We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (13 page)

Black residents of St. Louis County had long lived this. “The trauma of it—this is something they’ve experienced for years on end,” said OBS leader Montague Simmons. “This is their normal.”

They remembered that early one morning in September 2009, during a heavy downpour, a welder named Henry Davis had pulled his car over in Ferguson because he couldn’t see well enough to drive. The police officer who arrived on the scene ran Davis’s license plate, confused him with a man of the same name wanted for a traffic warrant, cuffed him, and took him to jail. After the officer learned he had arrested the wrong man, he and three other cops reportedly beat Davis so severely they had to take him to the hospital. Davis was returned to jail, held for several days, and finally charged with “property damage” for bleeding on the cops’ uniforms.
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They recalled that, in 2011, the Jennings Police Department—where Darren Wilson had begun his police career—had been disbanded and all its officers fired because of allegations of corruption and mistreatment of Black residents. When a mother and her child fled a traffic stop, an officer gave chase and fired shots at their car. A woman who had called to complain that her parked van had been damaged in a hit-and-run was beaten bloody on her porch after she made a joke about the van that the cop misunderstood.

Some still spoke of the 2000 Jack in the Box killings, in which two white undercover officers fired twenty-one shots into a car of two unarmed Black men, Ronald Beasley and Earl Murray, in the Berkeley fast-food franchise’s parking lot. When community members criticized County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch for failing to indict the officers, he said of Beasley and Murray, “These guys were bums.”
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Here were the strange fruits of resegregation: when August 9, 2014, came, one zip code in downtown St. Louis—where, seventy-five years before, African Americans had been confined in slum conditions and where, in 2013, police had shot Cary Ball Jr. twenty-five times—was among the fastest-gentrifying neighborhoods in the country.
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But in North County, Ferguson—the once-invisible city transformed by Mike Brown’s death into the new symbol of America’s racial divide—would ensure that the trauma, hope, and humanity of the resegregated would no longer remain unseen.

*   *   *

Sunday, August 10: Day Two. Inside the Ferguson Police Department conference room, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar told reporters that Michael Brown had assaulted a police officer. He added that the officer had been placed on administrative leave, had been briefly interviewed Saturday, and would be interviewed again that day. He refused to give the officer’s name and suggested that the Ferguson PD might actually return the officer to active duty. Outside, protesters could be heard chanting, “Don’t shoot!”

St. Louis County and Ferguson police were withholding information, but on Twitter the hashtags #MikeBrown and #Ferguson had begun trending. It would not be until Friday that the world would know that the officer who had killed Michael Brown was named Darren Wilson.

Ashley Yates was in the crowd outside of the Ferguson Police Department. After protesting on Day One at the South Florissant headquarters, she had returned. She had recently graduated from the University of Missouri and was pursuing a career in fashion and design. But Michael Brown’s death was leading her in a new direction.

Black clergy had come from their Sunday services to try to calm emotions, but Yates recalled that they were not finding much of an audience. She said, “People were rightfully angry.” She found herself drawn to a Black female cop on the riot line. Yates asked her, “Don’t you realize that if you have a son or daughter, or even you, you’re just as susceptible?”

“These are my brothers,” the officer replied. “If something happens, I know that every one of them is going to risk their life and shoot.” But Yates challenged her: “No, that’s the thing, though. They’ll only protect you ’cause you’re in blue.” The policewoman refused to answer. Lines were beginning to be drawn.

Like Yates, Larry Fellows III was a young person interested in fashion and design. He had just moved into his first solo apartment in Carondelet Park with the money from his new health-care billing job. But the night before, as he and his friends celebrated with a housewarming, the party had been disrupted by the pictures. On Day Two, Fellows met his friends Johnetta Elzie and C. Jay Conrod at Canfield Green for an afternoon memorial. Afterward, the three split up to meet their families and planned to return with more friends for a sunset vigil that Brown’s mother had called. But as evening drew near and they tried to return up West Florissant to Canfield, conditions had changed.

