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Unemployment Among African-Americans Behind St. Louis Protests: Reports

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A lack of jobs is one of the reasons behind massive protests organized by African-Americans in St. Louis following the shooting of two teenagers by local police officers, The Guardian reported Wednesday.

MOSCOW, October 15 (RIA Novosti) – A lack of jobs is one of the reasons behind massive protests organized by African-Americans in St. Louis following the shooting of two teenagers by local police officers, The Guardian reported Wednesday.

"There are no jobs," Denzil Dean, a 57-year-old landscaper and small business owner, told The Guardian when asked why she had joined protests in Ferguson, a suburban town in the St. Louis area in the US state of Missouri.

According to The Guardian, in 2012, the St. Louis County unemployment rate was three times higher for African-Americans than it was for white people.

"You see a lot of frustration," Dean said, adding that young African-Americans faced with unemployment are trying to build up a sense of unity.

"[African-American] youth are trying to develop some kind of community pride and they just can't do that with the police force harassing them," Dean explained.

Over the weekend, thousands of protesters gathered in Ferguson and St. Louis to rally against what they view as a series of racially motivated shootings of African-Americans by white police officers in the region. The protests continued on Monday.

The demonstrations followed the shooting of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers in the Shaw neighborhood in St. Louis. Myers, an African-American, was shot at several times by an off-duty white police officer.

The incident took place just two months after Michael Brown, another African-American teenager of the same age, was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson.

On Tuesday, state authorities in Missouri released the crime laboratory results of Myers revealing that gunpowder residue tested positive on his hands and clothing. The results prove that Myers may have been armed, despite his family members' claim that he was unarmed at the time of the shooting.

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