The shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri brought to light a set of racial injustices in the lived daily experiences of the city’s African American residents. Attempts to understand this deeper context of the unrest in Ferguson have drawn attention to the near all-white composition of its elected officials. Though African Americans make up about two-thirds of Ferguson’s population, they hold just one of the six seats on its City Council.

The gap between Ferguson’s residents and the officials elected to represent them is part of a larger pattern of African American underrepresentation in local government in the United States. More than 1.2 million African Americans in 175 communities across the country have councils that do not descriptively represent them. A council is descriptively representative if its members reflect the demographics of the community they’re supposed to represent. African Americans’ share of the council in these 175 communities does not reflect their share of the population.

The effects of this underrepresentation don’t always explode onto the national stage, as they did in Ferguson, but that lower profile shouldn’t be mistaken for insignificance. African Americans who are not descriptively represented are less likely to be engaged in the political process or have representatives who forcefully advocate their interests. That combination of disengagement and inattention fuels the cycles of injustice and mistrust that built to the sustained outrage and protests in Ferguson.

Ferguson has been pegged as an outlier but, though the representation gap in Ferguson is particularly pronounced, its basic story of African American underrepresentation plays out in many communities across the country. Of the 438 municipalities in which a descriptively representative council would have at least one African American member, 175 have councils that underrepresent their African American populations. That leaves more than 1.2 million African Americans underrepresented by their local councils nationwide.

Read the complete study on African American Underrepresentation in City Councils by Karen Shanton on the Demos website.