1. The document summarizes a book about the structural problems in the Ferguson, Missouri school district that disadvantaged black families long before Michael Brown was killed by a police officer. 2. It discusses how the subpar schooling laid the groundwork for tensions between police and the black community by limiting social mobility and exacerbating racial inequalities. 3. The author hopes that discussions about the case will help address issues of race, class, and social mobility to improve outcomes for other youth of color, as Michael Brown did not live to see progress himself.

1. Manchild in the Promised Land:
An Anatomy of a Crumbling American School District and the Tragedy of Michael Brown Jr.
By
J. D. Taylor
Last Revised On
3 July 2015 at 1:38PM (EST)
EPIGRAPH
“I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to
the Promised Land.”
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 3, 1968, at the Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ) in
Memphis, TN. The next day, April 4, 1968, King was assassinated.
INTRODUCTION
If you take a look back over the massive sinkhole in our national sense of self that a
combination of the riots, looting, outbursts of violence, and police obstruction that took place in
and around Ferguson, Missouri, following the tragic shooting death of unarmed teenager Michael
Brown Jr. by Officer Darren Wilson, you will almost certainly find no shortage of talking heads
and pundits, advocacy groups and lobbyists, civil rights organizations and police benevolent
associations, willing to offer their rendition of the “facts” of what took place.
But if you pull back the curtain a bit more on the public and mass media’s schizophrenic
analyses of what took place that fateful day and who was accountable for what, there’s a deeper,
darker—some would say far more insidious—narrative that has failed to arouse anywhere
approaching the understandable swells of righteous indignation that the immediate aftermath of
Officer Darren Wilson shooting to death Michael Brown has garnered.

2. Ferguson, as it turns out, is a far more complex story—a story with a far more
Machiavellian cast of characters and undoubtedly more “blame to go around”—than anyone up
to this point has surmised. As some scholars working at all­too­often under­reported on
intersections of race, class, and education have long suspected, Ferguson was not the beginning
of the storm, but rather a tragic culmination of a distinct and, some might argue, unavoidable set
of long simmering tensions that finally found its voice on
"Ferguson had structural problems that systematically disadvantage Black families long
before Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown,” points out Shaun R. Harper,
Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University
of Pennsylvania. “Inequitable schooling there didn't start two weeks ago.”
But how exactly did “two households, both alike in dignity,” as Shakespeare once wrote
of the Capulets and Montagues in “Romeo & Juliet”—the police and the policed—come to see
either side as “other?” What were the roots of some of the racial, social, and socioeconomic
antipathy that, at least in hindsight, so clearly characterized the citizens of Ferguson? Most
importantly, why did Michael Brown have to lose his young life before the news media,
academia, and any number of other opinion writers, prognosticators, Monday morning
quarterbacks, and social media trolls started acknowledging the stark reality of a school

3. district—the Normandy School District—that had so obviously fallen into a state of disrepair
that it had essentially become a “runaway train.”
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I am in no way shape or form qualified to speak with any degree of certainty or moral
superiority about either the guilt or innocence of Michael Brown Jr. or Officer Darren Wilson.
As a sociologist, that, as they say, is “above my paygrade.” However, what I am somewhat
qualified to speak about—what I feel it morally, ethically, and intellectually imperative to speak
about, quite frankly—is the litany of factors that arrayed themselves together long before August
9, 2014, and, ultimately led to that untimely ending of one young man’s promising life,
subsequent ending two promising careers, destruction of two innocent families, and the veritable
collapse, almost overnight, of the moral, social, and political infrastructure undergirding the way
our society talks about race, class, and, even more importantly I would argue, social mobility.
What were the symptoms we can point to of a simmering, now­infamous "tale of two
cities" that erupted into Ferguson, a city which, almost like a rose growing up from out of the
stilted soil of the American heartland, went from being an obscure, indistinguishable suburb of
just a little more than 20,000 on the dusty outskirts of St. Louis, Missouri, to “ground zero” for
our country’s long­fractured relationship with race?

4. What role, whether directly or indirectly, did those precariously placed dominoes that
Harper and others have alluded to subsequently play in the fatal collision of a white male police
officer and an unarmed black teenager that early August afternoon in 2014?
Furthermore, what "collateral damage" has the continued collision of these factors in the
aftermath of Ferguson subsequently played in both shaping and, one would hope, ultimately
shifting our national discourse on social mobility and income inequality?
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Although Michael Brown Jr., may not have lived long enough to cross the bridge himself,
our country's continued conversations on race, class, and the all­too­often adverse role both
undoubtedly appear to play in capsizing the hopes and dreams of even our most ambitious youth
of color as well as those from modest financial circumstances may, I sincerely hope, help to offer
a port in the storm so that other Michael Browns, other Trayvon Martins, other Tamir Rices may
one day make it safely across themselves.
So much so that when I think of Michael Brown today, it may undoubtedly be his face I
see in my mind’s eye, but it is Dr. King's voice that echoes forth, saying, with as much
confidence as existential finality, "I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight,
that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”