Part 4 of 5
The death of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer in Ferguson brought the eyes of the world to St. Louis last August. But it’s the people who live in St. Louis who were impacted most directly.
Now that a year has almost passed, St. Louis Public Radio is inviting you to share how Brown’s death affected your life, as well as your thoughts about how the events that followed impacted the region as a whole. We’ll be asking you a different question every day this week.
Today’s question: Is St. Louis as a region moving in the right direction to bridge gaps of race and class? If so, how so? If not, what needs to be done differently?
Here’s what a few people have had to say so far.
I do think we’re headed in the right direction. I just think it’s going to take a very long time…The problem that we’re faced with right now is that we do work together, we do go to school together, but we’re not friends as a group and that needs to change, and that’s very, very difficult. — Amy Peach, Richmond Heights
I’m not a politician. I’m not an elected official, so I can’t say if it’s moving forward or not. — Greg Gibson, Breckenridge Hills
Our state legislature didn’t do too much in their session to deal with these problems. I think there are still probably a lot of people in greater Missouri who feel as though this is just a St. Louis problem, it’s an urban problem, it’s a black problem and they don’t want to really address the issue. — John Powell, Ferguson
If Mike Brown had simply been buried like so many other victims of police violence and after a few days, even with rioting and so forth, things had settled back to the routine, I think we’d be stuck exactly where we were and there would have been no change. — George Lenard, University City
Do you have thoughts of your own to share? Continue the conversation in the comments section below, or become a source for St. Louis Public Radio through the Public Insight Network, which is how we received the responses above. Tell us: What has changed for you, one year later? You may also see the complete responses from these sources and others.
