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FERGUSON — They lit up the QuikTrip and let it burn in response to the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown 10 years ago.

Like many others watching the news, Courtney Graves had a visceral reaction to the raging fire.

“I felt like I needed to do something,� said Graves, 45.

For her, that meant running for a seat on the Ferguson-Florissant School Board. But other than serving in the Berkeley youth council, she didn’t have government experience. She was a therapist. Still, her campaign slapped up signs — “Count on Courtney� — and she won.

A position eventually opened with the Salvation Army at the site of the destroyed QuikTrip, which was rebuilt as the Ferguson Community Empowerment Center. She wanted to take her ideas deeper. She wanted to create paths out of poverty by offering more opportunities to children and adults.

“We need partnerships,� she said, one year into the role.

The main narrative of the Brown shooting portrayed Ferguson as a municipality running off the rails — doing just about anything to rake in money to fill holes in the budget left from the departures of well-off white folks to places like St. Charles County.

To some, Officer Darren Wilson represented both the frustrations of people who uprooted and the determination of those trying to stay and protect their section of north St. Louis County from unraveling. To others, who felt trapped and targeted, Wilson represented a racist police state quick to use force in communities of color.

Though suspected of strong-arming a store clerk a fraction of his size and trying to grab Wilson’s gun during an initial skirmish that led to a foot chase, Brown was unarmed, Black and 18 years old. On Aug. 9, 2014, his dead body lay in the middle of Canfield Drive for hours, during a new era of witness: cellphone cameras with easy access to social media.

Protests broke out here and across the nation, galvanizing the Black Lives Matter movement and propelling some new faces into elected offices. Both St. Louis County and federal officials went on to clear Wilson for fatally shooting Brown. The U.S. Department of Justice, in its lengthy investigation, found no credible witness to support a prosecution.

But more broadly, the feds slammed Ferguson over its “pattern and practice� of targeting Black drivers who became overburdened with insurmountable fines. The feds issued a costly mandate that continues to force the municipality to reform its policing.

Deeper digging revealed that overzealous courts and policing were mere symptoms of more lethal illnesses that run deep in regional history: racial inequities and concentrated poverty.

“Forward through Ferguson,� a detailed study issued in 2015, highlighted disparities in income, education and health across St. Louis County. It reported stark differences in life expectancy by ZIP code, ranging from age 56 in Kinloch, Missouri’s first Black town, to age 91 in a leafy pocket of Wildwood.

“We are not pointing fingers and calling individual people racist,� the report said. “We are not even suggesting that institutions or existing systems intend to be racist. What we are pointing out is that the data suggests, time and again, that our institutions and existing systems are not equal, and that this has racial repercussions. Black people in the region feel those repercussions when it comes to law enforcement, the justice system, housing, health, education, and income.�

Those disparities are still stark today, and the path to generational wealth is still pockmarked with obstacles. It takes three hours to travel by bus from Kinloch to Wildwood. Along the way, one extreme gradually gives way to the other.

Wildwood residents, of whom less than 2% are Black, may be more aware now of the problems that led to the explosion of Ferguson protests, but they’re just as insulated from them as they were in 2014. The geographic barrier around the region’s largest municipality seems to be built even higher with expensive home prices and resistance to developing more affordable options.

About 30 miles away, meanwhile, cleaning up a huge mess of rotting garbage seems like it would be the easiest regional challenge to address. But Kinloch, with its $21,750 in median household income, remains a dumpsite, while residents cling to the only cherished asset left: their history.

Kinloch and other parts of North County remain home to the highest concentrations of poverty in the region. Many residents can’t afford to leave, or even buy a new refrigerator with cash.

“For us, sometimes all we have is our voices,� said Graves.

‘All. This. Trash.’

The bookshelves in Damille Dixson’s home are full, anything from classic fairy tales to Joyce Meyer spiritual guides to romantic comedies by author Jenny Colgan, of which, “The Bookshop on the Shore,� is her latest favorite.

The main character, who has become cash-strapped in London without child support and a rising cost of living, moves to the Scottish Highlands to run a mobile bookstore. She eventually embraces village life.

“You think that the big city is what you need. It’s not,� said Dixson, 29. “You just need the quiet. All that land. The grass. It’s like a big Kinloch.�

Kinloch was once self-sufficient, with its own theater, post office and schools. It has fallen on hard times, especially since the city of St. Louis started buying land there in the 1980s for expansion of the airport.

Now, Kinloch is most known as a regional dumping ground for trash — on the street, in vacant lots, in ditches. There are building materials, toys and tree debris.

And yet, many residents like Dixson maintain a strong sense of pride.