Thousands of demonstrators were in the streets, including mothers and children with hand-drawn signs that read “Honk for Mike” and “Enough Is Enough!” From a command post up the hill on the other side of the railroad tracks, in the parking lot of the Buzz Westfall Plaza on the Boulevard, armored Humvees and BearCat vehicles, riot-ready officers, canine units, and SWAT teams rolled down the hill into Ferguson.
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They swept people back toward the QuikTrip. A low hum of panic was gathering.

“I’d never seen anything like that in my life. I was like, ‘Why are they here?’” Fellows remembered. “Mind you, families and kids and people were coming out to pay respect to Mike’s family, and to see all this intimidation by the police—it was frustrating. Because it was like, ‘Didn’t you take part in this murder? Then why are you here? You weren’t invited.’”

Suddenly people were running toward them. “They’re shooting!” a girl cried. Glass shattered to their left, and they turned to see youths looting the QuikTrip gas station. Inside, the employees gathered, put on jackets over their uniforms, and left through the back. After dark, fire engulfed the store.

The police had sealed off access to Canfield, so he and Elzie never made it to the vigil. Later, he grew outraged as he watched the newscasters focusing on the burned and looted QuikTrip and not on Michael Brown’s murder, as if property were more important than people.

During the evening, as lines of cops and angry protesters stared each other down, some protesters, including Bukky Gbádégeşin, linked arms and stood between the two lines. She thought to herself, “I actually just don’t want people to get hurt. I don’t want something to break. I don’t want the wrong store to be broken into that might trigger a police onslaught on everybody else.”

Yet Gbádégeşin was deeply conflicted. “People were shouting, and really angry, with just a very nihilistic outlook, like, ‘Why the fuck? Why can’t we do this? If they’re going to do whatever the hell they want, we can do whatever the fuck we want,’” she said.

The young radicals instinctively understood what the clergy and even seasoned radical organizers did not—that the aggressive police presence had already polarized the situation. Gbádégeşin and many others would quickly join the side of the young radicals, who were reminding the organizers of the limits of respectability politics. They were asking them, “Which side are you on? There is no in-between here.”

After attending the sunset vigil, Ashley Yates tried to walk back up to her car on West Florissant. She began recording videos on her cell phone. At the QuikTrip, drivers gassed up their cars for free. People walked out with cases of drinks. Someone had spray-painted “Fuck 12” on the wall next to the door. Sam’s Meat Market was being looted too. Against these scenes, she said the first thing that came to mind: “Los Angeles, 1992.”

The cops stood in the middle of the street—some with dogs, many with their batons tucked under their arms and their gas masks on—simply watching as looters broke into stores. But at the same time, they warned Yates and others to stay on the sidewalk, between the police and the looters. The only things the cops seemed interested in protecting were the vehicles they had parked all along West Florissant. “They’re letting everyone break into businesses,” she said, “but they’re keeping
us
out of the street.”

Yates had parked her car up the hill near the command post, but the police had set up a barricade at Ferguson Avenue so that demonstrators could not march up there. They had effectively locked everyone in—demonstrators, looters, and residents. When Yates asked a white officer why she could not get to her car to leave, he told her, “You shouldn’t have come down here. You should have known this was going to happen.”

In the background, police dogs barked. Yates was astonished. She asked, “
Why
should I have known this was going to happen?”

“It’s common sense,” he answered. “You watch the news?”

She finally found a long path to her car around the police line. “They treat us like we ain’t human,” she said, as gunfire retorted in the background, “that’s why they fuckin’ rioting. I’m against this, man, but I
understand it
.”

After midnight, police fired tear gas volleys all along West Florissant to clear the area. The escalation had begun.

*   *   *

By Monday, Day Three, the canine units were gone, replaced with the heavy shit: snipers sitting atop armored vehicles equipped with ear-shattering acoustic riot-control devices; groups of paramilitary police toting tear gas launchers, fitted with fighting knives, training their night-vision goggles, their M4 carbines, and twelve-gauge shotguns on demonstrators. Ferguson looked like occupied territory, a zone of civil war. In one set of widely circulated images, a young dreadlocked man was walked back down a sidewalk by five gas-masked cops in full armor, their assault rifles drawn on him. He had his hands raised.

