Ferguson, Mo - Racial tensions once again exploded in this St. Louis suburb in current days over the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager shot by a Ferguson police officer. But for decades, the city of 21,000 residents has grappled with the issue.
The city's population has been predominately African-American, while the city leadership and police force has remained mostly white.
Organizations have tried to contest the issue. PROUD (People Reaching Out for Unity and Diversity) was formed in the mid-1900's to work on fair housing practices and stop the migration of whites.
Later that decade, Rance Thomas co-founded NCCURHJ (North County Churches Uniting for Racial Harmony and Justice) to work on cultivating race relations here and in neighboring communities. In the past year, he helped to ease resentment over the exit of a superintendent from the Ferguson-Florissant school district in a controversy that broke at times along racial lines.
"A major factor is race. We have had a great deal of white flight," Mr. Thomas said. "We've had some success, but that's a difficult issue to deal with."
Anger was also fuelled in the area when the school district including Normandy High School-the school Michael Brown attended-was stripped of its state accreditation in 2012.
"You could see some of that tension when Normandy lost its accreditation," said Terrance Cauley, 43, who was demonstrating against violence in the community on Tuesday.
In the days since Michael Brown's death, protests that have been happening in the city turned violent again Wednesday night, with people hurling Molotov cocktails at police, who responded with smoke bombs and tear gas to disperse the crowd, the Associated Press reported. Earlier Wednesday, scattered violence had broken out, including the shooting of a man by a St. Louis County officer who police say had a handgun pointed at him.
Also on Wednesday, two journalists were arrested in McDonald's after police asked them to move out of the restaurant, according to the Washington Post, the employer of one of the journalists. They were briefly detained and then released, the news organizations said.
Meanwhile, the family of Michael Brown and others in the African-American community have been calling for a transparent investigation of the incident; with some saying tensions between the cities mostly white police force and predominantly black city have been building for years.
State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal said that this is an admonition and a forewarning for the local government to take a serious look on the racial tensions that is building up in the city for decades.
