Race, Empire, and Capital in St. Louis From William Clark to Michael Brown

On August 9, 2014, police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown on Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri, one of the many small cities carved out of the St. Louis metropolitan area. Brown was jaywalking near his grandmother’s house when Wilson stopped him. After a short encounter, Brown lay dead. In the months that followed, journalists and investigators uncovered a program of for-profit policing through which the city of Ferguson funded its operations by citing and fining its Black residents. Their reports would reveal to the world what Black people in Ferguson already knew: Brown’s death was the consequence of racist wealth extraction through hyper-policing. A crowd gathered on Canfield Drive as Brown’s body remained in the middle of street for hour after hour, and soon that crowd sparked an uprising against the forces that had killed Brown. As Walter Johnson writes, “On August 9, 2014, the disinherited of St. Louis rose again to take control of their history” (p. 431).

In The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, Johnson examines the two centuries of St. Louis history that culminated in Brown’s death and the Ferguson Uprising. The dynamics in Ferguson in August 2014 were the city’s past in microcosm. As Johnson explains, “The history of the city turns out to be less a matter of timeless midwestern conservatism than of reaction: to the consequential efforts of conquered, stigmatized, poor, and radical people to transform their lives and their society into the image of a fuller humanity” (p. 4). Radicalism and reaction have long existed cheek by jowl in St. Louis. “Ferguson”— as a shorthand both for police violence and for the Black Lives Matter movement—embodied that antagonistic, often violent history stretching back to Lewis and Clark.

Throughout The Broken Heart of America, Johnson displays his skills as a writer and a synthesist. He nimbly unspools a sprawling, complex story about “genocide, removal, and the expropriation and control of land—all justified in the name of white supremacy” (p. 6). No one familiar with Johnson’s previous books or his essays in venues like Boston Review will be surprised that his writing is evocative and often moving. As a synthesis, Johnson’s book rests on two foundations: the rich body of scholarship on St. Louis by Henry W. Berger, Andrea S. Boyles, Cecil Brown, Keona K. Ervin, Colin Gordon, Peter J. Kastor, Clarence Lang, Lisa Martino-Taylor, Malcolm McLaughlin, Robert W. Rydell, and Lea VanderVelde, among others, as well as the theoretical insights of W.E.B. Du Bois and Cedric Robinson. Johnson’s analysis is particularly indebted to Robinson’s ideas about “racial capitalism,” which Johnson succinctly summarizes as “imperial dispossession and capitalist exploitation” rationalized by white supremacy (p. 6).¹ At its best, Johnson’s book fuses broad analytical frameworks and the specific history of St. Louis to demonstrate that, from William Clark to Michael Brown, “empire, slavery, and segregation have been distinct aspects of a single common history” (p. 10).

Johnson begins his story in 1804—the year that the United States took possession of St. Louis following the Louisiana Purchase. Soon after, the city became the “eastern hub” of the U.S. empire (p. 44). From his office in St. Louis, William Clark, most famous for his role in the Corps of Discovery, negotiated treaties with Indian nations that dispossessed them of more than 400 million acres of land. These cessions laid the groundwork for the federal policy of Indian Removal as well as the “settler imperialism” of white agrarians celebrated by Clark’s patron, Thomas Jefferson (p. 39). One of Missouri’s first U.S. Senators, Thomas Hart Benton picked up the mantle of Jeffersonian empire and led the charge to distribute these lands to white settlers as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Then, in...