#ferguson protests

Umar Lee:

Before Mike Brown

Growing up in North St. Louis County, I remember a vibrant community full of churches, bars, VFW halls, Knights of Columbus, shopping malls, movie theatres, and all of the amenities working, and middle-class post-war Americans desired. To be a kid who loved sports, like me, North County offered Khoury League baseball, JFL football, little league wrestling, boxing gyms, soccer clubs, hockey clubs, basketball leagues, and much more. I played plenty of sports growing up in organized leagues (wrestling, baseball, and football); but I played more with kids in the street. When I wasn’t playing sports, I was listening to Jack Buck and Mike Shannon call Cardinals games on KMOX radio, sneaking up late at night to watch pro wrestling, reading wrestling and boxing magazines in the store because I couldn’t afford to buy them, also reading the St. Louis-based The Sporting News to keep track of stats, admiring the photos and articles in Sports Illustrated, of course reading the sports section in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch daily, and watching whatever sports were aired TV on the weekend for households without cable, topped off by sports news coverage from the likes of Jay Randolph, Ron Jacober, and Art Holliday on Channel 5.

Yet, while all of this was going on, which has left me with a life of fond memories, the North County, and my personal story, isn’t complete without looking at other events. The sports sections of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch discussed Whiteyball, our loss of Big Red football, almost losing the Blues to Canada, and the Steamers; but the news and businesses pages were far bleaker. St. Louis had then, and has now, one of the highest rates of violent crime in America, political dysfunction and corruption, and countless municipal fiefdoms. These pages also contained news of factory closings and job losses. Like Michigan, Pennsylvania, northeast Ohio, and other parts of the Rust Belt; working-class St. Louisans were reeling from job losses. North County was built up and populated by factory workers and those in the building trades, the small houses were built for guys like my dad who left high school and walked right onto an assembly line, and when those factories close, and the builders stop building, the economic conditions that underpin the health of families and communities erode. When Combustion Engineering in North St. Louis laid off my dad, uncle, and other relatives in the 80s, it hit like a micro version of the Great Depression. The saving grace would come years later when my dad joined my grandpa at GM, which had moved from North City to St. Charles County, skipping North County in the process, and my uncle getting rewarded for his service loading dead and wounded American bodies into helicopters in Vietnam by getting hired at the federal records center in Overland.

Beneath the changing economic conditions was the issue that defines St. Louis, and in particular, North County. Race. North County was largely farmland before World War II with a sprinkling of small towns mixed in. Old Town Florissant and Sacred Heart Parish in an example of historic North County which was a community of French and German Catholics who later welcomed and embraced Irish and Italian Catholics. Like south St. Louis City, places like Ferguson and Florissant, bonded together at church, in labor unions, and in neighborhoods. The problem is that these tended to be nearly exclusively white, and as the Black population of North City spilled into North County in large numbers beginning in the 1970s, this began to create tension. As a reference point, my dad graduated from Riverview Gardens in 1970 when the first Black student enrolled, today the school is virtually 100% Black. After splitting with my dad, my mother, who lived in North City and North County with us as small kids, took my biracial younger half-siblings to be raised in the Shaw and Dutchtown neighborhoods of South City, because she deemed the Riverview Gardens schools to be too white and racist. I stayed in Black Jack and then Florissant along with my older sisters, dad, stepmom, and grandparents.

As economic conditions became unstable in North County, white families began moving out to St. Charles County, and Black families began settling in areas that had previously been all-white, the existing white establishment relied on police departments, most of them either all-white or close to it, to act as a buffer zone. This frequently was manifested in traffic stops with places like Jennings being the worst. White residents of North County feared crime rates would soon mirror those in north city, and these fears were only heightened after high-profile crimes such as the 1982 kidnapping and murders of Gary and Donna Decker in Bellefontaine Neighbors, the stabbing death of McCluer North student and football player Dan Mckeon (brother of two professional soccer players) at a 1987 party in Florissant, the rape and murders of the Kerry sisters in 1991 at the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge, and the rape and murder of freshman student Christine Smetzer by a fellow student in a McCluer North bathroom in 1995.

Meanwhile, Black families arriving in north county for better schools, safer communities, and more amenities, after generations of legalized housing segregation in St. Louis City and County, often faced the brunt force of aggressive north county policing. Instead of harassing criminals and reducing crime, police departments in north county were often harassing students and law-abiding citizens coming home from work, church, or a night out. Before body cameras and smart phones these police interactions often included profane and racially abusive language and frequently beatings. This created a climate of distrust and anger in the Black community in North County. Crime was going up, but police were harassing law-abiding citizens instead of stopping criminals, and Black residents were also disproportionately victims of crimes that received far less media attention. As the racial composition of North County municipalities changed to majority-Black, voter turnout remained higher among longtime and typically older white residents. This meant that the numerous city halls and police departments in places like Ferguson remained nearly all-white even as whites became a minority in those communities.

In 2014, North County was a powder keg waiting to erupt. All it needed was a spark. That’s why I began writing about north county in my Evening-Whirl column and for the Huffington Post. No one was talking about North County and it was ready to explode. Local media focused on stories about bike lanes, hipster neighborhoods, and business as usual. Months before August 9th, I told Paul Fehler, of the Pruitt-Igoe Myth and political fame, that if there was a riot and civil unrest in St. Louis it would be in North County. A week before August 9th, with future mayoral candidate Cara Spencer watching, I had a heated argument with legislative aide Michael Powers at The Royale because he said I talked about problems in North County too much. Everything in the County is fine, I was told, all focus must be on the city.

