CLAYTON, Mo. — The march of clergy members, black and white and demanding a full investigation into police actions in St. Louis County, wound from the well-groomed and highly regarded high school, past the curious onlookers out for sushi or Starbucks, and finally to the county prosecutor’s office.

Wednesday was the first day that demonstrations reached Clayton, the affluent and mostly white county seat, 20 minutes and a million miles away from Ferguson, where 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot to death on Aug. 9 and protesters and the police have clashed violently in the streets. Here in Clayton, where Mr. Brown’s mother works at a gourmet grocer, and throughout the patchwork of largely white suburbs that curl around St Louis to the west and south, people have watched the events in Ferguson with compassion, outrage and indifference, some with sympathy, some with contempt.

Even among those who are more sympathetic to the concerns of the protesters, there is a striking language gap, with whites asking why demonstrators are not letting the justice system simply do its work and blacks saying the way the system works is exactly the problem.

“As far as justice and peace, we need to have it, of course,” said Arlene Rosengarten, who watched the march from farther up the sidewalk. “But we need to make sure there’s real justice and not jump the gun just because everybody’s angry. I think this is just setting a bad precedent.”