Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old Black youth, was shot dead by police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014, on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. His body was left in the street for hours. That simple horrific incident, and the sustained protests that followed, would change lives, attitudes, careers, and the direction of Black politics in the United States.
Walking down the street with a friend hours after a minor altercation at a local convenience store, Michael Brown was not in the mood to be told what to do. And the white cop who stopped him, Darren Wilson, riding alone in a patrol car, was not in the mood to have his orders disobeyed. Wilson told Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson not to walk in the street. They talked back to him, telling Wilson they were almost at their destination and would be on the sidewalk soon enough. At that point, they were just two young Black men, who presumably, in the mind of the officer, needed to be “checked.” He then allegedly realized that Brown fit the description of a person involved in a shoving and shoplifting incident at a local convenience store; things escalated from there.1
Wilson later testified that Brown “looked like a demon” on the day the confrontation and killing occurred. In other words, he was not afforded the status of human—not because of what he had done but because of who he was. He was not just a husky teenager with a cocky attitude. He was not a kid who loved video games or had struggled in high school; he was not a son whose mother had struggled to put food on the table and was planning to go to college.2 He was not an unarmed local kid simply refusing to follow instructions. He was a “demon.” Wilson’s view, as it turns out, was not so inconsistent with that of other white Ferguson police officers regarding local Black youth, as demonstrated in a damning Department of Justice report that documented a pattern of consistent racial profiling, harassment, and strong-arm tactics by the Ferguson police.3
There was no videotape of Brown’s murder, and the victim obviously could not tell his side of the story. Darren Wilson described an implausible set of events that conveniently absolved him of any wrongdoing in this case. According to him, he simply told Brown and his friend to walk on the sidewalk, not in the street. They refused, and a heated exchange ensued. Brown allegedly reached into the police car (knowing full well that Wilson was armed), threatened Wilson, and “forced” him to fatally shoot the teen. Any reasonable person would question the veracity of such an account. What is uncontested, however, is that at the end of a brief exchange, an unarmed young Black teenager was dead in the street. What happened next probably triggered rebellion as much as the shooting itself. Michael Brown’s lifeless body was left in the middle of Canfield Avenue as crowds gathered and news of the latest murder spread by cell phone, texts, and Twitter. This callous disregard for Brown’s basic humanity had “Black Lives DON’T Matter” written all over it.
Ferguson’s Black community was outraged at Brown’s murder. I tell the story of Brown talking back to Darren Wilson, and the alleged convenience store incident, to make a point. By all indications, Michael Brown was not a saint. However, in the resistance that followed his death, organizers insisted he did not have to be. There did not have to be a correlation between “sainthood” and Black citizenship. This was an important shift in the discourse about who is or is not a sympathetic victim of injustice. Brown did not have to be a church-going, law-abiding, proper-speaking embodiment of respectability in order for his life to matter, protesters insisted. And they insisted loudly.
After the shooting, neighbors initially stood around in disgust, witnessing the grizzly spectacle and demanding answers. After the body was removed, protests and vigils sprang up spontaneously. A memorial with flowers, photos, and stuffed animals was first set up at the site of the shooting. A police car reportedly drove over the makeshift memorial and destroyed it, which many saw as another gesture of callous disregard for Black suffering and mourning. The second night, hundreds of Ferguson residents poured into the streets. They marched, chanted, sang, and refused to disperse when police demanded that they do so. They were fed up. This would not be just another routine police murder. Not this time. What had been routine would become unacceptable.
Many chants reverberated throughout the Ferguson uprising, including “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” which evoked reports that Brown was in a surrendering posture when he was gunned down. However, it is the powerful and far-reaching slogan “Black lives matter” that finally took hold as the rubric under which a larger movement would ultimately rally. Some have argued that the term was imposed upon the movement by media, who latched onto it. But whatever propelled it into the public square, it struck a chord with Black people and others. Understanding that the systemic criminalization and devaluation of Black life is part of the current regime of racial capitalism is crucial to understanding Brown’s murder and why “Black lives matter” as a slogan has had such a deep resonance. It is a counternarrative to the barrage of messages that insist the lives of the Black urban poor do not matter.4
Scholar and journalist Marc Lamont Hill makes the compelling and provocative assertion that the Michael Browns of the world have been relegated by the state and dominant society to the status of “nobody.” In his words, “To be Nobody is to be considered disposable. . . . Underneath each case (of state violence) is a more fundamental set of economic conditions, political arrangements, and power relations that transform everyday citizens into casualties of an increasingly intense war on the vulnerable.”5 He cites underfunded schools, lack of access to affordable housing and jobs, as well as heavy-handed policing and a behemoth prison industry as some of the weapons amassed against young Black men like Brown, who have become “excesses” to the current formal economy. The Ferguson uprising insisted that Michael Brown was indeed “somebody.”
At the outset, the Ferguson protests included an assortment of forces: religious leaders held candles and knelt in prayer; Black civic leaders and elected officials from St. Louis, like Antonio French, who became ubiquitous on Twitter and CNN, gave speeches and interviews. But there was another group that took to the streets and held the streets. It was their bold actions that engendered the slogan “Whose Streets? Our Streets,” also the title of a powerful 2017 documentary about Ferguson. They were angry and fed-up Black youth—Michael Brown’s peers—who were tired of being harassed by the local white police force. They were young people who would eventually read the whole system of injustice into Brown’s untimely death, and disrespected corpse. Some protested peacefully but defiantly, while a small number took out their anger on parked cars and, eventually, on local businesses. There was looting. Windows were smashed, cars and trashcans were torched, and a few cars were overturned in the course of the uprising. However, for the most part protests were both militant and nonviolent at the same time.
The bottom line was that in a few short days, after a series of incendiary actions by local authorities, Ferguson’s Black population had become ungovernable. Those who sought to govern had lost all credibility with a key sector of the population. Local police had little influence on the crowds, and curfews were ignored. On August 18, Missouri governor Jay Nixon called in the National Guard, which only added to the tensions.
