■ Missouri is again at the center of a racially charged conflict.

Racial disparities statewide fuel St. Louis street uprisings

Missouri is again at the center of a racially charged conflict after a judge acquitted a white former St. Louis police officer of first-degree murder in the death of a black drug suspect.

The Sept. 15 verdict provoked angry protests in a state still not fully recovered from the unrest that followed the 2014 death of Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old shot by a white officer in the suburb of Ferguson.

The current conflict “has everything to do with a lot of the continuing, underlying social inequities,” said Kimberly Jade Norwood, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, who is black. “Poor public education, poor housing … lack of access to jobs. All these issues are prominent in the protests.”

Although the latest events have centered on St. Louis, the whole state has faced recent scrutiny over racial disparities. The NAACP’s national delegates voted in July to issue a travel advisory for Missouri.

Earlier this year, the Republican-led state Legislature passed a much-debated law that raised the standard for suing for workplace or housing discrimination, a vote that drew scorn from civil rights leaders.

And last month, a white Missouri House member posted on Facebook that he hoped whoever vandalized a Confederate monument in the southwest of the state would be hanged, sparking calls for him to resign. Before that, a black Democratic state senator posted and later deleted a comment on Facebook about hoping for President Donald Trump’s assassination. The Republican-led state Senate formally reprimanded the Democrat, while the GOP-led state House took the less serious step of opening an ethics review of the Republican.

A 2015 report titled “For the Sake of All” produced by Washington University and Saint Louis University found that mainly black St. Louis ZIP codes in some cases had an 18-year difference in life expectancy when compared with largely white ZIP codes.

Christian Goode The Associated Press Protesters are bound after their arrest Saturday at the St. Louis Galleria mall in Richmond Heights, Mo. Demonstrators marched and chanted among shoppers.