Citizen Brown - Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs by Colin Gordon

The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, ignited nationwide protests and brought widespread attention police brutality and institutional racism. But Ferguson was no aberration. As Colin Gordon shows in his book “Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs,” the events in Ferguson exposed not only the deep racism of the local police department but also the ways in which decades of public policy effectively segregated people and curtailed citizenship not just in Ferguson but across the St. Louis suburbs. protect but as sources of revenue was only the most immediate example.

Colin Gordon writes on the history of American public policy and political economy. He is the author of “Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs” (Chicago, 2019). He is a senior research consultant at the Iowa Policy Project, for which he has written or co-written reports on health coverage, economic development, and wages and working conditions. Colin Gordon received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990.