Kill in the Name of AutoZone

Devin Thomas O’Shea reviews Patty Heyda’s “Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA.”

By Devin Thomas O’SheaJuly 17, 2025

• Politics

• History

ST. LOUIS HAS the uncanny ability to throw off metaphors of American crisis. They seem to autogenerate every two or three years, dating back to the city’s civil rights leaders taking aim at injustices encoded in the construction of the Gateway Arch, all the way up to the McCloskey “gun-toting incident,” in which Patricia and Mark—from the steps of their gigantic mansion—pointed an AR-15 and a pistol at a group of Black Lives Matter protesters trespassing in their private gated neighborhood.

But it’s the murder of Michael Brown in 2014 that remains the loudest and clearest omen—a young unarmed Black man executed without trial by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, out on the shadeless asphalt of a St. Louis suburb. Patty Heyda’s new book Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA is a detailed investigation of exactly what kind of street that was, and how the machinations of global capital made it that way.

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Every city is composed on lines, and St. Louis has several odd ones. Radical Atlas begins with the city’s defining right-hand squiggle: St. Louis’s eastern perimeter, the Mississippi River.

Another wavy border lines the top of the map, defined by the Missouri River. These two waterways meet in the upper right corner, at the confluence, which “was historically the north-south point at which the Mississippi River froze in winter.” Heyda’s writing in Radical Atlas is composed in small rectangular paragraphs alongside 100-plus maps. Some maps encompass the entire United States, while some zoom in on Missouri at the center, dialing in on St. Louis, and further to local municipalities like Ferguson, Kinloch, and neighboring Dellwood.

The atlas’s early pages move from visuals around Indigenous dispossession to the lines of the Civil War—the Union cities of St. Louis, Columbia, and Kansas City are blue dots surrounded by the gray Confederate hinterland. Because of river confluences, St. Louis became a transfer point for barges transferring cargo to land or rail. Everything radiates out from the downtown riverport nestled in the pregnant bend of the Mississippi.

One of the worst straight lines in St. Louis was drawn from north to south in 1876, separating St. Louis City from St. Louis County. This occurred at a time when St. Louis City was densely populated and growing quickly, and was best traversed by foot, trolley car, or horse. Over the last 150 years, that balance has reversed thanks to cars and commuter suburbs—St. Louis County is now much larger, wealthier, and more populous than the city. As Heyda notes, the “Great Divorce” line aided the systems that produced Ferguson—it “represents an early, regional-scaled maneuver to hoard taxable land and avoid wider infrastructure costs.”

The Great Divorce line means the St. Louis region has two mayors—the St. Louis County “executive” and the St. Louis City mayor. Political power is further diluted by the fact that St. Louis County is a shattered pattern of lines dividing up hundreds of little municipalities. Each, like Ferguson, has its own police force, fire department, emergency services, waste removal, and underpaid part-time mayor who sits atop a little fiefdom—in Ferguson, the mayor rakes in a cool $4,200 per year.

In order for political consensus to be achieved in St. Louis, the county executive and city mayor must agree, and then negotiate with hundreds of county mayors and aldermen. No one is paid well, and the system was designed during Reconstruction. The result is a political apparatus that is extremely vulnerable to corruption by corporations, developers, and Missouri’s various Republican interests, which wield uninhibited gerrymandered control over the rest of the state, essentially recreating the Civil War map.

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Another terrible line in St. Louis runs east and west along Delmar Boulevard. It was recently crossed by one of the worst tornadoes in the city’s three-century history, creating another omen of climate catastrophe. Disaster will be metabolized in neoliberal capitalism through local mutual aid groups, who react immediately to help victims, doing the hardest and most dangerous work, burning out. Meanwhile, local, state, and federal aid takes weeks, and then months, to deliver half the cash needed to fix billions of dollars in damages. Radical Atlas’s introduction includes a handy chart depicting why this is our current hellscape—Heyda’s graphic shows privatization of public policy in the United States from 1920 to 2020, all of which demonstrates a clear hollowing-out of public aid capacity. “The timeline demonstrates that both political parties effectively advanced the gutting of the public sector capacity since the 1970s,” Heyda writes.

On the chart, the income inequality of 1929, at the start of the Great Depression, goes down during the FDR taxation regime that accompanied the New Deal public investments. The line of income inequality increases again starting with Ronald Reagan’s administration and the neoliberal turn of the 1980s. As opposed to the federal programs of the New Deal, the only way anything gets done today in the US is through public-private partnerships. Wealth inequality is now just as high—if not higher—than in 1929, right before the big crash. “Privatization, public defunding, social exclusion and urban violence are causally intertwined,” write Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman in the book’s foreword. “This cocktail of urban dysfunction has ignited conflict in cities across the US and the world, notably in Ferguson, just as it has in the border zone where we live and work.”

