An Ex-Cop Is Suing Over Racial Bias in Voting in Ferguson Schools

A former St. Louis police officer is among a group of civil and voting rights activists who are bringing a local school district in Ferguson, Missouri — a city struck by protests over allegations of systemic racial bias following the police killing of a black teen — to federal court, arguing its voting system shuts out black people.

Redditt Hudson, who once wrote that being a cop in Ferguson showed him how "unfair" and "racist" the system can be, is a plaintiff in the case Missouri NAACP v. Ferguson-Florissant School District, which kicked off Monday morning. The activists claim the district's at-large electoral system used to elect members of the school board violates the Voting Rights Act and is inherently discriminatory toward African-Americans.

Only one member on the seven-member Florissant School board is black, in a district, where 77 percent of the student body is African-American. Overall, the white voting-age population still outnumbers their African-American counterparts in the region.

"Despite the fact that African-Americans are almost half of the School District's population and are a substantial majority of its students, there has never been adequate representation of African-Americans on the Board," plaintiffs wrote in the complaint filed December, 2014.

An at-large electoral system allows board members to be voted in by the entire district, rather than by neighborhoods. The plaintiffs argue that, as a result, the African-American vote has been diluted in predominantly black areas that could elect someone "who resides in their neighborhood and better represents their community," if the system were not at-large.

The at-large system, plaintiffs claim, violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bars districts from imposing any "voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure" that "results in denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color."

Related: Why Fixing Ferguson Requires Toppling the Many Fiefdoms of St. Louis County

Hudson, an NAACP organizer and board member of the The Ethics Project, and the other plaintiffs, F. Willis Johnson and Doris Bailey, are all African-Americans who live in the district, which serves more than 12,000 students in the greater St. Louis area. The district covers 11 municipalities including the town of Ferguson, where the police shooting death of black teen Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 sparked mass protests that spread nation-wide. Criminal justice, voting rights, income, and employment are just some of the areas that have historically been affected by racial discrimination in the region, plaintiffs claim.

The school district itself was created by a federal desegregation order intended to counteract racial discrimination in the electoral process in the area, ten years after the Voting Rights Act was signed.

"This case will help right decades of systemic racially disparate treatment caused by government policies that have intentionally disadvantaged the African-American community and created economic, educational, voting and other inequalities," said Jeffrey Mittman, executive director of the ACLU of Missouri. "By using the federal Voting Rights Act, we have a powerful tool to address these inequalities by giving the residents of the district more control over their own community."

The school district has dismissed the plaintiff's claims in a statement, saying that due to the growth of the black community, the existing at-large voting system "facilitates the expansion of African-American representation."

"This method of holding elections does not violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act," the statement said. "On the contrary, we will show that the Ferguson-Florissant School District has a long history of African-American representation under the existing rules."

Plaintiffs said they expect the trial to last a week.