Then it happened. Mike Brown Jr., a recent graduate of Normandy High School, walked to an immigrant-owned and ran store with a friend (most such stores in the Black communities of St. Louis are owned by Palestinian Muslims), there was an altercation, but nothing out of the ordinary for a St. Louis hood store, and as he walked through the apartments and onto Canfield at the edge of Ferguson, he met up with Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. The encounter was fatal and almost certainly avoidable. Ferguson immediately handled the situation in a reckless and insensitive manner. Allowing the dead body of Mike Brown to lay in the streets for hours, and bringing out police dogs to intimidate family members, neighbors, friends, and those brought out by social media posts and discussions on Black radio. What happened that day, we’ll probably never know the entire truth. What we do know is what happened on August 9th of 2014 permanently changed St. Louis and America.

My Time in Ferguson

People have to remember that what became known as the Ferguson Uprising was not something that was instigated by academics, leftist political organizations and organizers, out of town celebrity activists, intersectional dogmatists, or people with college degrees. The anger at the death of Mike Brown came from the neighborhood. A neighborhood ranging from lower middle-class to generational poverty. People struggling and hustling just to stay above water. The community came out August 9th, but the uprising began August 10th and that was a day when an older generation of pastors, community leaders, and politicians were largely pushed aside, by a younger generation seeking an immediate redress to their grievances. It was leaderless and often without direction. Purely organic and there was a beautiful sense of community in the early days. Elders such as Anthony Bell attempted to provide direction (Bell setting up voter registration tables); but the situation was too fluid and beyond the capabilities of individual organizers.

[...]

From the beginning, I sought to use whatever platform I had to highlight the history of North County and attempt to tell a story of how we arrived at this moment. Having said that, like everyone else, I was caught up in the drama and passion of the Ferguson moment. I made videos, wrote some articles, cowrote a few pieces with Sarah Kendzior, and appeared on many local, national, and international news outlets (Al Jazeera links aren’t working). I was also arrested twice in Ferguson, threatened with arrest many more times, received numerous and graphic death threats, sparred with police supporters, lost my cool, provoked, was provoked, and finally lost my job and shortly thereafter my apartment (and in the middle of all of this, my grandma died and I was in a messy relationship). If you look at photos I didn't have grey hair before Ferguson. A few months later I was buying Just For Men.

I found a way to piss off police supporters and get under their skin, as did guys like Bassem Masri. In my estimation, the reasons for that are twofold. Firstly, we both grew-up in north county, so many of the people responsible for targeting and doxxing us were those we either grew-up with or went to school with. I saw lifelong friendships created in the Ferguson-Florissant School District end over Facebook posts during the Ferguson Unrest. This was mostly along racial lines. Secondly, unlike most activists, or those you see on Ivy League campuses today, we didn't talk and sound like spoiled brats, smart alecky rich kids who'd have to go to therapy for decades after one physical altercation. We'd been in plenty of fistfights, street brawls, and I'd been shot at and stabbed. Twitter trolls, insults, and radio talkshow hosts like Mark Reardon and Bob Romanik weren't gonna hurt my feelings.

[...]

Trump and The 2020 Sham

For the sake of time, and if anyone is still here, I'll fast forward to 2020. I've already previously stated, and Sarah Kendzior noted this in her book discussing St. Louis, that I believe Ferguson is partially responsible for electing Donald Trump as president. As in 1968, when Richard Nixon promised law and order, I knew conditions were ripe for a populist right-wing politician promising to restore law and order. No one saw COVID-19 coming, the shutdowns, the summer of massive protests after the murder of George Floyd, and the crazy presidential election. Four years later, I think we're still all trying to make sense of it.

While I fully embraced vaccines, and I'm happy I'm vaxxed, and I supported shutdowns at the time, I think it's pretty clear they did more harm than good. Most harmed were our children- particularly poor and working-class kids, who fell behind due to the virtual learning sham, and never caught up. I was at the Dallas campaign event where Biden was endorsed by multiple presidential candidates, thus virtually sealing the nomination. The South Side Ballroom was so packed, that I could barely move or breath, and couldn't get in a position to take a good photo, despite being relatively close to Biden. The next week it was too dangerous to publicly campaign, Biden stayed at home, and we elected an elderly man who was not up to the job but has generally been good in office both for American workers and our international allies. Mainstream media, so eager to defeat Trump, played along. Oh, the viable Democratic alternative was another elderly gentleman who honeymooned in the Soviet Union. It was not a year of good choices, but Biden was the best in my estimation.

[...]

The Aftermath: Where We Stand

Where are we today? A decade later, are we in a better place? North County is still in a state of serious decline and seems to be getting worse each year, North City is doing even worse, the population of both St. Louis City and County is declining, and many are opting for more prosperous communities, most notably Texas and Georgia suburbs (both reddish states). Violent crime spiked for a period, the decline in traffic enforcement has made driving and walking our streets far less safe and often deadly, and area police have essentially stopped policing. They don't want to be stars in a viral video or become a hashtag. For many cops, if they couldn't do things the old school way, they aren’t gonna do it at all. This has made our communities more dangerous, less livable for the most vulnerable, and places few people want to live in. This is a negative consequence from the lack of a strategic plan after Ferguson and failures on both the parts of law-enforcement and the community to hear one another.

