St. Louis: Retiring the Idea #BlackLivesMatter

Stuff Black People Don’t Like
February 16, 2015

The truth of lynching.

You’ve seen a comparison of black homicides in Detroit over a ten-year span to lynching in America; you’ve seen a comparison of black homicides in Baltimore over a seven-year span to lynching in America.

It’s only natural we’d turn our eyes to St. Louis.

But first, a quick refresher.

Though Oprah Winfrey, who donated $13 million to the building of National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), claimed “millions of black people were lynched,” it turns out only 3,446 blacks were lynched between 1882-1968:

From 1882-1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States.  Of these people that were lynched 3,446 were black.  The blacks lynched accounted for 72.7% of the people lynched.     Out of the 4,743 people lynched only 1,297 white people were lynched.  That is only 27.3%.  Many of the whites lynched were lynched for helping the black or being anti lynching and even for domestic crimes.

So, over a span 86 years, 3,446 black people were lynched (many were lynched for actual crimes, mind you); that’s roughly 40/lynchings per year.

The city of St. Louis has been in the news for the better part of sixth months, primarily because an 18-year-old black male refused to cooperate with a police officers request to walk on the sidewalk (instead of in the middle of the road).

But before we explode the hilarious myth of #BlackLivesMatter, let’s look at the historical record of homicide in St. Louis just to better understand the rationale of those white people who hoped to protect the integrity of their communities and neighborhoods with restrictive covenants (in the mid 1910s – when the city was 93 percent white – two-thirds of white St. Louis residents voted in favor of passing the nation’s first referendum imposing racial segregation on housing).

Why were white St. Louis residents so fearful of blacks then? Why does residential segregation still persist in St. Louis, much to the chagrin of white liberals nationwide (who still practice such activities in their private lives, while demanding quite vocally other whites practice only integration)?

The book St. Louis Metromorphosis: Past Trends and Future Directions (edited by Brady Baybeck and F. Terrence Jones), published in 2004 by the Missouri Historical Society Press, provides a historical reference to not only why residential segregation was necessary in 1916 St. Louis – when the city was only six percent black – but also why it is still necessary today… when the city is 49 percent black.

They write:

Examining overall homicide trends ignores the substantial role that race plays in levels and trends in city crime rates. Are the patterns shown for St. Louis similar for blacks and whites? To begin to address this question, in Figure 4 [below] we present homicide arrest rates for 1930-2000 disaggregated by race. Three trend lines are show, which represent total homicide arrest rates and black and white homicide arrest rates, respectively.

Three important observations emerge from inspection of Figure 4. First, the trend in homicde arrest rates for whites is relatively stable throughout the period, fluctuating no more than 10 per 100,000 over the last seventy years of the twentieth century. Second, consistent with findings reported in previous historical studies of homicide in the United States and New York, homicide arrest rates for blacks are generally much higher than the rates observed for white, and they remain higher though out the period. Indeed, black arrests account for over half of all arrests from 1950 on, a period of time when blacks accounted for less than one-third of the city’s population. And since 1970, blacks have accounted for 80 percent of homicide arrests except for a single year.

Although the full meaning of the race-specific trends shown in Figure 4 would move us well beyond the scope of this chapter, it is noteworthy that the year in which black and white homicide arrest rates begin to diverge considerably – 1963 – is a unique year in the demographic history of St. Louis. As shown in Figure 5, 1963 is the first year in which the City’s black population approaches about one-third of the total population, a proportion that has been identified as an important “tipping point” in social science research on racial segregation, and whites’ expressed neighborhood residential preferences, perceived threat from blacks, and fear of crime. (p. 268-270)

Why does the past matter? Because the trends of the past are the ghost from the future was born. [Study: More Blacks in St. Louis Killed by Other Blacks Compared to White Officers, KMOX.com,10-15-14]:

…a University of Missouri – St. Louis researcher says emotions aside, the number of black youth who have been fatally shot by white police officers has been fairly low in recent years.

Criminology professor David Klinger told KMOX’s Charlie Brennan that he conducted a thorough, decade-long study that showed there were 1,265 murders over that time, with 90 percent of the victims being black. And 90 percent of those black victims were killed by other blacks.

“While I understand the people are concerned about the use of deadly force by the police, by far – about 50 to 1 – more blacks in St. Louis are killed by other blacks as compared to white police officers,” Klinger says.

Over that same period, Klinger says 31 blacks were killed by police officers – 21 by white police officers.

“The sad fact is, we had well over a thousand black-on-black homicides in the city of St. Louis during that same decade,” he says.

The article should have read: 90 percent of known victims were killed by other blacks… (no snitch!)

So 90 percent of 1265 is 1138… 1138 black people murdered, with 90 percent of them killed by other black people. Or 1024 black on black homicides in St. Louis in the decade Klinger studied.

We can get a better number though:

Of the 567 homicides from 2008 to 2011, for which the race of the victim is available in the SLMPD annual reports, 502 are listed as black, while 64 were white. Over that period, 89% of those killed in the city were black. In a city that’s very nearly 50/50 black/white, those 64 homicides would give an annual murder rate of ~10/100,000 for white residents and ~78/100,000 black residents.