School board elections in Ferguson, Missouri use a racially discriminatory system that is helping to keep blacks “all but locked out of the political process,” a new federal lawsuit alleges.
The suit, filed Thursday morning by the American Civil Liberties Union in a federal district court in St. Louis, is the first effort to use the legal system to change the area’s political balance of power since unrest over the death of Michael Brown last summer focused attention on local blacks’ severe under-representation in government.