From the very beginning, a key factor fueling the historic Ferguson rebellion was the hyperbolic and militaristic response of the local and state authorities. Ferguson’s police officers (and St. Louis– area backup teams) showed up heavily armed with combat weapons and tanks—surplus from the US military.6 Local cops took a hostile approach from the start. There were numerous accounts of cops taunting the protesters, rough-handling reporters, and using a level of force seemingly designed to be provocative.7
One local person who became a prominent leader in the streets of Ferguson that summer and fall was Brittany Ferrell, a young nursing student with a six-year-old daughter. She impacted the struggle, and the struggle profoundly impacted her. Ferrell had been active on her college campus before August 2014, but nothing prepared her for the uprising. Brittany, having heard about the shooting on social media and feeling she had to do something, returned home early from vacation to see what was going on. She remembers having a conversation with her young daughter to try to explain the grim reality before they went out to join protesters in the street. That was day 2. From that point on she was drawn into the protest and became one of its most formidable voices. She was out there every day for weeks, lost her job, and found an exhilarating sense of purpose and community; at the same time, she experienced a lot of outright “cruelty,” in her words, in the form of sexist and homophobic remarks from a small but vocal group of fellow protesters: “It was as if because my body was unavailable [to men] I was out of my place or I was trying to emasculate Black men.”8 Nevertheless, she persevered, with these experiences fueling her feminist sensibilities as well as her determination to continue resisting racist police violence toward all Black people.9
Ferrell went from a neophyte protester motivated by a visceral anger at injustices she had witnessed her whole life to a savvy, and seemingly fearless, organizer. Along the way, she participated in meetings and strategy sessions and helped organize workshops on women’s leadership. She honed her public-speaking and chant-leading skills. She sought advice from those with more experience. “I would never downplay the knowledge that Merv [Marcano from Blackbird], Patrisse [Khan-Cullors], and Alicia [Garza] brought to the situation,” she reflected. “They brought wisdom from their experience and from elders.”10 She sought out advice from Garza in particular, and her counsel was helpful. In addition to acknowledging those who came from elsewhere, Ferrell remembers and recognizes that she was inspired by those local people whose names never made it into the newspaper: Tony Rice, Ebony Williams, Derek Robinson, Diamond Latchison, and Low-Key from Lost Voices, who was only fifteen when the protests began.11
Kayla Reed is another St. Louis–area local whose life was changed by the murder of Michael Brown that fateful summer day in August 2014. After she finished her shift as a pharmacy technician, her “cracked and crappy” Samsung phone was lighting up with texts about what had just happened in Ferguson.12 She picked up her friend Tef Poe, and they were out on the streets the first night to participate in the protests, not knowing how long they would be sustained. “I went to sleep that night thinking it was over,” she recalled, “but I woke up and it wasn’t.”13 That recognition became a pivot point for Kayla and sent her life in directions she had not foreseen. She, like so many others, was enraged by the heavy-handed tactics of the police and inspired by the courage of her fellow protesters.
Kayla keenly observed the dialectics of struggle in Ferguson. There was, on the one hand, a great sense of camaraderie and community building. On the other hand, there were tensions, fissures, and even budding hostilities between different sectors of the embryonic movement and between different personalities. Kayla spent a lot of time at a local apartment where Ferguson protesters crashed. Some called it a “safe house,” where people could eat, sleep, and refuel before returning to the streets. She remembers getting up every morning and cooking dozens of eggs and two pounds of bacon and potatoes for her new political family. That was an important period of bonding for the newly constituted activist community.
But among the local protesters, there were stresses—about money, tactics, and who could or should speak for the movement. And when supporters came from out of state, some locals reacted with a mixture of skepticism and gratitude. Kayla remembered that when she first met social media personality DeRay Mckesson, who had just arrived from Baltimore, she cursed him out because she was “trying to tell people to do one thing” and he was trying to tell her to do something else. They later became friends.14
Kayla, a confident, savvy young woman with a magnetic personality, is overall grateful to the movement for many things. “It’s not lost on me for one day that when this thing began I was a pharmacy tech, . . . and a lot of people invested in me” to develop her leadership skills. But there is something else profoundly personal. Kayla, the daughter and granddaughter of preachers, came out as queer after her involvement in the movement and is now happily partnered with a fellow activist. In reflecting on that process, she says, “The movement affirmed a part of me that I was not affirming for twenty-five years.”15 Her coming-out story illustrates the ways in which personal transformation and political transformation are, for many, bound together.
Personal stories like Kayla’s and Brittany’s played out against the larger backdrop of Ferguson, a town whose combined history, politics, and dominant culture created fertile soil to grow Black protest. Ferguson, Missouri, had an abusive, virtually all-white police force that had essentially occupied and ridden roughshod over the Black population of this little town for years. They were no doubt unsettled by the fact that Black residents were finally rising up against the tyranny that had become routine.16
The Ferguson uprising was a moment that reenergized veteran St. Louis activists like sixty-plus-year-old Jamala Rogers of the Organization for Black Struggle, who is lovingly referred to as “Mama Jamala” by younger activists and was one of the leaders and the first staff person of the Black Radical Congress. Rogers’s sage wisdom and firm but loving advice were enormous assets to the young activists who took to the streets in Ferguson. She was often the first person people called when they arrived in town to help, or when they encountered a problem or dilemma locally. Montague Simmons, the executive director of the Organization for Black Struggle (OBS), was also an indispensable human resource and anchor for the protesters, spending many hours in meetings, marches, and direct-action training sessions. A St. Louis native, Simmons took Brown’s death personally. When asked by journalist Jamilah Lemieux what he would say to the late Mike Brown if he could, an emotional Simmons replied, “I wish we’d been in the streets before August 9th. I feel like I failed Mike Brown, because I walked the same streets he did. I went to the same high school, the same junior high, and dealt with the same persecution before it ever touched him. And I fault myself for not finding ways to resist more thoroughly, for not agitating other folks’ ambition to resist in light of these systems before it got to him.”17 In addition to reenergizing seasoned organizers like Rogers and Simmons, the Ferguson protests also produced a cadre of new protesters, many of whom went on to become full-fledged organizers. Their experiences of personal and political transformation are important and telling. While high-profile activists have emerged from Ferguson, and from the Black Lives Matter Movement and Movement for Black Lives (BLMM/M4BL) in general, and have gained new levels of celebrity, most have labored in relative obscurity. It is the latter group whose stories are in some ways most revealing.
