We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (12 page)

Some nodded in agreement when McSpadden gave an interview to a local television reporter. “You took my son away from me. You know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate? You know how many Black men graduate?” she said, pausing a beat. “Not many! Because you bring them down to this type of level where they feel like, ‘I don’t got nothing to live for anyway, they gon’ try to take me out
anyway
.’”
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People began chanting, “Kill the police!” Gunshots were heard nearby, and dozens more county and Ferguson cops—almost all white—were called. They arrived wearing bulletproof vests and brandishing assault rifles. They walked snarling police dogs up the driveways of the apartment complex, pushing people back toward their homes. In Canfield Green, Chief Jackson and St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar’s Ferguson resembled nothing so much as Bull Connor’s Birmingham.

Smartphones and TV cameras were capturing all of it, and so, belatedly, the police tried to control the flow of images. They finally draped a long black cloth over Brown’s body, and erected knee-high orange blinders. Later, officers were stationed in a circle around his body and told to hold up blue tarps as if they were curtains.

Hours after Brown was killed, his neighborhood resembled a war zone. On West Florissant, the street from which Brown and Johnson had been walking home, what residents would come to call “the tanks” made their first appearance. County tactical operations units deployed Lenco BearCat vehicles—vehicles designed for SWAT teams to use “in hostile Urban Environments,” outfitted with half-inch-steel ballistic armor, two-and-a-half-inch-thick windows, and eleven gun ports, sold at a market price of $230,000 each.
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Through it all, Michael Brown’s body lay under the burning sun like a provocation and a question mark. It would be more than four hours before his body was removed from the street. In the dimming daylight, firefighters hosed down the road and the policemen took down the yellow tape. The crowd followed Lezley McSpadden into the middle of Canfield Drive. Someone had given her a bouquet of roses. She removed the petals and gently dropped them to mark the spot where her son’s blood still stained the road. People placed flowers and lit candles on the asphalt.

For Michael Brown’s family, friends, and neighbors, and all those who had borne witness that day, time severed into a before and an after. August 9 would forever be Day One.

*   *   *

Elizabeth Vega, a Mexican American teaching artist and counselor, was in despair. She had been dismayed by the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin the summer before, as well as by the recent shooting of John Crawford, who had been killed by police in a suburban Ohio Walmart while holding a toy BB gun that he intended to purchase. When she saw the pictures of Michael Brown’s body, she called her friends and they decided to meet in Ferguson as soon as they could. In a tiny green 1991 Saturn loaded full of art supplies and water, Vega and two companions headed north out of St. Louis City.

There were two main approaches into Ferguson. One took you from the I-70 off-ramp through a lush gully in Jennings past Lutheran North High and the Norwood Hills Country Club. You turned left past the fifty-acre Buzz Westfall Plaza on the Boulevard, with its Target and Schnucks market, its Burger King, GameStop, T-Mobile, and U.S. Bank, all redone in New Urbanist brick and tan. Then you drove down the hill on West Florissant, and when you crossed under the railroad tracks, you were in Ferguson.

Here the road narrowed and the buildings changed. On this side of the tracks, the mid-century buildings were low and worn, set back from the four-lane road with narrow parking lots. Beauty parlors, nail salons, boutiques, markets, storage lockers, and insurance brokers displayed modest window signs in neon and fluorescent. On August 9, the only buildings that broke the monotony were the McDonald’s on the near side and the QuikTrip just past where Canfield Drive began.

At dusk, a full moon was rising, and three of the four lanes on West Florissant had become a parking lot of police vehicles bearing the names of more than twenty-nine departments from across the county. BearCat tanks moved up the fourth lane toward Canfield. Police in MARPAT camo battle dress awaited instructions in the parking lot of Original Red’s BBQ next to the QuikTrip. Sirens lit the street in oscillations of blue and red. Helicopters buzzed above. Hundreds of Ferguson residents who had come down from their houses took in the scene with horror.