The good news is that St. Louis now has better prosecutors (Wesley Bell and Gabe Gore) who are committed to public safety, holding those accountable who harm our community, and enacting diversion programs and other positive post-Ferguson reforms. St. Louis has a mayor in Tishaura Jones who wasn't created in a lab by white progressives; but is a genuine leader, reared and educated locally. Without Ferguson, I'm doubtful Mayor Jones would've been elected, nor a new generation of leaders such as Adam Layne and Marty Murray.

So, it must be recognized, that while there have been some unintended negative consequences from Ferguson, there are also positive developments. These aren't just political. What inspires me isn't politics. I'm inspired by faith leaders in our community who took the Ferguson moment and began having serious conversations with their congregations. Fathers and mothers who began having difficult conversations at home with their sons and daughters. Teachers who began listening to their students. Old classmates who reached out to one another to have a beer and talk across the racial divide. Our increased racially diverse families and suburbs who are defying our political discourse on both sides as progressives have adopted a rigid and dogmatic Race Science and MAGA is doubling down on Nativism and Majoritarian racial grievances. By our faithful and intact immigrant families providing needed life to a region desperately in need.

@Umar Lee wrote a solid perspective on the 10-year anniversary of the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson and North County from a North County POV. #Ferguson

Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) for Teen Vogue on police and government repression of social movements such as the Ferguson protests and the campus protests over the Gaza Genocide (05.14.2024).

In March, 2018, the Washington couple Jennifer and Sarah Hart killed their six adopted children by driving off a California cliff. At first, authorities assumed the car crash was an accident. Further investigation revealed that the women had been abusing their children, and had premeditated the plunge as an act of family annihilation.

More compelling — and more challenging — are the racial and economic factors underpinning the tragedy. Jennifer and Sarah, both white, adopted the six children of color. The two went on to use social media and community platforms to curate a picture of harmony, vitality and bliss. The women’s posturing was calculated: Their idyllic facade concealed a pattern of neglect and abuse occurring behind closed doors.

I'm looking for prints or designs based on it (I've seen them, I know they're out there) that I can buy. I've done a general search but I'm coming up empty.

Now obviously, I'm only looking for sellers/companies that are either black-owned or support BLM type organizations. I will also accept just a memorial fund for Edward Crawford in general.

Also, since this photo is 6 years old, I'm aware my search may be fruitless. In which case, feel free to just link me to your favorite black-owned business, organization to donate to, or educational resource. I'll check them all out and reblog a few.

Ryan J. Reilly at HuffPost: 

It seemed like a turning point.

Six years ago this month, law enforcement officers left the body of an 18-year-old Missourian shot and killed by a police officer lying on the street in the summer heat for more than four hours, and Americans living in the greater St. Louis area decided they’d had enough.

Black citizens, many ruled by bureaucracies originally crafted with the express purpose of excluding them, were tired of being harassed and mistreated by unaccountable armed government agents who locked them in cages to fill municipal coffers.

The unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 was sparked by the police killing of Michael Brown on Aug. 9 and reignited the Black Lives Matter movement that began with the acquittal one year earlier of a self-styled neighborhood watchman who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012.

The protests and unconstitutional police response on the streets of a St. Louis suburb seized the nation’s attention and brought about some modest change in the St. Louis region and beyond.

There were blue-ribbon panels: Missouri’s Ferguson Commission and former President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

The feds pulled back on distributing military gear to local police forces and forced the city of Ferguson to curb its profit-driven and discriminatory policing practices. The slow-moving local political process  ― with the help of federal probes, expanded investigative reporting and activist-driven political pressure ― eventually ousted many of the government and law enforcement leaders who reigned over systems that enabled unconstitutional and abusive policing for decades.

Yet those reforms already pale in comparison to the swift changes the nation has witnessed since Minneapolis police officers killed George Floyd on May 25. Since Floyd’s death ― which followed the killing of Ahmaud Arbery by white vigilantes in Georgia and the killing of Breonna Taylor by police in Kentucky  ― there have been sweeping shifts in public opinion on the need for police reform. Just 7% of Americans now said policing is basically sound and requires essentially no changes, while nearly half of Americans said it is “not too sound” or “not sound at all.”

The effect has spread far beyond policing. Few parts of American life have been untouched by this racial reckoning, from evangelical churches, elite schools, the media industry and major American sports leagues to the “Bachelor” franchise and reality shows on policing. Many industries underwent wrenching internal conversations about how Black and brown employees and customers are treated and the effect of systemic racism on society today.

Black Lives Matter, a movement previously perceived by many white Americans as extremist or anti-cop, has transformed into a corporate-friendly slogan that reaffirms the basic human dignity of Black Americans and adorns suburban lawn signs. And the protests haven’t let up yet, more than two months after Floyd’s death.

