We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (14 page)

Chief Jackson responded, “What I did was release the videotape to you because I had to. I’ve been sitting on it. Too many people put in FOI [Freedom of Information] requests for that thing and I had to release that tape to you.”

That evening, the clashes resumed.

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The images from Ferguson bolstered the protesters’ argument that the most vulnerable lives were Black lives. “When an assault rifle is aimed at your face over nothing more than a refusal to move, you don’t feel like the American experience is one that includes you,” wrote rapper and Hands Up United cofounder Kareem “Tef Poe” Jackson in a letter to President Barack Obama. “We do not want to die.”
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Ferguson was now
the
national story, and it had been largely shaped by the people and the protesters, not the police. The hashtag #Ferguson drove the story. By the end of Friday, the Pew Research Center found, more than 7.9 million tweets had been generated.
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Social media fueled local and national interest, and organizing networks were forming. On the ground, many of the protesters were already getting themselves together. In the days that followed, Governor Nixon declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard. But demonstrations continued daily from morning to night. “We got war enacted upon us,” said Ashley Yates, “so people formed, basically, survival troops.”

“You would go and be there all day,” she said. “You’d move around, walk around, whatever, but those were the people you checked in with, those were the people who’d ask if you’d eaten, those were the folks you left with, who made sure you’d get home. That was an early form of organizing.”

Yates and Fellows found themselves drifting away from their jobs and becoming immersed in a new daily routine of meetings, work sessions, and protests. Soon people were asking if their group had a name. When the two joined with Johnetta Elzie, Brittany Ferrell, Ashley Templeton, and others to call themselves Millennial Activists United, they were part of an emerging ecosystem of organizations led by young people, including Hands Up United, Young Activists United, Lost Voices, Tribe X, OurDestinySTL, and others.

“This is civil rights 2.0,” said Damon Davis, who also found himself drawn into the fervent organizing. “It’s not suits and ties anymore. It’s tattoos and dreads and queer women of color out here.”

Community meetings drew together over fifty different organizations to coordinate planning and training. In order to accommodate the needs of the growing movement, OBS brought in leaders and organizers from Oakland, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City. Between August and October, they trained over 200 organizers in nonviolent direct action, and hundreds more in areas such as emergency response, medical support, crowd control, communications, and de-escalation.

Montague Simmons of OBS said, “One of the things that falls real heavy on us when we hear it is that it’s a leaderless movement. That’s not true. We would say it’s a leader-
full
movement.”

Central to the new national resistance was an organization called Black Lives Matter that had been started by San Francisco Bay Area organizer Alicia Garza, Los Angeles artist and activist Patrisse Cullors, and New York/Phoenix–based organizer Opal Tometi. On August 10, as #Ferguson exploded on social media, so did #blacklivesmatter. What began as a social-media meme was transformed by the Ferguson uprising into a frame, a theory, and an aspiration for the emerging national movement.

The genesis of the idea had come the summer before, in the long hours of July 13, 2013, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin. After the verdict was announced, Garza quickly posted to her Facebook page, “I can’t breathe. NOT GUILTY.” Her feed filled with posts from people who insisted they were not surprised. “That’s a damn shame in itself,” she responded. “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter.” She added, “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”

Cullors’s activism had sprung from the brutal beating of her brother by Los Angeles County jail officers. Garza worried too about her own brother, in whom she saw Trayvon Martin. The fragility of Black life was not the same as the fragility of white privilege. That night, the two women, who had known each other for years through organizing circles, talked for a long time about Zimmerman, Martin, their brothers, and what needed to happen next. Cullors put a hashtag in front of Garza’s refrain and posted it to Facebook, and suddenly a big idea cohered. The next day, the two contacted Tometi, a friend and a communications expert, and a social-media campaign was born.

“Black Lives Matter” articulated an impatience with the politics of respectability. Proponents of respectability politics, Randall Kennedy wrote, “advocate taking care in presenting oneself publicly and desire strongly to avoid saying or doing anything that will reflect badly on Blacks, reinforce negative racial stereotypes, or needlessly alienate potential allies.”
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Such politics were resurgent during the Obama era. The president himself was both a source and a symbol of respectability politics.