She left college to come home after her brother committed suicide. She’s glad to be back in the town that raised her. Until she recently bought a car, friends and family members would give her rides.

She doesn’t like when people shoot guns at the top of her street or dump garbage, but she recognizes the beauty amid the rubbish.

“I see the bigger things,� Dixson said. “I’ve got my house.�

It’s her first home. Above the books, plastic bags are stuffed into a gap in the ceiling. She said she pays a different amount to a private owner each month, depending on the work she does. Dixson used to sell plasma. Now, she’s a night waitress at Waffle House.

“I have to do a lot of rigging here,� she said.

It’s the rural feel that she really enjoys. Just past the edge of her property, there’s a mountain range of mattresses amidst a forest of overgrown grasses and trees that hide abandonment and provide cover for wildlife.

“I never want to leave Kinloch,� she said. “I have pride in the city that raised me. People have worse situations.�

Shirley Nettles, 63, moved back to Kinloch to be closer to her family roots. Her mother, who died in her 60s, is buried in a nearby cemetery, though Nettles hasn’t been able to find the grave. She said her father, who died in his early 50s, used to clean up trash for “rich white people.�

“He would cry about this,� she said of Kinloch.

She wasn’t wearing her hearing aids because of the roar of airplanes passing overhead.

“It’s messed up that that people come from everywhere and dump their trash because they won’t pay their bills,� she said. “All. This. Trash. It’s so sad to see. Ain’t nobody trying to do anything.�

Shannon Dixson, the new director of economic development, said Kinloch has been through a lot, but city officials are trying to rebuild. Though it hasn’t stopped dumping, she mentioned new surveillance cameras. She wishes there was more help.

“I don’t see the support that other communities have,� she said.

‘Do what you gotta do’

The bus journey from Kinloch to Wildwood offers a glimpse into the lives of people — nearly all of them poor and Black — trying to carve a piece of livelihood out of the fragmented region.

It begins in a gauntlet of street trash so nasty that it’s easy to miss a big punching bag with its guts spilled out. Walk past all the plastic dolls, stale sofas, worn-out tires and a charred utility pole. Hang a right on Martin Luther King Boulevard. Go past an overgrown park. Go past the missing gate leading into Ferguson. Go past a rental home that’s supposed to fetch about $1,200 a month if somebody can pass the credit check. Go past an assortment of “No Trespassing� and “Condemned� signs.

There, at Airport Road and North Dade Avenue, the No. 61 bus quickly pulls up, opens the door and zips away.

Inside, there are 18 passengers. Kyana Curry, way in back, is glad her boyfriend was at home in Ferguson watching her 2-year-old so she could go to work. After doing home health care for five years, she said she makes $15 an hour.

On this day, she is headed to an elderly man’s house in Creve Coeur. His care plan only called for two hours of help.

All this travel for two hours of work?

“It’s called, you gotta do what you gotta do,� said Curry, 30.

The next leg of the trip to Wildwood was on Bus No. 49, which was headed from the North Hanley Transfer Station all the way to the South County Mall. Passengers wore work shirts to places like Burger King, America’s Incredible Pizza and Get That Dough.

Antoine Kyles, 41, has been riding the bus since his car’s transmission went out two years ago. The $4,100 tab for repairs has been unsurmountable.

He rents a Ferguson home for $1,440 a month. He wants to find something better. But he’s trying to maintain what he has and keep up on child support. Apart from driving the Hilton shuttle, he has a side gig as a barber.

“I am trying to move away from North County,� he said. “I’ve got four kids.�

He knows life can be hard.

“I raised myself since I was 11,� he said, running off the bus to work at the Hilton.

After 50 minutes on Bus No. 49, it was time to go west on Manchester Road for the final leg to Wildwood. There was a 30-minute wait for the transfer in a covered bus stop nestled in Kirkwood commerce — pharmacy, grocery store, bank, medical clinic, places to buy a honey ham and a hot tub.

When the No. 57 bus came, Jermaine Young, 33, was in back. He wasn’t aware of Wildwood. He thought it might be a restaurant. He’d already spent more than two hours on public transportation coming from Metro East. He had a bag with a scraper and other tools. The tops of his shoes were splattered with paint. He wore a wedding band and saggy pants.

“They still prejudice people,� he said of west St. Louis County. “You can tell, when I walk in a store, all eyes on me.�

But he’s happy with his boss in Ellisville. He said she pays him about $30 an hour to paint houses. He hoped to get four or five hours this day and go home to his family.

“We are staying at a hotel because our house caught on fire,� he said.

No one was left onboard to soak in the final stop of the route to Wildwood town center. A patch of pink and white flowers led to a Dierbergs grocery and a medley of physical fitness gyms and yoga studios. “Good Vibrations� was playing at Starbucks.