Ferguson movement alumni — many of them young men and women who spent countless hours enduring scorching heat, freezing cold and stinging tear gas to call attention to police violence — watched all this unfold with a mix of pride and consternation. How did all their hard work — the trauma they endured that comes from prolonged exposure to chaos and violence and injustice — not lead to this kind of mass national awakening six years ago?

It’s not that the Ferguson activists haven’t been waiting and hoping this might happen. “There was frustration before this moment,” Kayla Reed, a former pharmacy technician who has emerged as one of St. Louis’ most prominent criminal justice reform activists in the years since Ferguson, told me. “So many people have sacrificed their bodies, their mental health, their freedom. You were questioning what was being produced on the other side of these uprisings.”

Even if it took this long, there is a growing sense among the people who were part of what happened in Ferguson in 2014 that what’s playing out on the streets in 2020 is merely a continuation of what they started, albeit a delayed one. Activist Samuel Sinyangwe called Ferguson “the catalyst” for that current movement in America and the almost “overwhelming consensus” that the nation needs to curb police abuse.

“None of what we’re seeing today would be possible without the protesters who took to the streets in Ferguson,” Sinyangwe told me. “All of that is built off of a foundation of people who got involved in this work in large part in response to the Ferguson uprising.”

Rasheen Aldridge, who was a 20-year-old from St. Louis when he came out to protest in Ferguson, said the movement helped create the “infrastructure” to get to a world now where serious policy change is possible and created an opportunity for “real uncomfortable conversations” around systemic racism.

“Ferguson played a huge part of the Black Lives Matter movement and allowing people to feel like it is their right to organize and take to the streets against this mass injustice that is taking place all across this country,” Aldridge told me.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who headed the Justice Department as it investigated Ferguson’s discriminatory and unconstitutional policing practices, also credited Ferguson activists with laying the groundwork for the change the country has seen in 2020.

“The background established in Ferguson and the background that was established by those early leaders in Black Lives Matter has really helped push this movement along,” Holder told me. “It wasn’t just a moment that you had in Ferguson, that was the beginning of a movement.”

Ferguson activists took a lot of grief, Holder said, but the nation wouldn’t have been as prepared to seize the moment after Floyd’s death unless they helped clear the path.

“They’re too young to be called it, but they’re almost like the grandfathers of the movement,” Holder said. “They’re the creators of the energy that has now spilled onto the streets of the United States and help to move the nation into a better place.”

‘Deja Vu All Over Again’

The Ferguson movement may have helped set the stage for the current moment, but it was the enraging video of Floyd’s brutal death that set it off. Eight minutes of former officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of a handcuffed Floyd, slowly choking the life out of him. The truth was right there, on video, clear as day.

That wasn’t the case in Ferguson, where the underlying facts of Brown’s killing created a major divide, one that often broke along racial or ideological lines. There’s no video of Brown’s death, only of his body lying in the street. The initial narrative was that Brown had his hands in the air and was trying to surrender when he was fatally shot, but it was deemed noncredible by an extensive federal investigation. A progressive local prosecutor elected in the wake of the Ferguson unrest didn’t exonerate former Officer Darren Wilson but recently announced that he couldn’t make a case.

The video of Brown that Americans did see, released by Ferguson police days after Brown’s death, was a surveillance video of Brown shoving a convenience store clerk while stealing a packet of cigarillos shortly before he was killed. That video and the disputed circumstances of Brown’s shooting gave many white Americans a convenient excuse to dismiss or ignore the broader, systemic concerns that were long-simmering in greater St. Louis and that came to a boil after Brown’s death.

In Floyd’s case, the video made the truth undeniable. There’s no remotely plausible excuse for his killing. Millions of white Americans were forced to confront what Black activists have been trying to convince them of for years: that the way many Black Americans were being treated by the police was fundamentally unjust.

“People weren’t ready with Mike Brown. They didn’t have the visual proof,” said Heather Taylor, the president of the Ethical Society of Police, a St. Louis police union for Black officers that formed in 1972 to combat racial discrimination in policing. “Now they just have it. … It’s telling people, ‘Oh, you need to change something, because it’s not working the way that we thought that it was.’”

Johnetta Elzie, a Ferguson activist who was among the first protesters to hit the streets after Brown’s death and went on to co-found the group Campaign Zero, said it didn’t surprise her that it took a graphic video of police slowly killing a handcuffed Black man to finally force white people to deal with the reality of police violence against Black citizens.

“It’s frustrating, but also I just wasn’t shocked,” Elzie told me. “I went to schools with white people my whole life, and I saw and read their attitudes on Facebook six years ago versus what their attitudes are today.”

Holder, the first Black U.S. attorney general under America’s first Black president, drew a line between the enraging video of Floyd’s death and two other pivotal moments in American media history: the 1955 publication of gruesome images of 14-year-old Emmett Till’s mangled body in his open casket and 1965 visuals of Alabama state troopers cracking the late John Lewis’ skull on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

“You can’t underestimate the power of the visual. We can see what happened to that little boy Emmett Till, and we can see what happened to John Lewis and all those people as they were charged by Alabama law enforcement,” Holder said. “And then you can see what happened to George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police.”

“That video ― 8 minutes and 46 seconds ― of seeing this man killed while people are yelling, ‘You’re going to hurt him.’ ‘You’re going to kill him.’ You hear him cry out for this mother. That struck a chord,” Holder said, adding that the video gave many white Americans “tangible evidence” of the misconduct that communities of color have been talking about for years.