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Despite the pervasive, racist belief that nothing of value exists north of Delmar Boulevard, Radical Atlas demonstrates that capitalism has found plenty to extract in the northern neighborhoods. Many white St. Louisans dismiss the north side as some combination of empty, Black, and hegemonically poor, which elides the fact that three Fortune 500 companies are located in north St. Louis County. They are all within 15 minutes of the site of Michael Brown’s murder:

1. Express Scripts, a corporation that manages pharmacies and various pill-delivery systems—2018 revenue: $100,064,000,000
2. Boeing Industries, the world’s fifth-largest weapons manufacturer, producer of commercial airplanes with doors that fall off, numerous dead whistleblowers, and much of the rocketry supplying the genocide in Gaza—2018 revenue: $93,392,000,000
3. Emerson Electric, an engineering corporation that specializes in everything from software to water treatment, power generation, heating, and ventilation. For military aircraft, Emerson manufactures pulse doppler radars, and is located less than a mile from where Michael Brown was killed—2018 revenue: $16,301,000,000

The Boeing and Emerson manufacturing campuses are part of a historic sector that developed in Ferguson and Berkeley between World War I and II. Defense companies wanted to be closer to the aerospace industry growing around Lambert Airport, just west of Ferguson.

The relocation came while Ferguson had a fairly white population, and was considered a “sundown town,” which lasted until the 1960s. Black residents were expected to be indoors by sunset, and this was sometimes signaled by the toll of a bell. According to The St. Louis American, in this era, “Ferguson blocked the main road to Kinloch, the tiny black suburb to its west, with chains, trying to keep out black residents.”

Over the course of the midcentury, white flight carried many Caucasian families west and south, out of the northern parts of St. Louis City and County. By 2013, almost all traffic stops in Ferguson involved Black motorists even though only 67 percent of Ferguson was Black. Black citizens were twice as likely to be arrested, and twice as likely to be searched. Municipal violations like speeding, running red lights, driving without current registration or proof of insurance, having an unmowed lawn, putting out the trash in the wrong place at the wrong time, jaywalking, and even the “manner of walking along the roadway” were all used to target Black residents of Ferguson. Men drinking in abandoned lots, kids standing together talking on a corner, and people wearing braids, baggy pants, grills, and tattoos were all, as the historian Walter Johnson puts it, “signs of criminality rather than the basic signs of accumulation available to people who don’t own much.” When Michael Brown was killed, Ferguson had a white mayor, a white city council, and an almost totally white police force backed up by a white municipal court judge. In 2013, the district had earned $2,600,000 in municipal court fines.

Radical Atlas is a book in conversation with a number of important studies of St. Louis, including Colin Gordon’s Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (2009) and Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (2020). “Why is the city government filling out its budget with municipal court fines when Emerson electric is doing $24 billion a year in business out of its headquarters on West Florissant Avenue?” Johnson asks in The Atlantic. Compared to these titles, Heyda’s study is even more zeroed in on how 2014 came about, and she takes time to list the cold statistics of what it meant to live in Ferguson between 2016 and 2018. The median household income at that time was $53,000, with only 28 percent home ownership, and 38.3 percent unemployment—over 10 percent higher than the national average in the worst of the Great Depression.

Through these maps, the picture becomes clear: Ferguson developed a suburban racialized feudalism. The local community was turned into a permanent rentier class: taxed, fined, and harassed by police who only protect corporate property, especially the Fortune 500 kingdom-campuses that hum along, fortified, reaping billions in profits from the architecture of global capital.

Heyda’s atlas is divided between “Territory,” “Space,” “Opportunity,” “Politics,” and “Justice,” focusing on a barrage of metrics measuring what has been going on in Ferguson, from Manifest Destiny to redlining, charter schools, airport expansion, property tax assessments, and corporate land use.

Many of these maps were illustrated by Heyda herself and include hand-drawn historical overlays. The sheer amount of data can be overwhelming, and refinding a map can sometimes be difficult, especially without a keyword index in the back. But large glossy photos (many taken by the author) help to anchor this information in the real world. Tax increment financing (TIF) is made easier to understand once you see a photo of the historic, falling-down brick building, visible through razor wire, being used as cover by a distribution warehouse, which profits off commerce that is completely unrelated to the surrounding community.

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As noted in its introduction, Radical Atlas is “a cautionary reference book.” It’s also more than the sum of its parts, giving readers and researchers an unparalleled study of a zone that embodied the injustice of the entire nation. The dynamic between citizen and police officer that took Michael Brown’s life is observable in every US city and town, and there are sister lines of the Delmar Divide from sea to sea. Every American city has some of the components that make up Ferguson because most resemble the growth patterns of St. Louis—an old and relatively empty downtown ringed with concentric circles of suburban development, carved up by gigantic interstate highways.

