Since the protests and rioting that wracked it in 2014, Ferguson, Missouri has become not one, but three things: a place, a symbol, and a machine.
The place is an ordinary suburb of St. Louis, with ranch and bungalow homes along tree-lined streets. The symbol still looms over America’s conversations about race and power. The machine is the activists, academics, and public officials who have spent a decade using the symbol to amass power and money.
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Over the past decade and a half, St. Louis has spent millions on programs aligned with racial equity agendas. Behind that spending lies a nonprofit-activist complex and public-policy supply chain visible across thousands of public documents, social-media posts, reports, and recordings.
Many Americans have forgotten about Ferguson or remember it only as a symbol. But on closer inspection, the Ferguson of today is a potent illustration of how the racial upheavals of the past decade can be turned into profit and unaccountable power.
The machine’s origins trace to a humid Ferguson evening and a two-minute police encounter. Michael Brown Jr.’s death on August 9, 2014, was a tragedy. Brown allegedly robbed a convenience store and violently shoved its clerk. Several minutes later and about a half mile from the store, Officer Darren Wilson initiated a police stop that escalated into an altercation involving a struggle over Wilson’s gun. Brown ran; Wilson pursued. Moments later, Brown turned and charged Wilson despite warnings to stop. Wilson shot and killed him.
Brown’s death triggered weeks of riots, looting, national media coverage, and the mobilization of progressive and Marxist activists in violent street protests. I can still hear the fear in my grandmother’s voice as she described stores burning only miles from her home. The symbolism of the incident was primed to race ahead of the facts. “Hands up, don’t shoot”—the claim that Brown had been surrendering to Wilson and pleading with him not to fire—became a global rallying cry.
Yet the foundations of the Ferguson machine predated Brown’s death. In May 2014, Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) published a report on the well-being of black residents in the region. The report recast economic mobility, housing, and education as public-health challenges under the now-ubiquitous rubric of social determinants of health—the idea that public spending on housing, education, food, and other nonmedical expenses can pay for itself by saving on health-care costs. The implication, that inequality was killing black Fergusonians, would soon be leveraged for a host of political efforts.
That November, ArchCity Defenders (ArchCity), a legal-advocacy nonprofit for the indigent, published a widely circulated white paper arguing that the region’s courts commodified poverty through excessive ticketing and fines. Its authors successfully lobbied the Department of Justice to open a citywide civil-rights investigation into Ferguson.
As the riots subsided, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon called for an “unflinching study” of regional barriers to racial equity, an echo of the ArchCity and WashU reports. In October 2014, Nixon established the Ferguson Commission. Local and national health foundations helped fund it.
Six months later, the Obama Department of Justice issued two reports. One debunked the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie and cleared Officer Wilson of wrongdoing. The other searingly rebuked Ferguson’s police and courts—and, by implication, St. Louis.
Fourteen months after Brown’s death, the Ferguson Commission published a sweeping 204-page report. It featured 189 calls to action, spanning unionization, health care, education, policing, philanthropy, and economic mobility. Its principal sources included the WashU and ArchCity reports, and the DOJ investigation of Ferguson’s police and courts. Notably, Brown’s death was excluded from the study.
After the Ferguson Commission issued its final report in September 2015, its work migrated into a new nonprofit, Forward Through Ferguson (FTF), formed to “catalyze” the calls to action. Its “Theory of Change” sought to transform St. Louis politics and philanthropy and to produce “replicable models” for other cities. Among the group’s initiatives was defunding the police, later recast in softer language as “First Responder Alternative” and “transforming 911.”
An activist front emerged to advance FTF’s agenda in electoral politics. A loose coalition of Ferguson protest veterans, racial-justice organizers, progressive campaign operatives, faith leaders, and insurgent Democratic activists helped elect Ferguson activists to the St. Louis City Council and a George Soros-backed chief prosecutor. A 2016 headline from a now-defunct local progressive newspaper captured the mood: “You Say You Want a Revolution: Inside the not-so-secret plot to take over St. Louis’ Democratic Party.”
Out of that insurgency, Action St. Louis (Action STL) emerged. [Founded in 2016 by a WashU student who remains its executive director, Action STL became a force in local politics and forged a close partnership with ArchCity. Their executive directors sit on each other’s boards, and the groups opened a community-development center together. WashU supercharged their activism by giving them its academic imprimatur.
The relationships produced a policy pipeline. In 2019, a WashU legal clinic produced a report on environmental racism for its “partners,” Action STL and ArchCity, to use in advocacy. By 2020, both groups were working closely with FTF on left-wing initiatives. FTF established a Racial Healing + Justice Fund for black-led initiatives, partially funded by WashU; ArchCity was among its recipients.