Ferguson activist Rasheed Aldridge, a small, slender young man who walks with a slight limp, grew up in St. Louis and was working at a car rental agency at the St. Louis airport when the Brown murder occurred. He had met his friend Janina, whom he considers to be like a sister, in the “Fight for 15” movement to increase the minimum wage. She worked at the McDonald’s in Ferguson and was one of the first people he called when the news of Brown’s murder blew up on Twitter. He got involved on day 2, telling Janina, “We need to take the skills we learned from the Fight for 15 [and try to help].”18 He said they quickly discovered the situation was too volatile and “organic” for more traditional modes of organizing. Still, he threw himself into the protests and was rewarded with new lessons and an expanded political community.
“I did not know those people from a can of paint when I first went out there, except my friend Janina, but we bonded and we tried to keep each other safe and protect each other”—for example, using Maalox and milk to ease the sting of teargas, aiding strangers who had, in the moment of standing on the barricades together, become their allies.19 This was in spite of, and alongside of, very real political and tactical differences among the protesters that were reflected in the slogans, actions, language, and sensibilities of the large amorphous crowd. Aldridge eventually left his job to become a full-time organizer. He was the youngest member of the Ferguson Commission, a body established by Missouri’s governor to assess the grievances that gave rise to the protests. He was also part of the delegation that visited the White House in December 2014 to meet with President Obama and his staff about the implications of Ferguson for the nation.
Nabeegah Azeri was working as a probation/parole officer, trying, in her own words, to “change the system from within” when the Ferguson uprising occurred. A friend from her Islamic Center recruited her to hand out water bottles to protesters. This began as an innocent and somewhat naïve gesture of support. “I didn’t know what else to do”—she confessed that this marked the beginning of her politicization. She got pulled into a peaceful march on day 7 of the protest, but when she and her friend’s eight-year-old son quickly encountered tanks and heavily armed police, she realized she was in the midst of something she had not anticipated. She began going to mass meetings, joined the jail support team, and launched herself into the uprising. She attended actions almost every night. A few months later, she quit her job and began working as a full-time paid staff person at the local nonprofit MORE (Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment). For Azeri and many others whom I interviewed, the Ferguson uprising intensified their political awareness and propelled them into a long-term commitment to the fight for racial and social justice.
Two non-Black, St. Louis–area women organizers who were also deeply involved in the Ferguson protest movement were Elizabeth Vega, a fifty-plus-year-old Chicana mother, who put her life on hold to join the protests and mobilizations after Michael Brown’s death, and Julia Ho, a twenty-three-year-old Asian American former student and environmental activist, who was working for a local nonprofit when the events of August 9, 2014, occurred. Elizabeth suffered arrest and harassment, lost her car, and endured many sleepless nights, but she considered enduring these things worth it to stand up to intolerable injustice. Julia helped to coordinate the essential “bail fund” for the hundreds of Ferguson protestors who were arrested over the course of the uprising.20 They were two among many. Vega also worked with a small group of local artists, including Damon Davis, to construct a piece of performance art that was showcased during “Ferguson October” (a large-scale resistance campaign). It was a wooden coffin with mirrored panels affixed to it on all six sides. Mirror Casket was carried through the streets of Ferguson during the protests to symbolize Brown’s death but also to have both protesters and police see their faces reflected in the mirrors. His death and their actions were entangled in the imagery that was produced. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture acquired the coffin, which is part of its collection of Black protest artifacts.21
All kinds of people took to the streets of Ferguson during the height of the protests, but as one organizer observed, at the end of the day “it was mostly poor people, poor Black people, who held it down the longest.”22 One such group, which became an important part of the Ferguson movement ecosystem, named themselves “Lost Voices.” These were local Black youth who literally set up camp on the streets of Ferguson after Brown’s murder. There is something about a physical occupation of public space that manifests the urgency of the moment. The encampment of a few dozen youth, all with a steel-willed determination to be visible symbols of resistance, evolved into a center for tactical debates, political education, trust building, and protest planning. The members of Lost Voices became mainstays in the nightly street protests.23
Two other important local groups that emerged out of Ferguson were Hands Up United and Millennial Activists United (MAU). Hands Up United was built largely by poet-activist and community-based intellectual Tef Poe and a cohort of St. Louis activists. The group describes itself as “a collective of politically engaged minds building towards the liberation of oppressed Black, Brown and poor people through education, art, civil disobedience and agriculture.”24 Hands Up United emphasizes the connection between race and class politics, pledging to counter “attacks on the poor” and “reclaim the war on hunger.”25 Hands Up United’s signature program is its Books and Breakfast gatherings, which are reminiscent of the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast programs. A meal is served in advance of a hearty political education session or film screening. The Books and Breakfast program has been replicated in a number of cities outside St. Louis.
Three of the four founders of MAU were Black queer women, who like many others were new to activism. They included Brittany Ferrell and Alexis Templeton, who in 2014 were twenty-five and twenty, respectively. They are now married to each other. The other cofounders were Ashley Yates and Larry Fellows III.26 Templeton speaks openly about her own personal trauma before the Ferguson uprising. Having lost her family in a tragic car accident a short time before the uprising, she found meaning and hope in struggle. Speaking at the 2015 LGBTQIA activists’ annual “Creating Change” conference in Denver, Templeton confessed that after struggling with depression and multiple suicide attempts, “Mike Brown saved my life. I was able to put my struggle in this bullhorn.”27 MAU made it clear from the outset that they were about fighting sexism as well as racism. Ferrell commented in an interview with Nylon magazine, and reiterated in an interview with the author, that “racism and patriarchy go hand in hand.”28 Feminist views and sensibilities like Ferrell’s percolated throughout the Ferguson protests and the national movement as it took off.
When I suggest that the movement is a Black feminist–led movement, I am not naively asserting that there was no opposition and contestation over leadership, or that everyone involved subscribed to feminist views. Nevertheless, when we listen carefully, we realize that the most coherent, consistent, and resolute political voices to emerge over the years since 2012 have been Black feminist voices, or Black feminist–influenced voices.
