Manchild in the Promised Land: An Anatomy of a Crumbling American School District and the Tragedy of Michael Brown Jr. 

 By  

J. D. Taylor  

Last Revised On 3 July 2015 at 1:38PM (EST) 

 EPIGRAPH 

 “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to                                           

the Promised Land.” 

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 3, 1968, at the Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ) in                                     Memphis, TN. The next day, April 4, 1968, King was assassinated.  

INTRODUCTION  

If you take a look back over the massive sinkhole in our national sense of self that a                                   

combination of the riots, looting, outbursts of violence, and police obstruction that took place in                             

and around Ferguson, Missouri, following the tragic shooting death of unarmed teenager Michael                         

Brown Jr. by Officer Darren Wilson, you will almost certainly find no shortage of talking heads                               

and pundits, advocacy groups and lobbyists, civil rights organizations and police benevolent                       

associations, willing to offer their rendition of the “facts” of what took place. 

But if you pull back the curtain a bit more on the public and mass media’s schizophrenic                                 

analyses of what took place that fateful day and who was accountable for what, there’s a deeper,                                 

darker—some would say far more insidious—narrative that has failed to arouse anywhere                       

approaching the understandable swells of righteous indignation that the immediate aftermath of                       

Officer Darren Wilson shooting to death Michael Brown has garnered. 

Ferguson, as it turns out, is a far more complex story—a story with a far more                               

Machiavellian cast of characters and undoubtedly more “blame to go around”—than anyone up                         

to this point has surmised. As some scholars working at all­too­often under­reported on                         

intersections of race, class, and education have long suspected, Ferguson was not the beginning                           

of the storm, but rather a tragic culmination of a distinct and, some might argue, unavoidable set                                 

of long simmering tensions that finally found its voice on  

"Ferguson had structural problems that systematically disadvantage Black families long                   

before Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown,” points out Shaun R. Harper,                           

Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University                                 

of Pennsylvania. “Inequitable schooling there didn't start two weeks ago.” 

But how exactly did “two households, both alike in dignity,” as Shakespeare once wrote                           

of the Capulets and Montagues in “Romeo & Juliet”—the police and the policed—come to see                             

either side as “other?” What were the roots of some of the racial, social, and socioeconomic                               

antipathy that, at least in hindsight, so clearly characterized the citizens of Ferguson? Most                           

importantly, why did Michael Brown have to lose his young life before the news media,                             

academia, and any number of other opinion writers, prognosticators, Monday morning                     

quarterbacks, and social media trolls started acknowledging the stark reality of a school                         

district—the Normandy School District—that had so obviously fallen into a state of disrepair                         

that it had essentially become a “runaway train.” 

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I am in no way shape or form qualified to speak with any degree of certainty or moral                                   

superiority about either the guilt or innocence of Michael Brown Jr. or Officer Darren Wilson.                             

As a sociologist, that, as they say, is “above my paygrade.” However, what I am somewhat                               

qualified to speak about—what I feel it morally, ethically, and intellectually imperative to speak                           

about, quite frankly—is the litany of factors that arrayed themselves together long before August                           

9, 2014, and, ultimately led to that untimely ending of one young man’s promising life,                             

subsequent ending two promising careers, destruction of two innocent families, and the veritable                         

collapse, almost overnight, of the moral, social, and political infrastructure undergirding the way                         

our society talks about race, class, and, even more importantly I would argue, social mobility. 

What were the symptoms we can point to of a simmering, now­infamous "tale of two                             

cities" that erupted into Ferguson, a city which, almost like a rose growing up from out of the                                   

stilted soil of the American heartland, went from being an obscure, indistinguishable suburb of                           

just a little more than 20,000 on the dusty outskirts of St. Louis, Missouri, to “ground zero” for                                   

our country’s long­fractured relationship with race? 

What role, whether directly or indirectly, did those precariously placed dominoes that                       

Harper and others have alluded to subsequently play in the fatal collision of a white male police                                 

officer and an unarmed black teenager that early August afternoon in 2014? 

Furthermore, what "collateral damage" has the continued collision of these factors in the                         

aftermath of Ferguson subsequently played in both shaping and, one would hope, ultimately                         

shifting our national discourse on social mobility and income inequality? 

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Although Michael Brown Jr., may not have lived long enough to cross the bridge himself,                             

our country's continued conversations on race, class, and the all­too­often adverse role both                         

undoubtedly appear to play in capsizing the hopes and dreams of even our most ambitious youth                               

of color as well as those from modest financial circumstances may, I sincerely hope, help to offer                                 

a port in the storm so that other Michael Browns, other Trayvon Martins, other Tamir Rices may                                 

one day make it safely across themselves. 

So much so that when I think of Michael Brown today, it may undoubtedly be his face I                                   

see in my mind’s eye, but it is Dr. King's voice that echoes forth, saying, with as much                                   

confidence as existential finality, "I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight,                                   

that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”