There are three Edward Jones offices within two blocks of the bus stop. Inside one, the assistant said she’d never heard of Kinloch.

‘A good formula’

Some call Wildwood, established in 1995, the Alps of St. Louis County.

At 67 square miles, it’s bigger than the city of St. Louis. Officials say erosion is the biggest challenge.

The commercial town center has the feel of a movie set built all at once near the intersection of Highways 100 and 109. By design, it is less than 2% of the municipal footprint. There aren’t any big box stores; you can go to neighboring Chesterfield for that.

Wildwood values open space. Twenty percent of the land is made up with natural areas like Greensfelder County Park, Babler State Park and Rockwoods Reservation. The remaining 78% is residential. Since the 1960s, a “no-urban� structure limits the size of most lots to at least 3 acres, enough space for septic.

Anyone can buy or invest in Wildwood, but barriers to entry are built in high costs and resistance to change. Residents recently pushed back on a proposal for 34 single-family homes on a small piece of the town center.

This summer, about 30 people showed up for a morning coffee event with new Mayor Joe Garritano. One resident voiced concern about “some radicalization going on inside the city limits.� Another wanted to know how many people are allowed to live in a home and who is monitoring it.

William Hermanson, who used to oversee lending at a savings and loan in Florida, told the mayor not to allow any high-rise apartments or other high-density developments.

“Don’t lose sight of why people come here,� Hermanson said. “Don’t take the greenery away from us. It’s beautiful out here. Revenue is good. It’s not everything.�

Clearly there is money. There’s no need for pawn shops or check cashing joints.

With only 26 employees, Wildwood also likes government lean. It utilizes service contracts paid for with regional taxpayer support. Without revenue from local big box stores, the countywide sales tax pool helps pay for Wildwood services.

“The pool is a good formula,� Garritano, 48, a financial adviser, said at the meeting. “It works for us.�

The newest business being considered was the “Good News Brewery� that would potentially move into the West County Feed and Supply building.

“Rich people like to have a couple beers, and entertainment, so they have to allow some of that stuff in,� said Dan Diehl, 66, the owner. He opened the feed store in the 1980s, back when there was more farming.

As more people moved in, restrictions and taxes went way up.

“Everybody moves out to the country, and they want the hog farmers to leave because they don’t like the smell of it, you know what I mean,� he said. “They got their little part of it, but they don’t want anyone else to have a part of it. It’s like an exclusive country club.�

Mayor Garritano says there is something for everyone in Wildwood. A New York native, he settled his own family there in 2008.

“We just saw all the opportunity out here,� he said. “Open space. Made us feel like it would be a great place to raise a family.�

As the , he’s aware that it’s not an island. He said the Michael Brown shooting ultimately laid bare challenges that other communities face.

“The incident raises a level of awareness that we didn’t have,� he said.

Did that awareness have longstanding impact?

Missed opportunities

James Knowles III, the mayor of Ferguson during the thick of the unrest, says no. He thinks there have been a lot of lost opportunities to address regional issues like poverty.

Instead, the focus has been ticket revenue.

“Oftentimes, with Ferguson being the epicenter of the conversation, we missed out on really getting to the broader issues,� he said.

Knowles had risen from Ferguson police dispatcher to mayor, a post that paid $300 a month during a period of intense local, national and international scrutiny — be it at town hall meetings or on the side of West Florissant Avenue being interviewed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

“Five hundred cameras from 500 angles,� he said of the media.

He offers no apologies directed at Ferguson, noting that it’s the only municipality with a federal consent decree — “We’ve spent millions of dollars on trying to babysit our police officers� — even though Ferguson officers go to the same academy that everybody else goes to in St. Louis County.

“This was a joke what we’ve had to go through as far as reforms because we were committed to making reforms and building back faith and trust in our police department from the very outset,� he said. “Quite frankly, our residents, the people who pay the police officers’ salaries, by and large weren’t the people screaming for these reforms.�

He said the high level of arrest warrants was a regional problem, exploited by attorneys and unaddressed for decades by the Missouri Supreme Court.

“The henhouse was the court system, and the foxes were the attorneys and the judges and people who have been part of the system forever,� he said. “It was their job to oversee it. They tried to blame elected officials like me.�

He said he can’t think of one thing better in Ferguson.

“There have been some ups and downs over the years where things might have improved,� he said. “But today, the sense of community is not there. The institutions have failed a number of people.�

These days, Knowles, 45, commutes from his Ferguson home to Dardenne Prairie, 30 miles away, where he works as city administrator. Home prices in the area where some of his old friends now live easily fetch $500,000. He said the police don’t mess around out there. A difference is that residents can afford to pay their fines.

