Canfield Drive: A History of Race and the American City on a Street in St. Louis

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown and a friend were walking down Canfield Drive, a residential street in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. There, they encountered Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. Moments later, Brown was dead on the street--shot by Wilson at least six times. That evening, a memorial appeared on the pavement where he had fallen. In the days that followed, vigils turned into protests, and protests into an Uprising, as police in riot gear faced off with a grieving, outraged community. For nearly two weeks, Ferguson commanded the nation’s attention. The killing of Michael Brown was an outrage and it should not have happened. But Canfield Drive was primed for tragedy long before that fatal encounter because the street was already a place of racial conflict. This was no accident.

Canfield Drive: A History of Race and the American City on a Street in St. Louis uncovers the deeper history behind the street where Brown died, tracing how race and the built environment have long intersected in St. Louis--from the city’s founding to the Ferguson Uprising. The book follows the story of Black space across two centuries: from early Black communities, to the birth of the St. Louis Blues, to the Halcyon days of The Ville, to the destruction of Mill Creek Valley, to the tragedy of Pruitt-Igoe, and to the construction of Canfield Drive. Though Canfield Drive is the first comprehensive history of St. Louis’s Black urban landscape, it is more than just St. Louis’s story. Canfield Drive details the racial engineering of the American city. Here is the machinery of American segregation laid bare: occupancy covenants, court decisions, racial steering, white flight, public housing, voucher systems, and predatory policing that combine to transform neighborhoods into traps. Here too are the people who fought back, building community against staggering odds and securing civil rights reforms that transformed America’s understanding of government’s obligations to its citizens.

Canfield Drive provides a powerful lens on the national story of race and the American city and reveals how Michael Brown’s death was not just one officer’s deadly decision, but the inevitable outcome of America’s built environment--a tragedy centuries in the making, on a street designed for violence. This is how a place becomes a powder keg. This is how history erupts into headlines. This is the story behind the story that America couldn’t look away from. This is the story of how a street came to matter, and how it came to stand for something far greater than itself.

Matthew Knox Averett is Associate Professor of Art History at Creighton University where he teaches art history courses from the Renaissance through Modernism, focusing on urban and architectural history and the intersection of race and the built environment. A selection of his publications includes ＂’Veggendo Roma’ The Urban Image of Rome in the Age of Dante＂ to Le città di Dante (2021) and ＂’Noble Edifices’ The Urban Image of Papal Rome, 1417-1667＂ to Interpreting Urban Spaces in Italian Cultures (2022). In 2015, he edited and contributed chapters to The Early Modern Child in Art and History (Routledge). At Creighton, Averett has held leadership roles in Creighton’s anti-racist initiatives, and from 2020 to 2022, he served on the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accountability, and Sustainability Committee of the Society of Architectural Historians.