The other route into Ferguson began on South Florissant Road, running parallel to West Florissant, only two miles but a world away. Getting off the highway, you drove up its length through Cool Valley, past churches, gas stations, modest and tidy ranch homes, and the McCluer South-Berkeley High School, until you arrived in a tidy little business district where signs let you know you had arrived in Ferguson’s historic downtown.

Above the strip malls, bars, and restaurants, the municipal compound containing the fire and police departments rose like twin headstones. The building that housed the Ferguson Police Department and Municipal Court was just completing a multimillion-dollar makeover, the most expensive city infrastructure investment in recent memory. When Vega heard West Florissant was closed, she drove up this route.

Across the street in the parking lot of Andy Wurm Tire & Wheel, several people were gathering, including Vega’s friends from the Organization for Black Struggle, one of the area’s oldest racial justice organizations. Olubukola “Bukky” Gbádégeşin, an art and art history professor at St. Louis University; her partner, Jonathan Fenderson, a professor from Washington University; and Montague Simmons, a former investment banker who now chaired the Organization for Black Struggle, were all there. Soon they were making signs and talking strategy about how to get answers from the police.

Vega spotted a young toddler who looked anxious, confused, and lost. She walked over to him, bent down, and asked the boy, “Baby, are you OK?”

He answered, “They shot Mike-Mike and I saw him dead in the street.”

Vega took him and his six-year-old sister by the hand and said, “Come on, let’s make a sign.” As she took out the paper, the boy answered the question she was about to ask him—he had put his two small hands in the air. Together they traced his hands and arms onto the page and colored them in.

The group was now chanting, “No justice, no peace.” Elizabeth asked the children if they knew what justice meant, and they talked about that for a bit. The girl decided she wanted to make a sign from the chant, so Elizabeth spelled out the words and she wrote the letters, drawing a backward
J
. These were not the kinds of things, Elizabeth thought, that white people in the county would ever have to talk to their children about.

The OBS members knew some of the demonstrators—local labor organizers, solidarity activists, anarchists. But as the crowd swelled, it looked less like an ordinary protest.

“We were on the sidewalk initially, and people would be driving by and honking in support. There were some people who slowed down and pulled over and asked, ‘Why you all out here?’ And somebody would talk and explain to them what had happened,” Bukky Gbádégeşin recalled. “So many people pulled into the parking lot, and actually got out and started chanting with us.”

“For us, that was unprecedented,” said Montague Simmons. “The year before, [college honors student] Cary Ball Jr. had been shot twenty-some times [by St. Louis City police] and we may have been able to get thirty people at most.”

Gbádégeşin said, “When we started [on August 9], we had about twenty, thirty people. By the time we finished [that night], it was like two hundred people, two hundred fifty.”

The new demonstrators included mothers and grandmothers who had decided not to go home because they could not fathom the grief of laying their children down. They included young people like Tory Russell and Ashley Yates. Russell, a high school football coach and a day laborer, had left his house when he heard about Brown’s death. He brought with him a group of people from Canfield Drive.

Yates and her girlfriend had come straight from her mall job in the ritzy Plaza Frontenac. Yates had pulled up Black Twitter and her timeline was filled with the pictures. The two decided to head back across the county to where she had grown up. All of the protesters—old and young—felt as if they were being drawn into something bigger than themselves. As Elizabeth Vega put it, Michael Brown’s killing was “the collective ‘snap of the last straw.’”

As the evening of August 9 drew on, Ferguson police came out to ask who the leader of the protest was. By then, Yates recalled, “it was masses of people, so no one person could lead.” But the crowd in the lot selected Russell and a small group of others to go inside to speak to the police. Meanwhile they held the signs they had made—“Mike Brown RIP,” “Stop Cop Killing,” “Police Brutality Has to End.” They shouted, “Hey hey ho ho, killer cops have got to go.” They adapted other chants from the sixties or Occupy Wall Street. But soon they were chanting a brand-new one: “Hands up! Don’t shoot!”

