Canfield Drive - Matthew Knox Averett

Winner of the 2026 Missouri Conference on History Book AwardOn 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 f
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