In 2021, Action STL published a socialist agenda drawn heavily from the equity reports by WashU and the Ferguson Commission. “Anchored” and endorsed by 40 allied organizations—including ArchCity, FTF, and the St. Louis Democratic Socialists of America—the plan declared St. Louis “ravaged by racism and unbridled capitalism” and sought to “redistribute resources” across the city.
In 2021, progressive darling Tishaura Jones won the mayoralty of St. Louis, bringing the machine closer to City Hall. Her transition team included the executive directors of Action STL and ArchCity. Leadership of the city’s powerful economic development agency soon passed to a protégé of ArchCity’s board chair. With Jones in power, St. Louis was poised to become a social and financial laboratory.
Jones called the roughly $498 million in economic stimulus funds St. Louis received through President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make long-term investments that will transform St. Louis for generations.” More precisely, the funding would go to deepening partnerships with nonprofits, foundations, and other institutions.
Her Stimulus Advisory Board included the leaders of ArchCity and FTF, along with the principal author of WashU’s influential 2014 health-equity report. Jones also formed a Reparations Commission with Action STL leadership and more WashU faculty. My analysis of the City’s 414 ARPA projects and their expenditures suggests that $200.5 million was appropriated to recommendations and organizations detailed in equity agendas produced by WashU, the Ferguson and Reparations commissions, and Action STL.
Many appropriations carried politically palatable labels: social determinants of health, economic justice, public-safety alternatives, and housing stabilization (free rent). Between 2021 and 2026, at least $126.7 million was spent on lump-sum cash payments, a guaranteed basic income pilot, mortgage and utility assistance, free rent, community-violence interventions, 911 diversion, child-support arrears, free car rides, home repairs, government-sanctioned homeless encampments, and more.
A sum of $13.9 million went to 13 community-violence nonprofits, including prison and police abolition groups; $9.9 million to lump-sum cash payments and guaranteed basic income; $17.6 million to free rent programs; $17.2 million to home repairs, property tax relief, and mortgage and utility assistance; and $4.5 million to 911 diversion. A holistic harm-reduction nonprofit highlighted in the reparations report received $2.5 million.
These nonprofits have faced little accountability in how they spend their money. One beneficiary campaigned for Jones’s reelection after receiving funds. An internal audit of another recipient spotlighted in the reparations report warned of financial instability. A poverty-empowerment nonprofit, the board of directors of which includes the city treasurer and a former city council member, showed significant deficiency in internal financial controls, according to ProPublica’s nonprofit explorer.
As federal dollars dwindle, activists have turned to St. Louis’s nearly 4,000 foundations, which control about $17.4 billion in assets. Under the banners of “civic infrastructure” and “economic mobility,” two foundations—the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the St. Louis Community Foundation, with a combined $934.5 million in net assets—are engaged in justice philanthropy, which prioritizes redistribution for racial and environmental wrongs. One is now led by the principal investigator of WashU’s 2014 equity report who sat on Jones’s ARPA advisory board; FTF’s executive director sits on the steering committee of a $161 million initiative funded by both foundations. In 2025, a foundation board member and now chair of WashU’s board of trustees said that substantial change was coming to St. Louis “in a matter of years, not decades.”
Mayor Jones lost her April 2025 reelection bid, but the machine remains formidable, as shown by its response to a 1.8-mile-wide tornado that devastated St. Louis’s predominantly black northside on May 16, 2025. Action STL and ArchCity quickly folded the disaster into their activism. City officials are now directing $120 million toward activist demands.
Earlier this year, WashU bestowed its Rosa Parks Service Award on Action STL’s executive director, and the university’s chancellor took to social media to promote an updated environmental racism report. Jones, meantime, enjoyed fellowships at WashU’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity and Harvard’s Institute of Politics.
Sometimes narratives survive not because they are true but because institutions need them to endure. At FTF’s 2025 Racial Equity Summit, its executive director discussed the group’s racial justice healing fund with startling candor. “I need you to stay guilty,” she told the audience, referring to white guilt as a primary driver of post-George Floyd corporate giving. Another panel on genocide and collective liberation, featuring former Missouri Representative Cori Bush, ended with “From the river to the sea, we’re gonna fight till Palestine is free.” While many Ferguson residents want to move on, the activist class needs the Ferguson narrative to continue.
The Ferguson Commission called for a new kind of machine. A decade later, the ward boss has given way to the research report, the smoke-filled room to the grantmaking committee, and the precinct captain to the nonprofit executive. Elections can change mayors, but they cannot easily supplant a sprawling network of nonprofits and academics fueled by federal dollars, foundations, and ritualized grievance. The machine assembled in Ferguson’s name is an unflinching warning to St. Louis and the nation: “stay guilty.”