The aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, hasn’t surprised Dr. Walter Paquin, a Bluffton University faculty member.

“This is an event 20-plus years in the making,” says the assistant professor of social work. Paquin lived and conducted research in the area as a graduate student at Washington University in neighboring St. Louis, and revisited his study of black suburban neighborhoods this summer.

He points to an increasingly segregated Ferguson—as “white flight” followed an influx of African-American residents beginning in the ‘90s—and related economic conditions as factors that also helped fuel unrest and sometimes violent protest in the St. Louis suburb after Aug. 9. That’s the day Darren Wilson, a white police officer, fatally shot Brown, an unarmed, 18-year-old black man, during an encounter on a Ferguson street.
At the same time that more segregation has meant less general economic opportunity for black residents of Ferguson, African-Americans nationwide have not made gains in home ownership—an economic factor in underlying frustration along with high unemployment, Paquin says.

In 1940, he notes, 45.6 percent of white households owned their homes; in 2010, that figure was 44.8 percent for African-American households. “African-American households are doing as poorly now as white households were 70 years ago,” he explains, despite enactment of legislation—such as the Fair Housing Act of 1968—meant to overturn discrimination in housing.

Those economic conditions are “part of the outrage” about the Brown shooting and a couple others in St. Louis, says Paquin. “Those things are the tinder that has been building, and maybe we’ve even been pouring fuel on it,” he adds.

African-Americans in St. Louis began moving to the suburbs in St. Louis County looking for better neighborhoods and educational, as well as economic, opportunities, Paquin says. And in 2000, for the first time, more African-Americans lived in the county than in the city. “That initial move to the county was a good move,” he maintains.

Over the last 20 years, though, white residents have also left many of those same suburban neighborhoods, driving down housing values and helping create segregated communities, he says. That has happened in three of the four neighborhoods that predominantly comprise Ferguson, whose population is now about two-thirds black.
Meanwhile, however, what appears to be an “ingrained culture” of hiring white police officers in Ferguson hasn’t changed, he notes.

“There are lots of Ohio cities and counties that look similar to St. Louis,” Paquin adds, saying “the idea that things have gotten better for African-Americans is actually not the case.” Citing systemic problems without simple solutions, he suggests general acknowledgment that “we still have racism in the U.S.,” accompanied by such steps as awareness-raising conversations and putting more resources into education.

“We don’t get to the solution until we start,” he says. “We need to start making changes.”
Now in his fourth year at Bluffton, Paquin earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from Washington University’s George Warren Brown School of Social Work in 1996 and 2007, respectively. He was a housing counselor for the Justine Petersen Housing and Reinvestment Corp. in St. Louis in 2001-02, and his subsequent doctoral dissertation was titled, “When City Renters Buy Homes, Do They Buy in Better Neighborhoods?”

This summer, he received a Bluffton University Research Center grant for his follow-up project, “Do Black Neighborhoods Remain Stable? Revisiting Black Suburban Neighborhoods.”