Ferguson Prepared America For This Moment

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.

The unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 was sparked by the police killing of Michael Brown on Aug.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Louis police union for Black officers that formed in 1972 to combat racial discrimination in policing.

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.

“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.”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Louis County, which was largely built from small white-flight towns designed to keep Black residents out.

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.

Over the next few months, in municipal court after municipal court, I watched mostly white police officers, court officials and judges treat Black citizens facing minor municipal ordinance violations with disgust and disdain as they quickly churned through cases in an effort to raise cash.

Louis prosecutor ―  told one Black defendant to take his “rag” off, told another Black defendant to “get a job” and complained that a Black mother brought her child to court.

In Ferguson, the Justice Department’s investigation revealed, the police force, city officials and a part-time municipal judge conspired to raise revenue, and officers competed to see who could issue the largest number of tickets.

Ferguson effectively had a regressive tax system, enforced upon Ferguson’s poorest residents by armed police officers, that paid the salaries of an overwhelmingly white police force that disproportionately harassed Black residents for offenses such as “Manner of Walking in Roadway” and arrested domestic violence victims for failing to secure occupancy permits for their abusers.

The city’s former top clerk, one of those fired for sending racist emails, told a local television station that the racist emails “went through the whole station.” Beyond the outright bigots, the data illustrated that Ferguson’s overwhelmingly white police operated off of racial stereotypes.

More Black citizens were stopped, and Black drivers were more than twice as likely as white drivers to be searched, even though the white drivers that were searched were more likely to have been carrying contraband. .

Louis County police officer trained his sniper rifle directly at the crowd of peaceful demonstrators.

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.

Louis County police officer slammed my head on the door for good measure.

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.

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.

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.

There’s a lot of good police officers out there who protect and serve.

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.

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.

“For people in this country to talk about racial things is hard,” he said, echoing his speech a decade ago.

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.

Educating people on unfairness and injustice since the Ferguson unrest has often felt like pulling teeth, but Aldridge said he tries to maintain a sense of optimism about the progress that has and can be made.

Louis activist and rapper better known by his stage name Tef Poe, said that what people witnessed in Ferguson was people from all different backgrounds come together and “stand up against this police force that morphed into an army.” He sees the Ferguson unrest as a moment that pushed the United States a bit closer to living up to the promise of the Constitution

Louis do something that, in my opinion, hadn’t been done since 1776, which was force the democracy to actually be a democracy, to actually be what it said it is

Whether, as Holder joked, the Ferguson protesters are the grandfathers of the movement ― or perhaps the older siblings ― the largely young protesters who hit the streets of Ferguson less than six years ago said there’s already a change in the movement with the younger protesters coming up, many of whom were coming of age in a world where they’re constantly exposed to gruesome videos that remind them of their vulnerability

Elzie, who was 25 when she hit the streets of Ferguson and is now in her 30s, said that watching injustice unfold online has shaped the world of many of the youngest protesters

“I think that’s radicalized a whole generation of people, especially because they also just don’t have any hope for the future,” Elzie said, referring to the shrinking economic opportunities for the next generation of Black Americans that have been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic

The Ferguson unrest “opened up the gate” to a lot of the new faces that took to the streets in the wake of Floyd’s death, Aldridge said

Visceral moments like Floyd’s death on video, Reed said, help chip away at the walls blocking people from seeing the scale of problems in policing and beyond

“I do know this: America owes its readiness for this moment to the thousands of people who were on the streets in Ferguson, Baltimore and more,” Packnett said