Washington Post, June 21, 2018: The forgotten Ferguson
When Starbucks opened here in 2016, politicians celebrated, predicting that the coffee chain would revitalize a city marred by violent protests over Michael Brown’s killing two years earlier.
Other corporations jumped in with multimillion-dollar commitments to help rebuild the majority-black town that became a global symbol of racial and economic inequality.
But four years after the unrest, nearly all of the new development is concentrated in the more prosperous — and whiter — parts of town, bypassing the predominantly black southeast neighborhood where Brown was fatally shot by a police officer while walking to his grandmother’s home.
The investments, rather than easing the economic gap, have deepened that divide.