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, the first Black woman to head the second-largest prosecutor’s office in the nation as Chicago’s chief prosecutor, also pointed to Mamie Till’s decision to show her son’s mangled body to the world as a similarly galvanizing moment.

“This is deja vu all over again because this is not new,” Foxx said. “There were lynchings happening regularly, and it had been written about, but it was the actual seeing of that body that really got people moving.”

Foxx agreed it could be frustrating that it took the violent video death of a Black man to help awaken so many white Americans to longstanding injustices, but that such moments make it harder for Americans to ignore or justify away the lived experiences of their fellow citizens.

“If your system has always worked for you, and you’ve always believed it to be fair, you will try to find justification for why something else happened that deviated from that,” Foxx said. “There’s a thing that we do where we just care about our bubble. That’s why we continue to have systems that fail us, when it’s not all hands on deck, when it’s only the Black people who are, like, ‘Yo, their knee is in our neck. We need you on this.’ The busting of that bubble continually is exhausting but necessary.”

The roiling coronavirus pandemic also can’t be separated from any comparison between Ferguson and today — nor can the presence of a president who has used his platform to make less-than-subtle racist political appeals and implemented policies that harm people of color.

“Our history is stained by state violence against Black people,” said Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and former chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division charged with investigating Ferguson. “But the national outcry about racial injustice in policing is also happening against the backdrop of a global pandemic that is disproportionately impacting communities of color. We are in the middle of two pandemics — structural racism in policing and COVID-19 — as we face a national election just three months away in which one candidate uses racism and division as an electoral tactic with our very democracy at stake.”

‘The Whole Damn System’

Protests didn’t erupt from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Buffalo, New York — and last for two months — purely because of one killing in Minneapolis. The nationwide uprising sparked by George Floyd’s death was fueled by deeply held frustrations over the way people of color in America are treated by the country’s power structures and, most of all, by the police. The exact same dynamic played out in Ferguson in 2014, just on a smaller scale.

The men and women who hit the streets back then didn’t do so solely because of Brown’s death. That was just the final straw. National media coverage of Ferguson did focus on the aggressive and unconstitutional police response to the demonstrations. But particularly in the case of cable news coverage, it was tough to capture the broader reality of the broken law enforcement systems at the core of the tension between police and Black residents of greater St. Louis. The media focus on the shooting and the looting often hid a larger truth: that the entire law enforcement apparatus in the St. Louis region was unjust, as even some area police chiefs later conceded.

Some of the first people I interviewed after I first set foot in Ferguson in August 2014 were employees of an auto parts store that was looted after Brown’s death, where two workers explained that police harassment was an everyday fact of life.

“They see dreads, and they, you know, I’m young, I’m Black, that’s an automatic flag,” one told me. “I’ve gotten harassed, pulled over for no reason. They want to search my car, didn’t find anything. Got mad, you know, still want to write me petty tickets.” His coworker added that “everyone” had a bad experience with police.

He was right. Pluck anyone from the crowds of protesters on the streets of Ferguson that August, and you’d almost certainly hear a story about police misconduct, ranging from excessive ticketing to threats to their lives. One protester recounted the time he was talking on his cell phone only to turn around to see a cop’s gun in his face. “This man almost killed me,” the demonstrator said. “You know what that man said? ‘I want you to have something on you because I’m gonna beat your ass.’ That’s what that man said ― I swear to God on my son ― he said, ‘I’m going to beat your ass if you got something on you.’”

If you’re looking for a place that encapsulates systemic racism, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better example than greater St. Louis. No sane person would design the patchwork municipal structure in place in St. Louis County, which was largely built from small white-flight towns designed to keep Black residents out. As the demographics shifted over time, many of those municipalities turned to ticket revenue to keep their budgets solvent, employing poorly trained (and often poorly paid) officers to fund their own salaries by fining residents for minor violations of municipal ordinances.

The work of the St. Louis-based group ArchCity Defenders, which put out a paper outlining municipal court abuses days after Brown’s death, helped federal authorities and national reporters connect the dots between the anger on the streets and the injustice in the courts. St. Louis County’s system of dozens of municipalities, many of them strapped for cash, routinely locked people up for outstanding debt for violations municipal ordinances, holding humans in cages until they could extract monetary payment. One corruption-plagued town had an ordinance against saggy pants that resulted in hundreds of dollars in fees and an eventual arrest warrant for an American citizen, giving law enforcement legal permission to seize a man’s body for a fashion crime.

[...]

‘In Some Parts Of The World, This Is Unfamiliar’

On my first day in Ferguson, not long after interviewing the workers at the auto parts store, I watched a daytime peaceful protest develop along West Florissant Avenue, a main thoroughfare near the site of Brown’s death, which became a focal point of the protests. A church choir performed from a platform attached to the back of a truck. Ministers led the way, and church members marched along with professionally printed signs calling for love, peace, prayer and nonviolence. A group of protesters of all ages danced to Pharrell’s “Happy.”

Then the riot cops showed up. Dozens of officers, some in military camouflage, arrived at the scene. In broad daylight, from atop a heavily fortified BearCat, a St. Louis County police officer trained his sniper rifle directly at the crowd of peaceful demonstrators. They were not interested in dialogue.