Darnell Moore, who spent time on the streets of Ferguson, co-coordinated the solidarity freedom ride that helped to launch the Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN), and interviewed the leaders of MAU for The Feminist Wire, writes, “Not all of the freedom fighters are Black men with masculine swag and pedigree. Not all of them are cisgender and straight and able-bodied. Some of us are women. Some of us are queer. Some of us are trans. Some of us are poor. Some of us are disabled. And, yet, all of us desire the same: an end to anti-black policies, practices, and ideologies.”29 These are the kinds of intersectional feminist politics that were injected into the protests in Ferguson.
Another set of political actors on the streets of Ferguson in the summer and fall of 2014 were local faith-based civil rights groups that joined forces to form the broad-based Don’t Shoot Coalition. In a different time, the local male clergy would have been in the forefront. But this time was different. Ferguson marked a pivotal turning point in the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black Freedom Movement in terms of class, gender, and the politics of sexuality. These variables were central distinguishing features of the struggle, as reflected both in the narratives of those who were involved for a sustained period and in the vision and principles that the new groups eventually put forth. As progressive activist and St. Louis minister Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, who was a core organizer during the Ferguson protests, put it, “I take my orders from 23-year-old queer women.”30
The stories of two other young activist women illustrate the ways in which Black feminist influence took hold in concrete ways. One is the political evolution of Johnetta (Netta) Elzie, a fierce young protestor (twenty-five years old at the time). Outraged over Brown’s death, she hit the streets when the Ferguson uprising began, and never looked back. The events of August 2014 also changed her life. A native of Black working-class St. Louis, Elzie was politicized in large part through social media, and Twitter became the primary medium for her activism. Enraged by what had happened in her community, having already lost a personal friend to police violence, Elzie unleashed a steady stream of tweets after Brown’s death, first to express her own anger and frustration and then to mobilize others to act. Early on in the protests, she met, befriended, and joined forces with Baltimore native DeRay Mckesson, who had quit his job as an administrator for the controversial Teach for America program, had migrated to Ferguson, and eventually became one of the most well-known faces on social media loosely associated with what came to be termed the Black Lives Matter Movement, although he has never been a member of BLMGN and is not a member of M4BL.
In the immediate wake of Brown’s murder, Elzie became ubiquitous on social media and ever present on the streets of Ferguson and in the planning meetings and debates that took place in local churches, in living rooms, and on street corners during those early, intensive days of the uprising. Her involvement propelled her into the national spotlight, where she landed on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, appeared as a guest on MSNBC, sat in meetings with politicians, and was featured in a glamorous spread in Essence magazine.31
Though Elzie was admittedly not an organizer or an activist before Brown’s murder, her newfound calling thrust her into unexpected conversations, exposing her to ideas she had never encountered in quite the same way, and powerfully impacted her evolving worldview. A January 2015 interview in the Atlantic magazine chronicles this evolution: “When I went out on August 9, it wasn’t because I was concerned with feminism. It was because I was concerned about black people,” she pointed out bluntly.32 But then she experienced two things that seemingly added a new dimension to her resolve. First, she observed Black men taking credit for the work of Black women organizers and usurping the mantle of leadership, when the majority of those she had seen on the streets most consistently were women. At the Ferguson protests, she had witnessed hundreds of Black women defying the cops and curfews and withstanding teargas and rubber bullets, but in her words, “When it was time to have meetings and private phone calls and the back door stuff[,] I’d go to these places and it would be predominantly male, predominantly heterosexual black men. . . . There would always be some man who would answer the question for me while I’m trying to talk.”33 This sexist behavior did not sit well with the outspoken young woman, who was coming into her own as an activist, and she did not hesitate to make her feelings known.
Second, she made new friends in the struggle, many of whom were Black feminists, and they talked with her “in great detail about feminism,” explaining the differences between various and competing feminist traditions. Elzie was influenced by her Black feminist comrades and her own gender experiences within the movement. Black feminist politics impacted her thinking, even if she does not place herself fully in that tradition. She concluded the interview this way: “I have met some of the most brilliant, smart, and beautiful black women ever. And they’ve changed my life. I’ve never felt so empowered before. . . . It’s nice to have sisterhood in struggle.”34 Even though Elzie may not label herself a feminist, the sentiments she expressed reverberate in the writings, speeches, and manifestos of Black feminists from the 1970s to the present.
The second story that exemplifies the influence of Black feminist ideas among Ferguson activists is the lesser-known story of Alisha Sonnier, who was already a socially conscious local teen leader before the uprising. As was the case with Elzie, Michael Brown’s death touched her deeply. Years earlier Sonnier had organized protests with other Black youth, who were routinely profiled, hassled, and harassed at their local shopping mall near Ferguson. She was aware of racism and was outspoken in standing up for herself and her friends, but she did not consider herself an organizer per se. Rather, she engaged in what most historians and movements and observers refer to as everyday acts of resistance. But that was the extent of it.35
When Michael Brown was killed, Alisha was eighteen years old, a recent high school graduate on her way to her first year of college at St. Louis University (SLU) in the fall of 2014. But echoing Elzie’s sentiments, Sonnier notes that the uprising in Ferguson opened her eyes, and “changed my life,” forever.36 On the second day of the protests, she and three friends, including her boyfriend, Jonothan, having heard about Brown’s death through social media, went down to Florissant Avenue, the epicenter of the protests, to see what was happening. Having heard a rumor of a vigil, they brought candles and expected that this would be the extent of their participation. As they approached what they thought would be a peaceful expression of mourning, they came upon a phalanx of heavily armed police. Immediately, Alisha knew this was different than any situation she had been in before.
