editorials that documented a national shame by taking readers inside dilapidated government schools for Native Americans.
The Jury
The Jury
Vanessa Gallman(Chair )
editorial page editor
Rita Ciolli
editorial and opinion editor
John Fensterwald
editor-at-large
Pam Platt
editorial director
Susan Smith Richardson
publisher and editor
Winners in Editorial Writing
Editorial Staff
For its lucid editorials that explain the urgent but complex issue of rising pension costs, notably engaging readers and driving home the link between necessary solutions and their impact on everyday lives.
Tim Nickens and Daniel Ruth
For their diligent campaign that helped reverse a decision to end fluoridation of the water supply for the 700,000 residents of the newspaper's home county
No award
No award
Joseph Rago
For his well crafted, against-the-grain editorials challenging the health care reform advocated by President Obama.
2015 Prize Winners
Anthony Doerr
An imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.
Julia Wolfe
A powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.
Stephen Adly Guirgis
A nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death.
David I. Kertzer
An engrossing dual biography that uses recently opened Vatican archives to shed light on two men who exercised nearly absolute power over their realms.