The actions of law enforcement agencies in St. Louis County amounted to a tremendous self-own, much like the more recent actions of police departments across the nation who routinely brutalized peaceful protesters, particularly in the early days of the movement. Faced with a protest movement that asserted that police brutality was a problem; that cops weren’t held accountable for misconduct; and that law enforcement officers frequently lied, St. Louis law enforcement chose to help protesters illustrate those exact points.

Police soon began clearing the entire area. As I tapped away on my computer on a story from inside a McDonald’s down the block, I saw the fortified police force march in formation down the road. A few officers made their way into the McDonald’s. Minutes later, a group of officers led me out of the McDonald’s in handcuffs, and a St. Louis County police officer slammed my head on the door for good measure. Outside, I joined Wesley Lowery, then of The Washington Post, who’d been violently seized moments earlier by an officer who didn’t like being recorded. In what seemed almost like a parody of a movie about the civil rights era, they stuffed us into the back of a police car with a minister in a white collar who sang hymns as we made our way to a Ferguson jail cell.

In case we still hadn’t gotten the message that St. Louis County had a fundamentally broken system, county attorneys charged us with municipal ordinance violations a year after our arrests in an attempt to fend off a potential lawsuit. To drive the point home, the municipal court later issued warrants for our arrests in what it claimed was a clerical error. Just to clear up any lingering doubts, St. Louis County also cleared the officer who slammed my head against the door of wrongdoing and promoted him to sergeant.

The actions of police on Aug. 13 drew even more attention to what was unfolding in Ferguson. The next night, under new law enforcement leadership, police allowed the protests to continue without interference. It was one of the few nights of calm in Ferguson that August.

But it didn’t last long. Many of the aggressive police tactics continued, with little regard for the U.S. Constitution. A ragtag smorgasbord of armed security forces ― seemingly champing at the bit for an excuse to arrest citizens assembled to petition their government ― forced demonstrators to maintain constant motion and seized the bodies of protesters who paused on a public sidewalk for violating a “five-second rule” they made up. (A police chief later said the unconstitutional rule was enforced by mistake.) Even months later, police grabbed peaceful demonstrators off a sidewalk, outfitted them in orange jumpsuits and held them for 18 hours on high bail. Over the course of months of unrest in Ferguson, police came up with any excuse they could to execute arrests, locking up dozens of other reporters along the way.

Despite widespread evidence of a fundamentally broken system, there was an instinct to cover policing in St. Louis as an issue of “bad apples.” But a lot of people had trouble conceptualizing or refused to acknowledge the existence of a law enforcement system with a rotten core.

Edward Crawford, who was photographed tossing a police tear gas canister while wearing an American flag T-shirt in what became an iconic image of the Ferguson unrest, told HuffPost in 2015 that he understood that a lot of people didn’t understand the system that Black people in the St. Louis region dealt with every day.

“In some parts of the world, this is unfamiliar,” Crawford told me. “The police crimes are very low. Police officers are respectable in a lot of places. Every police officer isn’t bad. There’s a lot of good police officers out there who protect and serve. But you also have some who seem to not.” (Crawford died in 2017.)

The politics of policing and media coverage of policing have shifted in the past decade. Just a few years before Ferguson, Obama had to invite an officer who’d arrested a Black law professor inside the professor’s own home to visit the White House because the president had mildly criticized an arrest that, based on the officer’s very own police report, was unlawful. Crossing a police union was a political death sentence.

During the Ferguson unrest, Holder ― a former judge who spent much of his professional life in law enforcement and whose brother was a cop ― was frequently smeared as anti-law enforcement based on measured criticism of race and law enforcement. When former FBI Director James Comey spoke out on the contentious issue of race and policing ― stating that law enforcement has historically enforced “a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups” ― the white Republican said he received literally no pushback from the law enforcement community. But Holder’s comments on race and policing were met with an immediate backlash, and in many cases, the racism wasn’t so subtle.

When Holder remarked in 2009 that the United States had been “essentially a nation of cowards” on issues of race ― a statement that barely raises an eyebrow in the 2020 dialogue ― his words set off an immediate backlash in the conservative media. His point, that Americans needed to “find ways to force ourselves to confront that which we have become expert at avoiding,” was somewhat lost in the controversy.

Holder recently told me he revisited that speech after Floyd’s death and thinks it held up pretty well. “For people in this country to talk about racial things is hard,” he said, echoing his speech a decade ago. “We’re experts at avoiding racial conversation.”

On the local level, there’s certainly been progress in Ferguson, which recently elected its first Black mayor. But some of the changes have been maddeningly slow. Jon Belmar, the St. Louis County police chief who oversaw the violent, unconstitutional response to even peaceful demonstrations in Ferguson, only retired earlier this year after the county paid out more than $10 million dollars to a gay St. Louis Police Department sergeant to whom a jury awarded $20 million in a discrimination and retaliation suit. (That sergeant, who was named to head the police department’s diversity and inclusion unit, recently stepped down from the position, claiming he had faced racial discrimination as a white man.)