A few minutes later, everything got very personal and even more dangerous. Jonothan, holding a sign that read “Freedom Ain’t Free,” began walking toward the police line. He and others marching with him were given a stark thirty-second warning to stop, but the police did not wait for him to comply. He was hit with pepper spray five seconds later and fell to the ground. Alisha wrapped his arm around her shoulder, and they limped toward the nearby home of a family friend, still not knowing what Jonothan had been doused with. “What’s wrong with the young brother?” a neighbor asked. Jonothan was in excruciating pain. He kept saying his skin was on fire. He was burning up. The man brought out his water hose in an effort to provide temporary relief, but a few minutes later the burning returned with greater intensity. Finally, they found some milk and poured it over Jonothan’s face, and the pain seemed to lessen. It was a startling wake-up call about the willingness of the state to use violence on unarmed Black protesters.37
Rather than being frightened and deterred by her encounter with police violence on the streets of Ferguson, Alisha was emboldened, and her sense of purpose was fortified. She dug in. She attended strategy meetings at St. John’s Church, one of the key meeting places; went out into the streets night after night; and found her voice. When college classes began that fall, she and her fellow students, along with community members, organized “Occupy SLU,” a massive encampment that essentially shut down the private Catholic university campus for an entire week until a set of thirteen demands were agreed to by the university administration. Working with Tribe X, a group of young Black activists (which she cofounded in the thick of the struggle); the Metropolitan St. Louis Coalition for Inclusion and Equality; and the SLU Black Student Alliance, Alisha was at the center of the occupation, and it was a powerful learning experience. But that was only the beginning of her growing political commitment.38
As Alisha’s understanding and political engagement deepened, and after she had a few hard-fought battles under her belt, she found issues of gender to be increasingly important to her in the context of this Black-led struggle against police violence. In reflecting back on her participation in the Ferguson protests a year and a half later, she was eager to recount not only the specific details of the street actions—the arrests and the late-night confrontations with the police—but also the ways in which her attitude and passion on a whole range of issues had expanded, especially regarding issues of gender and sexuality. “Sure, I had seen sexism before, but I really got to see it in the movement . . . the way the men treated us [at times, as black women] was like our lives didn’t matter.”39
Alisha experienced a kind of protective paternalism when some male leaders told women they should go home, implying they were not tough enough to be in the streets after dark. Her response was “I don’t need you to try to push me to the back. I don’t need you to erase me. I don’t need you to silence me.”40 There were also subtle and not-so-subtle forms of harassment and disrespect in the rough-and-tumble demonstrations and in the sometimes chaotic and unscripted meeting and social spaces. In some instances, men were literally “grabbing booties,” she recalled. “And we had to say, ‘Hey, brothers, don’t do that. We are not out here for that.’”41 Alisha overheard some men refer to Black women who had rebuffed their sexual advances as “bitches.”
In another instance, she overheard fellow male protesters mock and malign the relationship of a lesbian couple that had become prominent in the struggle: “They are just playing. They can’t be getting satisfied,” the men quipped. Alisha was highly upset and offended by these remarks, even though before her involvement in the movement, she had never been in political or social spaces with openly same-sex couples. She bristled at the hypocrisy of fellow protesters who would chant “black lives matter” one minute and disrespect straight women and queer women the next. She recognized other contradictions as well. How dare they, she thought to herself, not see the double standard in sagging their pants as a style statement and then criticizing young women who wore short skirts or “twerked” at parties as “hoes.” She did not hesitate to speak out when she witnessed and overheard such things.42
Through readings, teach-in discussions, and personal conversations with others involved in the struggle, Alisha began to explore broader, deeper, and far-reaching questions about the nature of oppression, injustice, and power. In the wake of her participation, and as a direct outgrowth of the Ferguson uprising, she began to develop a Black feminist point of view. Out of all the people who flooded into Ferguson to support the protest movement there, Alisha had been most intrigued and influenced by groups of women who were talking about gender and sexuality. In her words, they were critiquing the heterosexual binary of “good girls” versus “bad girls” imposed on Black (and other) women. Why couldn’t there be greater sexual expression and sexual freedom and autonomy, she began to wonder.43
On one level, murder by police and sexual freedom for Black women may seem like unrelated issues, but for young Black feminists, they were intimately related. For Alisha, fighting for liberation and freedom from police violence and harassment had raised the large and unwieldy questions, What freedom are we fighting for? And whose freedom are we fighting for? In other words, when protesters insist “Let’s get free,” do they mean free from just police abuse or something much more? For Alisha and most of those who have sustained their involvement, the answer is the latter.44
When the Department of Justice (DOJ), under heavy pressure from activists, conducted a six-month investigation of the Ferguson city government and police department, a portrait was painted that revealed even more of the backstory to Wilson’s confrontation with Michael Brown on that fateful summer day. The story was indeed much bigger than those two men. The DOJ documented what Black Ferguson residents already knew. Steady and consistent harassment and intimidation of the town’s residents, 67 percent of whom were Black, were perpetrated by an essentially all-white police force. In fact, harassing, arresting, and fining African American residents of the town had become a nefarious revenue source. The DOJ declared, “Police Department and court operated not as independent bodies but as a single money making venture. Investigators found that officers stopped and arrested people without cause and used excessive force almost exclusively against African-Americans.”45 Fines from misdemeanor violations and traffic offenses were used to fill municipal coffers at the expense of Black citizens. The majority-Black population of Ferguson felt under siege from a callous group of white cops and city officials, who saw them all as a resource to be ruthlessly exploited, as well as being some version of Michael Brown—that is, less than human. The situation in Ferguson resembled the segregated, racist-run hamlets of the Jim Crow South.
The many people I talked to who were active on the streets of Ferguson during what we now look back on as the historic 2014 uprising all insisted that to understand Ferguson, we have to look at the larger St. Louis area. St. Louis is a Rust Belt city that has suffered economically over the past few decades. Loss of jobs and housing has hit the city hard. The area surrounding the community center where the Organization for Black Struggle has its headquarters is physically devastated: dilapidated homes, vacant lots, and empty storefronts. This neighborhood is an extension of Ferguson. This is the backdrop against which the police violence and community resistance played out. The thirty-five-year-old OBS had been on the scene fighting these conditions long before the Ferguson uprising occurred and continued to play a leadership role during and after the uprising. Respected local leaders like OBS’s Montagne Simmons were on the streets day and night providing guidance, advice, and support to protesters. Jamala Rogers recalls that when the protests began, “Those already in the trenches … shifted into the role that best utilized their skills and talents.”46
Where there are large Black populations, high unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, and an active underground economy, there is heavy-handed policing, which takes different forms. So-called broken windows policing, a racist and highly flawed model, has been the modus operandi of the Chicago and New York police forces and many others across the country for years.47 The supposed logic maintains that smaller, seemingly benign offenses portend serious crimes, and tackling the former will prevent the latter. In other words, there is criminal behavior and “precriminal” behavior. This mind-set sets the stage for racial profiling and harassment of entire groups of people, who “might” be headed toward serious crimes. Michael Brown’s treatment at the hands of Ferguson police is an example of where this approach can lead: a petty, or perceived, infraction leads to confrontation and deadly results.
