Courtney Phillip Johnson

Courtney Phillip Johnson, a 22-year-old Black man from St. Louis, Missouri, is known publicly today mostly through the quiet negative space that sometimes follows a killing: the absence of a widely circulated narrative. What can be established from accessible public materials is that his death occurred in a city that, in 2009, was grappling with a heavy toll of violence—enough that the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department would later report 143 murders for that year under its Uniform Crime ...