Other changes came about more cleanly. Voters in both St. Louis city and St. Louis County elected prosecutors with more than progressive ideas about criminal justice. Aldermen in St. Louis unanimously voted to close the “Workhouse,” a notorious city jail with decrepit conditions widely condemned as inhumane.

And while some Ferguson protesters have become national voices in the movement for social justice, others have followed the path of the late Rep. John Lewis, running for office and working to change the government from within.

6 years ago today, the police shooting of Michael Brown at the hands of Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri facilitated the rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement into the public conscience. Over the next few years, topics such as exposing police corruption and misconduct, criminal justice and police reform, and discussions about combating white privilege, systemic racism, and the blue code of silence became mainstream political positions to be embraced. 

6 years later, as the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, and George Floyd at the hands of police are still fresh on our minds, there have been more robust discussion on the role of policing that went further than even during the Ferguson times, such as calls to “defund the police” and/or to outright abolish police (or at least police unions), alongside more mild reforms that looked radical a few years ago. Also, discussions on the role racism and white supremacy play in our nation are finally getting a frank hearing, such as plans to rename US Military bases that were named after Confederate traitors, brand names such as Aunt Jemima getting renamed due to the name’s connotations to minstrel shows, band names such as Lady A (formerly Lady Antebellum) and The Chicks (formerly Dixie Chicks) changing names due to slavery connotations, buildings and street names named after white supremacists being renamed, and statues of white supremacists and Confederate traitors coming down. 

Thomas B. Harvey at Slate (08.09.2019):

Every year around Aug. 9, people ask if there has been progress since Ferguson. Depending on who asks, Ferguson can mean the small suburb of St. Louis where Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Mike Brown or it can mean the broader St. Louis region. Ferguson can also represent one of those rare moments in time where white middle-class people were forced to see the interplay of race, class, and policing in ways they can most often completely ignore.

More importantly, what do we mean by progress? Would progress simply mean there are fewer police killings or fewer people in jail because of their poverty? Don’t we need to know what was sacrificed to make change in order to measure progress?

People protested for more than a year, risking their lives and their safety, while routinely being arrested, harassed, jailed, and surveilled. The world’s media came to St. Louis and shone a spotlight on the injustices here. Journalists were arrested for doing their job. ArchCity Defenders, the St. Louis–based civil rights law firm I co-founded, filed dozens of federal civil rights class actions against Ferguson and nearby cities along with the St. Louis University School of Law’s Legal Clinics, Alec Karakatsanis, and others. The Department of Justice launched an investigation and entered into a consent decree with the city after concluding the Ferguson Police Department systematically violated black people’s civil rights to increase revenue. The Ferguson Commission pulled in volunteers who devoted time and energy to hearing the voices of the most affected people and making recommendations for change over the course of 19 meetings and an entire year.

The fight for change took a lasting toll. People who were beaten, tear-gassed, and threatened by police still suffer psychological damage from it five years later. Bruce Franks, for instance, led protests, fought the system, won election to the Missouri House of Representatives, and then resigned in 2019 because of significant mental health challenges (he recently revealed he has contemplated suicide). Several young men involved in the protests—Edward Crawford, Bassem Masri, Darren Seals, MarShawn McCarrel, Danye Jones—died suddenly in the past five years.

[...]

If progress can be measured through stronger police accountability, the results are decidedly mixed. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, pushed by local organizers, has placed an unprecedented number of St. Louis police officers on an exclusion list, refusing cases they bring and not allowing them to testify. She’s brought criminal charges against more than a dozen officers and attempted to overturn a convictionher office won based on lying officers and bribed witnesses. For these efforts, she has been derided by the police officers union and several of the region’s most prominent lawyers. Similarly, newly elected St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell campaigned on reform under the close watch of local activists. He has already brought charges against a police officer who shot an alleged shoplifter in the stomach, something that never would have occurred under former prosecutor Bob McCulloch’s regime.

These prosecutions represent a small step toward acknowledging the knife is there. But other recent events suggest few other officials agree. Most notably, St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley walked free in September 2017 despite the existence of a video that showed him saying he was “going to kill this motherfucker” shortly before he shot Anthony Lamar Smith with his personal weapon. St Louis Circuit Judge Timothy Wilson, who is white, ruled that Anthony Lamar Smith likely possessed a weapon, even though none was recovered at the scene, because “the Court observes, based on its nearly thirty years on the bench, that an urban heroin dealer not in possession of a firearm would be an anomaly.”

Mirroring scenes from 2014, during the protests that followed Stockley’s acquittal, St. Louis police beat and trapped people, deployed chemical munitions in violation of a federal court’s injunction, and taunted protesters with chants of “Whose streets? Our streets!”

Ben Westhoff at The Verge:

Most Americans had never heard of Ferguson before August 2014, but the protests following Brown’s killing piggybacked on the nascent Black Lives Matter coalition and helped inspire huge demonstrations in New York, Baltimore, St. Paul, and other cities.

“Ferguson” became shorthand for the national push for racial justice, even while parts of Ferguson, the city, were left in rubble. Despite the damage, a consensus soon developed that Ferguson shouldn’t just be saved. Community members, activists, government officials, and business leaders alike worked to remake it better than ever.

“Maybe this is an opportunity,” said Reggie Jones, the mayor of adjacent municipality Dellwood, which was also hit hard by the damage. In the first three years following Brown’s death, upwards of $65 million was invested in Ferguson and the surrounding community.