The initial phase of the Ferguson uprising sustained itself for about two weeks. Braving teargas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and the intimidating presence of the National Guard, local protesters were bolstered by outside allies, who filled the streets of Ferguson, defying the curfew with ferocious, spirited demonstrations. Given the number of people in the streets—unaffiliated, unorganized, and with varying levels of political consciousness—it is perhaps surprising that more random acts of vandalism and looting did not occur. But looting was indeed a small-scale part of the rebellion, a part that mainstream media and local officials latched onto in a feeble attempt to discredit the protests overall. It did not work. While some mainstream leaders took the bait and cleaved the protesters into good and bad actors, most did not do so successfully or effectively.
Even the media were divided. Commentators like Van Jones on CNN and Melissa Harris-Perry and Joy Reid on MSNBC questioned the ways in which more conservative Black journalists like CNN’s Don Lemon seemed to equate violence against people with violence against property. The “politics of respectability,” a layered and complex notion, is a longstanding mode of isolating and marginalizing those sectors of the Black community who do not conform to middle-class norms of behavior and comportment.48 In the 1940s, civil rights organizer Ella Baker cautioned against excluding the so-called town drunk from campaigns for civil rights for fear that his or her presence would somehow discredit the movement—as if proper behavior and politeness have ever protected Black people from discrimination or racial violence. For some observers, the rowdiness of the Ferguson crowds seemingly eclipsed the righteousness of their grievances. Positing another view, political scientist Fredrick Harris describes the politics of respectability and its relevance in this way:
What started as a philosophy promulgated by black elites to “uplift the race” by correcting the “bad” traits of the black poor has now evolved into one of the hallmarks of black politics in the age of Obama, a governing philosophy that centers on managing the behavior of black people left behind in a society touted as being full of opportunity. In an era marked by rising inequality and declining economic mobility for most Americans—but particularly for black Americans—the twenty-first-century version of the politics of respectability works to accommodate neoliberalism. The virtues of self-care and self-correction are framed as strategies to lift the black poor out of their condition by preparing them for the market economy.49
In other words, the principle of the politics of respectability is to advocate individual solutions to systemic problems and, conversely, to blame individual “bad” behavior and mistakes for system-wide conditions of racism and poverty.
A radical politics of intersectionality insists not only that marginalized sectors of oppressed communities be included in any political calculus for liberation but that their suffering, interests, and aspirations be at the very center of any movement concerned with social transformation. Those marginalized subjects include not only those deemed disreputable as sexual subjects, but others as well, which is why the new movements’ emphasis on class is also significant. Looters, for example, are stigmatized in another way: dismissed as “thugs” or “riff raff,” they are deemed undeserving of the rights supposedly afforded to law-abiding citizens. However, there is a political lens through which we can view a practice as controversial and seemingly random as looting. Poor people understand that an aspect of social control in a class society defined by gaping disparities in wealth is that police protect property, sometimes at the expense of the well-being of people. There is an armed line of demarcation between poor people and the things they cannot have but often need and deserve. When law and order break down, so does that line of demarcation. To make the point more bluntly, when homeless people occupy empty buildings, they are arrested for violating the property rights of absentee owners, and when hungry people invade a local grocery store and make off with food to feed their children, they too are punished by the state, even if the excess inventory was about to be discarded. The injustice of police violence against Black bodies is seen as contiguous with the everyday threat of violence that prevents the working poor, unemployed, and underemployed from having food, clothes, or even small luxury items that are dangled in front of them every day by the multi-billion-dollar advertising industry. Looting, in some people’s minds, may at least temporarily jettison that unjust arrangement. It is ironic but perhaps not terribly surprising that looting is sometimes portrayed as an even greater evil than the loss of human life.
The Ferguson uprising made international headlines and had a ripple effect across the country. Those who reflexively showed up in Ferguson days after the protests began included filmmakers and journalists, veteran activists, religious leaders, and ordinary folk who wanted to stand with the people of Ferguson. Young organizers showed up—like thirty-four-year-old New Yorker Maurice (Moe) Mitchell. Moe and others began to strategize alongside locals about ways to lengthen the reach of the Ferguson uprising and connect it to other struggles. Mitchell arrived in August and stayed through December. His role in stitching together local and national efforts was vital.
He arrived in Ferguson and immediately reconnected with St. Louis activists he already knew and began to pitch in. Mitchell brought with him years of organizing experience in a number of progressive electoral and grassroots campaigns. He was among a small group of movement-builders who gravitated to the energy Ferguson generated, adding fuel to the fire that local people had lit. Mitchell walked up and down the streets of Ferguson and talked to people, facilitated meetings that brought various organizations together, conducted direct-action trainings, and tapped his national contact list to bring other organizations and resources to the aid of Ferguson protesters. In the thick of the fray, Mitchell tweeted from Ferguson on August 17, “No hyperbole. No exaggeration. This is a war zone. Why is our government so intent on silencing these young people?”50 If the government was trying to silence them, Mitchell was determined to help amplify their voices.
Media from all over the world showed up to cover the Ferguson story. Palestinians halfway around the world watched the uprising on television, followed it through social media, and tweeted statements of solidarity. Banners shared on social media and held up by solidarity delegations that eventually visited Ferguson read, “Palestine Stands in Solidarity with Ferguson” and “Ferguson to Palestine, Occupation Is a Crime.” Palestinians also sent practical messages about how protesters could protect themselves from the effects of teargas.51 In South Africa (and London), there were solidarity actions that linked the injustices faced by Black people on that continent with the struggles of the people of Ferguson.