The young visual artist Damon Davis wondered if the police understood the optics they had created. “They got to know this don’t look right,” he thought to himself. He decided to head to Ferguson and found himself at the site of the burned-out QuikTrip.

There he found a block party going on. The QuikTrip had become a gathering place for the resistance, a temporary autonomous zone. People distributed water and food and made signs. Street-theater artists performed plays. Black Greeks stepped. Buddhist monks prayed. Punk bands played. B-boys rocked. The
Washington Post
’s Wesley Lowery wrote, “This was their Tahrir Square, their Tiananmen Square. The place each night where they would make their stand.”
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Davis recalled, “People was chatting, soapbox preacher dudes doing their thing. Everybody had a corner, and they got their own platform they’re trying to get involved with. And then [over the police loudspeakers] they told everybody to leave.”

Larry Fellows and Johnetta Elzie were in the street handing out water bottles, with Wesley Lowery standing alongside them documenting the scene, when police began firing tear gas canisters in high, smoking arcs into people’s yards and at people’s cars. Over the loudspeakers, the cops told people to go home. One of C. Jay’s neighbors stood on her lawn and yelled back, “This
is
my home.
You’re
the ones who need to go home.” But the police marched forward through the red-and-blue haze toward the QuikTrip. Elzie felt something like a sudden sharp punch to her chest, and was breathless for a second. The advancing police had shot her with a nonlethal round.

On Wednesday night, Day Five, the street clashes reached a climax. Police were pelted with rocks, bottles, bricks, even Molotov cocktails. Robert Cohen snapped an iconic photo of Edward Crawford—dreadlocked and dressed in his favorite American-flag jersey, with a bag of Red Hot Riplets chips in one hand and a flaming tear gas canister in the other, poised to fling the canister back, away from the children with whom he had been marching.
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Cops fired stun grenades, beanbag rounds, Stinger balls that worked like flash-bangs, and PepperBalls—ammo that Fellows described as “weird Pokémon balls that spit out gas.”
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They arrested working journalists and St. Louis alderman Antonio French. The young protesters had come up with a new chant, “Unite, rebel, throw the guilty cops in jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell.”

The next morning, Attorney General Eric Holder, Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, and other politicians, left and right, decried the police militarization. St. Louis Police Chief Samuel Dotson pulled his officers back from Ferguson, publicly denouncing the county police’s warlike tactics. Even military personnel were outraged. When police pointed rifles at people’s chests, one retired army officer told the
Washington Post
, “That’s not controlling the crowd. That’s intimidating them.”
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The journalist Radley Balko noted that the police seemed to have lost their mission: “The soldier’s job is to annihilate a foreign enemy—it’s to kill people and break things. A police officer’s job is to keep the peace and to protect our constitutional rights.”
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The same day, Governor Jay Nixon appointed Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, an African American resident of Florissant, to lead the command. Johnson met with Michael Brown’s family and marched with demonstrators. Thursday evening was the quietest of the week. But the authorities still had given no more information about the officer who had killed Michael Brown. In the community, there was a profound sense that police were protecting their own.

On Friday, Day Seven, at QuikTrip, Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson held a press conference to announce that the name of the officer who had shot Michael Brown was Darren Wilson. But before he did, Jackson described Brown’s August 9 robbery of Ferguson Market, which had immediately preceded his confrontation with Officer Wilson. Soon cable news channels were running the store’s surveillance cam video of Brown grabbing cigarillos and pushing the Arab American owner as he walked out.

Why, asked reporter after reporter, did Jackson see fit to release the store video at the same time he named the officer? One of them read to the police chief a statement issued by the Brown family’s attorneys: “Michael Brown’s family is beyond outraged at the devious way the police chief has chosen to disseminate piecemeal information in a manner intended to assassinate the character of their son, following such a brutal assassination of his person in broad daylight.”