The any-suburb-USA scalability of Ferguson is important because, as the geographer Phil A. Neel argues in Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict (2018), much of the world’s proletariat now lives in the “near hinterland.” In European countries, this takes the shape of towering apartment centers that ring the city, housing the immigrant workers of large logistical complexes and warehouses. In the cities of Africa and Latin America, the near hinterland is an escape from the high rents of the city, which “takes the shape of the slum city, often walled off from wealthier exurbs and the downtown core.”

Neel argues that a “demographic inversion” has transformed the old postwar suburbs of the United States into “the primary settlement zones for new immigrants,” a migration that “has generated new ghettos and new forms of resistance, epitomized by the suburban rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.”

The economic engine that made suburbs the stronghold of class mobility for working people has failed, and those areas are sliding into collapse. This is visible in the growth of the carceral state in tandem with the explosion of suburban poverty. “As early as 2011,” Neel writes, “the suburbs housed more poor than the cities—with 16.4 million suburban poor making up about one third of the national total.” Neel continues,

The thing about poverty in these suburbs is that it doesn’t look like poverty, just as class doesn’t look like class. There are no overspilling brick-built public housing towers, as in the inner-city ghettos of the past. But there is also nothing that looks much like the French banlieue or the British council estate. Instead we have “Main Street,” the darling of every politician. These places still have the surface appearance of those uniquely American suburbs: each house tucked quietly onto its own plot of land, no front porch even to mediate between the public and private.

Radical Atlas maps this Main Street dynamic in detail, paying special attention to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater St. Louis as “empowerment” centers set beside the fast-food franchise businesses lining West Florissant Avenue, where much of the 2014 protest occurred. To the horror of so many conservatives, what was damaged that year was a QuikTrip, which burned. The Public Storage was set on fire. A Walgreens pharmacy was ransacked, as was the Little Caesars pizzeria. Local franchise owners and employees were affected, but the fury of the Ferguson uprising includes the fact that these were corporate businesses that extracted wealth from the local community in exchange for junk food, liquor, and cigarettes. Profits fatten the pockets of corporate executives who have never even been to St. Louis, and we now live in a country where little piggies like Kyle Rittenhouse can go one step farther than the McCloskeys, and kill in the name of the AutoZone.

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Heyda’s atlas is full of worrying data, but proactive “Mobilize” sections are peppered throughout. Abundance-heads might find ammunition in Heyda’s pages on sustainable zoning, especially the possibilities of a wind-based code that conserves energy and cleans car-polluted air. Ferguson, and much of north St. Louis City and County, is fogged by a pattern of increased asthma rates. Tree policy and land use could be mobilized to combat these health problems, and to cool the vistas of suburban asphalt that turn into an inferno in the summer, but in great thanks to DOGE, $4.7 million in tree-planting programs for north St. Louis have been slashed, and no Missouri politician has stood in the way.

But Radical Atlas is testament to the fact that zoning reform will not be enough—robust funding, as well as protection from privatization and censorship, can mobilize public schools and libraries as anchor institutions of neighborhoods, empowering community members with access to knowledge and thus the power to participate in government, apply for passports, access the internet, read books, and so on. Implementing comprehensive public transit, education, and healthcare programs is the only way to repair the fabric of society in inner-ring suburbs like Ferguson, but the few public institutions holding the tapestry together are overstressed and under systemic attack.

If we’re going to live under corporate feudalism, then the Fortune 500 companies that call St. Louis home owe the city and its people huge investments in these public goods. The government (which these companies operate like a sock puppet) has proven incapable—ballot propositions that fund investments in institutions like community colleges are extremely popular in cities like St. Louis, and they often pass. But urgently needed voter-approved public transit initiatives—like a north-south MetroLink extension—were promised long ago and have been sunk by dysfunction. Both Democratic and Republican administrations up and down the ballot have failed to deliver St. Louis’s desperately needed light rail expansion, even after a great deal of funding has been secured through a half-cent increase on sales tax. Public transit is obviously needed in car-plagued cities like St. Louis, and the north-south Green Line looks to be on permanent hiatus, with the sitting mayor in favor of Waymo cars as a solution.

For Neel, the driving questions that brought him to Ferguson during the uprising were “how does a riot grow in this decentralized space, and what limits its growth?” and “can a new communist politics emerge from capitalist sprawl?” Heyda’s atlas offers a crucial study of how neoliberal capital turned the streets of Ferguson into a site of global protest, and how these struggles in north St. Louis’s counties are the laboratories of a future liberatory politics. Every urban historian and city planner should have a copy on the shelf—I’ll be returning to the atlas again and again.