In the year after Brown’s murder, demonstrations took place in over 150 cities. In New York City, the Justice League, a group cofounded by veteran civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, in conjunction with a dozen or so other groups, called for massive demonstrations. People spilled into the streets, filling Times Square and clogging the West Side Highway in Manhattan. They shut down the Brooklyn Bridge, tied up the George Washington Bridge, and disrupted Columbia University’s campus. Some of the activity was organized, but not centrally, while some was purely spontaneous. There were no demonstration permits, no single leader galvanizing the masses, no premade signs that everyone carried. This was messy, and it was massive. Dozens of cities witnessed Black-led multiracial protests on a mass scale. Aerial views on news reports showed throngs of people marching through the streets of major cities, from Los Angeles to Chicago, in solidarity with Ferguson.
Clergy gave Black Lives Matter sermons and put banners on their churches. There were “White Coats for Black Lives” demonstrations by health providers and medical students. Then there was the formation of Law for Black Lives, which was organized by the Center for Constitutional Rights, and has now spun off as a freestanding group. And there were tiny community groups, student groups, groups of friends, and groups of activists in other struggles who made the Black Lives Matter slogan their own, scrawled it on handmade cardboard placards, and took it to the streets—engaging in civil disobedience on a large scale and disrupting business as usual. Some of these protests occurred in the immediate wake of Brown’s murder, and some occurred after the grand jury verdict.
Anticipating correctly that the grand jury would decide not to indict Darren Wilson in the fall of 2014, the loose, local coalition of groups and individuals that had sustained the Ferguson protests called for a massive fall resistance campaign, which they called “Ferguson October.” They invited caravans of supporters to join them. Even though the Darren Wilson decision would not be handed down until November, thousands still heeded the call to come to Ferguson in October. The hacker group Anonymous showed up and took credit for temporarily shutting down the Ferguson police department’s website, threatening further actions. “You should have expected us,” one of their signs read.52 Legal teams came from the National Lawyers Guild, the Advancement Project, and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Organizers working against the inhumane deportation schemes of the US government immediately saw the Ferguson connection. Marisa Franco, leader of the national coalition Not One More, which has now evolved into Mijente, and a longtime friend of Alicia Garza’s, stressed the political significance of having immigration organizers stand in solidarity with Ferguson. In an MSNBC article she authored entitled “Latino Communities Must See Ferguson’s Fight as Their Own,” Franco writes, “So much lip service is given to the idea of the ‘black-brown’ unity. This is an opportunity to go beyond theory and rhetoric. We learn infinitely more by doing, and we can build and fortify unity between our communities through joint struggle. A good ally shows up, and pushes what’s moving and plugs in where help is needed. Let’s listen carefully on how we can show up and contribute.”53 The same overpolicing policies used on Black communities have also been directed at communities of undocumented persons. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the second-largest criminal investigative agency in the United States, and its detention prisons have rivaled the growth of state-run and private prisons, which have become a booming industry.54
The massive turnout for “Ferguson October” revealed a scale of sustained organizing and network building that made good on the often-repeated statement “This is a movement, not a moment.” The signs people carried represented the breadth of the informal but far-reaching coalition that had grown up out of the soil of Ferguson. In addition to the signs linking Ferguson to Palestine and to immigrant rights were those of LGBTQIA groups, faith-based groups, prison abolitionists, and environmentalists. The progressive wing of the organized labor movement showed up as well. Service Employees International Union president Mary Kay Henry declared, “We stand with our brothers and sisters in Ferguson.” She called for peaceful demonstrations at courthouses around the country to protest the nonindictment of Darren Wilson.55
Activists had already jettisoned the “All Lives Matter” challenge, which attempted to dilute and diffuse the potency of the Black Lives Matter message. Of course all lives matter, movement leaders responded, but this new movement was responding to the systematic devaluation of Black life in particular. If we were all equally vulnerable, there would be no need to underscore the importance of Black life, but that was clearly not the case. It was this understanding of the pervasiveness and persistence of anti-Black racism that was reflected in the eclectic mass of individuals and organizations that came together for the Ferguson demonstrations.
In the wake of #BlackLivesMatter’s freedom rides to Ferguson, Garza, Tometi, and Khan-Cullors got together to explore what was next for their network and base. People who had participated in the rides asked them to set up some kind of organizational structure to continue and expand their efforts. This had not been their intent, but they conceded that something was needed. So the Black Lives Matter Network was born and morphed into the BLMGN. Chapters subscribe to a set of principles, but beyond that they are given a great deal of autonomy and freedom to define their priorities, their campaigns, and even their membership.56 At the outset, some chapters, like Denver’s, for example, even included non-Black members.
On the one hand, this loose structure represented a refreshing new approach to national leadership. On the other hand, it represented new and perhaps unexpected challenges. Alicia, Opal, and Patrisse were thrust into the spotlight as the term Black Lives Matter went viral. In a powerful essay entitled “A Herstory of the BlackLivesMatter Movement,” Alicia insisted that the three founders not be erased from the origins of the term as it took off and began to be deployed in ways inconsistent with their intentions or politics.57 After Ferguson, however, and even though the cofounders of #BLM and BLMGN insisted repeatedly that they were not personally leading or speaking for an entire movement, they often found themselves cast in that role; with that casting came lavish praise, harsh criticisms, and unrealistic expectations.
Predictably, the media erroneously conflated the BLMGN with the entire multifaceted movement. At the same time, others with no connection to the network’s chapter structure or its leadership, and no connection to the myriad of organizations that legitimately fall under its larger banner, literally hijacked the mantle of BLM. This further complicated things. These were the so-called rogue BLM chapters, such as the Cuyahoga County “chapter” in Ohio that endorsed a Republican candidate for state senate to the horror and chagrin of the national BLMGN leadership, which immediately disavowed the group.58
A critical dilemma early on for BLMGN as it began to receive donations and grants to support its work was staffing. None of the three cofounders of BLMGN was ever on staff. However, they brought in longtime Oakland-area activist and leftist Ayoka Turner, then an advanced seminary student, to help with the work. She was hired and devoted considerable time and energy for the first two years, working to get the network established. Later, other staff were brought on board to handle communications and outreach and coordinate the chapter work. They were Nikita Mitchell, Miski Noor, Kandace Montgomery, Shanelle Matthews, and others. As of 2017, there is a solid chapter structure, decision-making procedures, and plans for internal leadership development. The network is still decentralized, but it rests on the work of a number of robust local chapters, including those in Chicago, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and the Twin Cities.
