Race and Economic Struggle in St. Louis

On Friday, September 17, 2017, when St. Louis Circuit Judge Timothy Wilson delivered his not-guilty verdict in the first-degree murder and armed criminal action trial of Jason Stockley, the former St. Louis police officer who fatally shot black motorist Anthony Lamar Smith in December 2011, many residents and community leaders immediately took to the streets in protest. Conducting marches and demonstrations at strategic locations such as the St. Louis city police headquarters, newly elected St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson’s Central West End home, and popular shopping malls and stores in St. Louis County, Stockley protestors staged actions designed to disrupt capital flow and accumulation, as longtime St. Louis organizer and founder of the city’s Organization for Black Struggle, Jamala Rogers, explained. Their hashtag, “no justice no profits,” pointed to an economic focus as well as a determination to carry out sustained resistance well beyond the day that Wilson issued his verdict.

It is, of course, impossible to fully understand the significance of the Stockley protests without accounting for the Ferguson uprising of 2014 and the ways that it catalyzed the national Black Lives Matter movement. Ferguson protestors provided a blueprint for disrupting local business as usual and nationalizing the issue of police misconduct, racialized poverty, and the corrupt municipal systems that keep poor and working-class black residents trapped by punitive court fees and fines. The recent protests made clear the deep extent to which St. Louis City and County are microcosms of racial capitalist subjugation in the United States and centers of public debate. They also showed that the city and its inner ring suburbs were hubs of transformative, working class–led, black political insurgency that coalesced around and found its most powerful articulation in the merger between black freedom and economic justice.

The Stockley protests made 2017 another significant year in collective action, but so, too, did less publicized local and statewide battles for workplace rights. A short listing explains why. In June 2017, the Missouri NAACP State Conference issued a travel ban on the state of Missouri, warning would-be travelers that the state was hostile territory for black Americans and that the state legislature had just passed SB 43, a “Jim Crow bill” that amended the Missouri Human Rights Act to make it much more difficult for individuals to prove that they were the victims of workplace discrimination. Two years following the 2015 passage of a St. Louis City ordinance that would raise the city minimum wage to $11 by January 1, 2018, the Missouri State Legislature, with the support of Republican Governor of Missouri Eric Greitens, passed a bill that canceled the wage increase. While city workers began earning a new $10 minimum in 2017 as a result of the politically efficacious organizing of the Fight for $15 campaign and its supporters in St. Louis, after August 28, 2017, the same day that SB 43 went into effect, most workers earned paychecks based on the former $7.70 wage. As the fight for a permanent minimum wage increase in the city continued after this defeat, one major victory perhaps indicated the growing strength of labor organizing in the state. On August 18, 2017, a coalition of labor unions and their supporters, organized by We Are Missouri, Missouri Jobs with Justice, and other labor groups, delivered more than three hundred thousand signatures, about three times more than the amount required, to the state capitol, to stop Governor Greitens’s February 2017 right-to-work bill from taking effect. The issue will be brought to a vote in 2018.

Beyond their immediate influence, the NAACP ban, Fight for $15, labor’s campaign to stop “right-to-work” from becoming law, the Ferguson uprising of 2014, and the 2017 Stockley protests reflect more deeply the organizing tradition of justice-making in St. Louis, which centered the varied, expansive, and competing concerns of the working class, and has long understood black liberation through the prism of worker self-organization and economic self-determination. The Missouri labor organizers who defeated the early twenty-first-century attempt to make Missouri the twenty-eighth...