Meanwhile, spurred by a Department of Justice report that shamed city officials for policies that persecute poor African American residents, Ferguson began curtailing predatory fees and fines and systemic, racial discrimination, slashing “driving while black” fines and hiring a diverse police department. The movement led to the election of a reform-minded St. Louis County prosecutor named Wesley Bell who defeated longtime incumbent Bob McCulloch, the man who announced that the officer who killed Michael Brown would not be charged.

Even with the groundswell of activism, the reforms, and the influx of redevelopment dollars, life is not better for low-income and black Ferguson residents five years after Michael Brown’s death. In fact, by a number of measures — including murder rate, black poverty rate, and small business revenue — it’s worse, and the lack of progress can be seen most vividly on and around West Florissant Avenue.

These trends are not just confined to Ferguson. In 2015 for the first time, US suburbs had more poor residents than the cities. But Ferguson is a particularly disturbing prototype. Having inspired people around the globe to rise up against police brutality, it has fallen prey to deeper problems, structural failures of design and planning implemented long ago. In a city oppressed by systemic racism, the infrastructure and policy — literal systems — are perhaps just as insidious.

[...]

Ferguson was incorporated as a city in 1894, 120 years before Michael Brown’s death. With good railway access and, later, good freeway access, it became a thriving bedroom community to St. Louis. Though a small section of the town was known as “Little Africa” — where some black families lived in log cabins — life was downright Rockwellian for most white families, and the population began to accelerate after World War II.

“Grocery stores took orders over the telephone and delivered them later that day,” recalls longtime Ferguson resident Delores Herr Bretch in the book Ferguson: A City Remembered, looking back fondly at the idyllic 1940s of her childhood. “Service stations picked up your car, did any needed work, filled it up with gas and delivered it back to your home. Doctors made house calls, milk-men delivered and the White Bakery Company sold door-to-door. Oh, those yummy cinnamon rolls!”

But racial animus began to rear its head. Long before Donald Trump’s presidency, in 1975, a Ferguson councilman named Carl V. Kersting wanted to build a 10-foot-tall fence along the city’s border with Kinloch, the all-black town whose school district a court had just ordered Ferguson to annex.

Ferguson mayor James Brawley scuttled the fence plan, however. And according to Ferguson, he went on to march with Kinloch mayor Clarence Lee on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

Ferguson, by then, had nearly 30,000 residents, but demographics were beginning to shift. One catalyst was the closing of St. Louis’ most famous housing project, Pruitt-Igoe, which housed thousands of black residents.

Once hailed as an architecturally forward model for utopian living, within a few years of opening, the projects had descended into squalor. In 1972, the demolition of the towers began. The Section 8 voucher program was launched soon afterward, allowing displaced people to live wherever they wanted. In part because, unlike some other suburbs, Ferguson did not have restrictions against high-density housing, black residents who wanted to live in apartment buildings began moving there in large numbers. White flight to further-flung exurbs followed, and Ferguson’s home prices began dropping. Its tax base and public school system eroded, and the crime rate rose.

Not all of the white people left, however. The transition from mostly white to mostly black in Ferguson and surrounding municipalities has been happening for decades in fits and starts, and remnants of the old guard can still be seen. At the southern end of the West Florissant Avenue corridor lies, of all things, one of St. Louis’ most exclusive golf courses, the Norwood Hills Country Club, which once hosted the PGA Championship. Its immaculately tended, sprawling grounds offer wine tastings and tennis lessons by certified professionals, and it has almost certainly never been visited by most of the residents living in the low-income housing that surrounds the facility.

While Ferguson has its haves and have-nots, it is not the dystopian place portrayed in the media. Most of the coverage focused on the racism of municipal officials, rarely noting that the city, overall, is progressive in many ways, with large amounts of subsidized housing as well as great parks and leafy streets of well-maintained craftsman bungalows and colonial revivals. An economically and racially diverse crowd shops in Ferguson’s downtown area, which is walkable and anchored by cute local businesses, including a bicycle shop and a brewpub. Every May, thousands jog through the streets for 5K and 10K twilight runs.

One thing Ferguson increasingly lacked, however, was money. As the Clinton administration gave way to the Bush and Obama years, its infrastructure was aging and funds to maintain it were running out. Even with big-box retailers and a Fortune 500 company, Emerson Electric, within its city limits, because of misguided tax incentive schemes and a Missouri law designed to keep local taxes low, Ferguson received only a pittance in property taxes from large companies like Emerson, which was only contributing an estimated $68,000 annually as of 2013.

So it balanced its budget in the worst possible way: on the backs of the town’s poorest residents who paid excessive, debilitating fines and fees for petty offenses, including “driving while black” — offenses that could land them in jail if they didn’t pay.

Anger at such institutionalized mistreatment by police boiled over following Michael Brown’s killing on August 9th, 2014. The next evening, attendees of his candlelight vigil expressed their outrage over his death by sacking local stores, which was soon followed by the first wave of protests, riots, looting, and burning. An even more destructive wave followed in late November, after prosecutor Bob McCulloch’s announcement that Officer Darren Wilson, who killed Brown, would not be indicted.

Has truth itself become a popularity contest now?