In the wake of the Ferguson uprising, Black freedom organizing overall took on new urgency. Similar questions and dilemmas that faced BLMGN also faced the larger movement. So from the summer of 2014 to the spring of 2015, numerous meetings, formal and informal convenings, and retreats took up a range of questions. Some of these were closed strategy sessions involving different organizational representatives. However, the largest public movement gathering was in Ohio, one year after Michael Brown’s death.
In Cleveland, in the summer of 2015, thousands gathered under the banner of the Movement for Black Lives, a new coalition in the making that had been formed the previous December to wrestle with critical questions facing the nascent movement of which BLMGN, BYP100, Million Hoodies, and Dream Defenders were a part. The tight-knit Blackbird collective, aided by activists on the ground in Cleveland, was instrumental in pulling together the historic conference at Cleveland State University, which took place July 24–26, 2015. The convening involved representatives from dozens of organizations in the planning process—a process that was politically and logistically challenging. While many groups were invited to help plan the conference, participation was, not surprisingly, uneven. The gathering drew a diverse crowd of over two thousand Black people from around the country, including Mississippi organizers from the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, who hosted a dynamic workshop on their Cooperation Jackson campaign to transform and liberate that historic city. Other attendees included Black food justice organizer Dara Cooper; Black and Puerto Rican activist and Green Party former vice presidential candidate Rosa Clemente; filmmaker Byron Hurt; Oakland journalist Margaret Prescod; contingents from Million Hoodies United, Dream Defenders, Southerners on New Ground, Project South, and the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center in Detroit; and a contingent of Ferguson protesters. There was also a dynamic workshop by Paris Hatcher, the creative force behind Black Feminist Futures Project, a volunteer collective that hosts “visioning salons,” to envision just futures, and media and cultural interventions that promote the leadership, empowerment, and amplified voices of Black women. Mariame Kaba of Project NIA and Page May with the We Charge Genocide collective facilitated a workshop about Chicago’s “Reparations Now!” campaign, a successful crusade that culminated in a city ordinance providing reparations to victims of police torture. Some veteran Black feminist activists from the 1980s and ’90s also showed up to lend support. There were at least two dozen members of the old Black Radical Congress present, as well as activists from INCITE! and Critical Resistance.
The emotional highlight of the Cleveland gathering was the opening session, which featured family members of and a photo tribute to dozens of victims of police violence. One by one, mothers, siblings, and children of those slain stepped forward and said the names of their loved ones, followed by “this is why I fight.” Many in the audience were visibly shaken and rose to applaud at the end of the session, often with tears streaming down their faces. There was also a people’s assembly, conducted with an audience of one thousand plus, led by Project South’s Ash-Lee Henderson, the new codirector of the legendary Highlander Center in Tennessee as of 2017. She walked the crowd through a list of statements, asking for affirmation to measure the level of consensus on some core principles that would guide M4BL going forward. At the end of the two-day gathering, some people left with a mood of hopeful anticipation about what would come next, while some, disappointed that there were not more concrete outcomes, still wondered what level of unity was possible.59 Echoing through the cavernous auditorium and energizing the crowd was the recorded sound of singer Kendrick Lamar’s popular tune “Alright.”
A smaller retreat was held a week later in upstate New York at the YWCA Conference Center, hosted by Alicia Garza and Linda Burnham of the National Domestic Workers Alliance under the banner “Now That We Got Love, What Are We Gonna Do?” The goal of that intergenerational gathering, which included civil rights movement icon Bob Moses, labor leader Gerry Hudson, movement elders Makani Themba and Jamala Rogers, and myself, as well as a hundred others, was to share analyses, try to make sense of the moment, and determine if a stronger consensus could be achieved among the diverse forces that had been assembled. It is important to note that Jamala and Makani played very special roles in the movement upsurge from the outset. Jamala was a central figure giving strategic advice and practical support in Ferguson, as a longtime St. Louis organizer. Makani was a national resource. Of her contribution, activist Ash-Lee Henderson says, “Makani Themba’s commitment to sharing the lessons of past liberation movements, her clarity of this current political movement and our positionality in it, and her revolutionary vision for the future of our people has made her a crucial support and wise sister-elder. Our strategies and relationships are stronger because of her commitment to our leadership, relationships, and our building of successful and impactful movements.”60 Stories were shared and relationships were deepened, but much more work remained.
A year later, the effects of the Ferguson uprising against racist state violence were still being felt throughout the state and the country, when the flagship campus of University of Missouri, ninety miles from Ferguson, erupted in protest over racist incidents on campus. The school, located in Columbia, Missouri, but commonly referred to as Mizzou, was the site of a prolonged hunger strike, a boycott of classes, a tent city encampment, and large boisterous demonstrations. Many of the student leaders at Mizzou had visited the Ferguson protests, and others had been inspired from a distance. An activist group formed on campus calling itself “Concerned Students 1950,” a reference to the year Black students were finally admitted to Mizzou. Ultimately, when the predominately Black football team refused to play (foreshadowing the heroic actions of professional football player Colin Kaepernick who “took a knee,” refusing to stand during the national anthem at games to protest racism and police violence) as a show of support for the protests, the university acceded to some of the students’ demands, and the president and chancellor were both forced to resign. The year before the major Mizzou protests, a group of young Black women activists had laid some of the political foundations that made the large mobilization possible. The 2015 Mizzou protests were the most visible campus actions, but there were smaller rallies, vigils, and direct actions in solidarity with and as a part of BLMM/M4BL took place on nearly eighty campuses throughout the country.61 An outgrowth of these disparate campus struggles was the formation of the Black Liberation Collective, a national network of Black student activists.62. In 2014–15 Missouri was a hub of resistance to anti-Black racism, influencing and inspiring political actions throughout the country. By the spring of 2015, Baltimore would become another center of protest.