Back on Canfield Drive, a Dumpster behind the apartments had been set on fire, and authorities quickly moved in. Lit by sirens, pushed back against the curb by growling police dogs straining at their leashes, residents and others who had earlier gathered around the scene of the crime were now surrounded by police on all sides. Near the lamppost that had marked the edge of the yellow tape line, they held their hands in the air. They too chanted, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!”

One cop walked his dog over to the memorial that McSpadden had made for her son and let it pee on the flowers and candles. After the rest of the policemen got into their vehicles to leave, car by car they rolled over what was left of the memorial.
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In the days to come, these memorials to Michael Brown Jr. would be destroyed over and over, as if to say,
This is the American way of remembering.
But every time the memorials were torched or removed, people returned to put them up again. They had found the words to respond:
This time you will not get away with it
.

Later, many would debate whether Brown actually had his hands up when he was shot. Some pundits asking if the movement had been built on a lie. But that debate missed the point: the image resonated—and would continue to grow in the public imagination—because it captured a bigger truth, a deeper feeling. “Hands Up” was about the ways we saw race in post–civil rights America, and perhaps especially about what we refused to see—the blindnesses of a “post-racial” era. If, as intellectual Ruth Gilmore had written, racism was about the ways in which Blacks, whites, and others differently experienced “vulnerability to premature death,” “Hands Up” was an argument for the right to live.
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And so began the daily protests in Ferguson against police brutality that continued unbroken for hundreds of days. It would become, as the Reverend Osagyefo Sekou said, “the longest rebellion in the history of the United States against police brutality.”

*   *   *

Two weeks after Michael Brown was killed, the Arch City Defenders—a group of progressive St. Louis–area lawyers—released an influential white paper that exposed the link between policing, poverty, racial profiling, and city budget revenues.

Throughout the county, Blacks experienced stops, searches, and arrests at much higher rates than whites. Driving home while Black on a four-mile stretch through eight municipalities could be like running the gauntlet of gangs in
The Warriors
. For Ferguson, heavy policing was strategic. The Defenders report revealed that in 2013 the Ferguson court disposed of 24,352 warrants—more warrants than there were residents. Blacks, who made up 67 percent of the city and 6 percent of the police force, suffered 86 percent of traffic stops and 93 percent of arrests. Court fines and fees were the second-largest source of city revenue.
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A single violation—whether for a broken car taillight or failing to subscribe to the city’s garbage collection service—could set off a cycle of disaster leading to eviction, loss of child custody, denial of loans and jobs, and even more jail time.
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If one missed appearances or payments, not only might she face compounded fees and additional court fines, she might be arrested on the spot when she came to the court window to try to pay it off. The Defenders called it a “modern debtors’ prison scheme.”

A Department of Justice investigation launched after the protests over Michael Brown’s killing found that Ferguson had implemented intentionally racist and unconstitutional practices in its policing and in its courts. Michael Brown and Dorian Johnson’s jaywalking stop was not unusual. It was actually routine. “From 2011 to 2013,” the DOJ noted, “African Americans accounted for 95 percent of Manner of Walking in Roadway charges, and 94 percent of all Failure to Comply charges.”
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The DOJ also stated bluntly that “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs.”
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City officials pushed the police department to increase ticketing to meet budget projections. In turn, the department tied officer promotions to “productivity”; that is, the number of citations an officer issued. In effect, this transactional approach coarsened the entire culture of Ferguson policing.

In one of its more stunning passages, the DOJ outlined how completely Ferguson’s system dehumanized its residents:

Officers expect and demand compliance even when they lack legal authority. They are inclined to interpret the exercise of free-speech rights as unlawful disobedience, innocent movements as physical threats, indications of mental or physical illness as belligerence. Police supervisors and leadership do little to ensure that officers act in accordance with law and policy, and rarely respond meaningfully to civilian complaints of officer misconduct. The result is a pattern of stops without reasonable suspicion and arrests without probable cause in violation of the Fourth Amendment; infringement on free expression, as well as retaliation for protected expression, in violation of the First Amendment; and excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
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