Ella Jones, the current mayor, said she recently had breakfast with Knowles to address the “terrible disconnect in this city.�

“We are trying to figure out what can be done to move this city forward,� said Jones, 70. “Because we are not going any place. We are standing still.�

She was frustrated. Being the first Black mayor of Ferguson doesn’t come with the kind of power that many may have assumed. She has one vote on the city council. She said whites have a 4-3 majority that has limited her powers.

“They are not interested in the city as a whole,� she said. “They are pushing their agenda and not what’s best for the city. The city is turning back. It really is. Everything here is along racial lines.�

Councilman Mike Palmer, 39, said he doesn’t always agree with the mayor because she lacks vision and doesn’t communicate well. While he acknowledges there are two Fergusons, he believes the divide is rooted in concentrated poverty, not race.

Out on the street for a Juneteenth parade in North County, Jones was in higher spirits.

“This is phenomenal, everyone is involved,� said Jones.

Tracy Tanksley, 51, who works for the Postal Service, was glad to get caught in a traffic jam and spontaneously become part of the celebration. She said federal oversight of policing in her hometown was merited. 

“It’s so much better, so much better,� she said of policing. 

The parade was well attended, but just a few of the observers were white, including one woman who stepped out from work to watch. She said she thought the national holiday was a joke.

The route started on West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson and ended in Dellwood. It passed neighborhoods in need of repair, an Elite Liquor shop and storefront offers for easy cash. At one spot, a $100 loan will cost you $221 to pay back in six months.

The parade also went by businesses that were spared from burning 10 years ago but have since closed, like a Black-owned Save-A-Lot.

It passed new construction, like the Empowerment Center that replaced the destroyed QuikTrip.

‘Help them find their spark’

On the second floor of the symbolic site, Graves, of the Salvation Army, is concerned about some of the businesses in North County that don’t operate in affluent areas of the region.

“You see these rent-to-own and they prey on our community,� she said.

She is trying to address these challenges by teaching residents to be better consumers and leaders, so they can find a path out of poverty. And she’s starting young.

Earlier this summer, about 20 children, grade 3 through 5, showed up for “Spark Academy.� Graves said the free 8-week program helps youths “discover their gifts and talents� by teaching new things and helping them “embrace the things they do know.�

“We just kind of help them find their spark,� she said.

During one class, children developed new business plans. They drew and pitched ideas: lemonade stands, make-up artist, doll closet.

Graves hopes the children will grow up to be entrepreneurs who will invest in their neighborhoods.

“It’s another skill to create generational wealth,� she said.

She also hired Tallis Brown, 49, of the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis, to teach financial literacy classes to adults over the summer on Tuesday nights.

Brown started off by telling the class what they already knew: If you aren’t rich, you will need to borrow money. He cautioned them against predatory lending schemes that can lead to insolvency and desperation.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs� was a key focus in the class. To reach “self-actualization,� the pinnacle of the pyramid, you must have self-esteem. To have self-esteem, you must have love and belonging. To have love and belonging, you must have safety and security. To have safety and security, you must have your physiological needs met — food, water, clothing, sleep.

Stay away from people just trying to survive, Brown told the class. Surround yourself, rather, with people up higher in the pyramid and you too will be lifted.

Still, he expressed little hope that any of the students or other Black residents in North County would be able to save $25,000, let alone enough money to climb out of “generational poverty.�

But he presented one solution that they’d have to die to cash in on: life insurance.

“It is not just for your burial,� Brown said. “This is how you can change your lineage. Your family. Everything. I am sorry, but none of us will ever save $250,000 for our kids. I don’t mean to be mean.�

One of the students was Denzel Tenner, 31. As a contractor for the Urban League, he said he doesn’t quality for life insurance benefits at the agency, but he’s grateful for the custodian job. He has bills. He needs legal representation from an old gun charge.

At the end of class one night, the air seemed to be momentarily sucked out of Tenner when he won $25 from a luck-of-the-draw raffle.

“Nobody ever gave me nothing,� he said.

To complete the financial literacy course, he’d need to save $25 a month for four months, attend five weekly classes and meet with a financial adviser. Then the program will give him $300, for a total nest egg of $400 saved — enough to cover half a month’s rent.

“Hey, look, that’s a change,� he said, smiling. “You hear me? For real.�

But he took the class to do more than save $400.

He wants to take advantage of opportunities and come out at a better destination — something the region as a whole hasn’t been able to do in the 10 years since Michael Brown’s shooting.

“Sometimes we stumble in life,� he said. “You have to get back up, you know what I am saying, and learn from our mistakes. That’s the important thing. Learning from our mistakes. A lot of people don’t and do the same things over and over again.

“For real.�

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