But the Black Lives Matter activists were pro-queer feminists who worked with those on the margins of society: incarcerated people, domestic workers, and migrants. They thought of themselves as proudly, defiantly intersectional. They offered an expansive notion of what they called “Black love,” a vision of radical diversity. Garza wrote,

Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black undocumented folks, folks with [criminal] records, women and Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements. It is a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement.
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Black Lives Matter challenged not only the content but the form of respectability politics—the traditional, charismatic Black messiah model that typically privileged straight male leadership and top-down, hierarchical infrastructures, such as those of the Black church. Instead, the movement drew on the methods and examples of Bayard Rustin, the gay man who had led the mobilization of the 1963 March on Washington while eschewing the spotlight; Ella Baker, the woman who had trained generations of organizers while strongly advocating modes of decentralized leadership; and Assata Shakur, the Black Panther activist exiled to Cuba who was still on the FBI’s Most Wanted list and had written the lines they adopted as their mantra: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

And they unapologetically centered Blackness, out of a historical and existential necessity. “We know that our destinies are intertwined,” Garza wrote. “Non-Black oppressed people in this country are both impacted by racism and domination, and simultaneously, BENEFIT from anti-black racism.… When Black people cry out in defense of our lives, which are uniquely, systematically, and savagely targeted by the state, we are asking you, our family, to stand with us in affirming Black lives.”
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Those who opposed the movement by arguing that “all lives matter” could not see the cold inhumanity of their stance. The systematic denigration of Black lives was inescapable, whether in shortened life expectancy or the growing list of extra judicial murders. In the United States, most conversations about race defaulted to a discussion about whiteness. But racism and inequality would never end if Blacks focused on easing white anxiety. Change would come only through a struggle to transform how everyone saw and treated Black lives. If Black lives mattered to all, then all lives really would matter.

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By the end of August, a few weeks after Michael Brown’s death, Cullors and Black queer feminist organizer Darnell Moore had organized a national freedom ride that brought 600 Black Lives Matter activists from across the country to join what people were now calling the movement in Ferguson. Organizers joined the daily protests on West and South Florissant and helped to stage other actions across the city. Activists from Palestine, Egypt, and Hong Kong tweeted words of support and practical advice, including how to deal effectively with tear gas.

The national network of organizations issued a set of demands, including the immediate arrest of Darren Wilson, the ending of police militarization, and reinvestment in resegregated impoverished communities. And to further these demands, organizers agreed to launch four days of civil disobedience they would call Ferguson October.

But as the start of protests neared, the area was shaken by three more officer-involved extrajudicial killings. The first—just three miles away from Canfield Green and less than two weeks after Michael Brown was killed—was captured on video. Police Chief Samuel Dotson told reporters that the suspect, Kajieme Powell, had raised his knife and that officers had shot him in self-defense. But the cell phone video he released the next day contradicted his own account.

Armed with nothing but a steak knife, Powell, a mentally ill man, had stolen two energy drinks from a store. He walked out, put the two cans down near the curb, and walked aimlessly in large circles, arguing with the young store clerk who had come out to reason with him. At that point, the man shooting the video thought the whole scene was funny.

But then the first police car arrived, and two officers—who would never be named publicly—emerged to tell Powell to put his hands up. Powell walked toward them, taunting, “Shoot me, motherfucker!” Then he started walking away from the police in another wide circle. When he came out of the loop to face the police, they fired twelve shots at him. He had not even drawn his knife. As the life bled out of Powell, one of the officers cuffed him while the other kept his gun trained on him.

On September 19, twenty-one-year-old Kimberlee Randle-King was arrested in Pagedale, a small North County town of cemeteries and an abandoned soap factory. She had been on her way to pick up her two children at her grandmother’s house, but ended up in a group of people arguing and tussling on the street.

When she was taken in, police found Randle-King had seven “failure to appear” warrants for traffic and vehicle violations and prepared to take her back to a cell. The police report said that she “became ‘hysterical’ and claimed she would lose her ‘job, house, and babies.’ Kimberlee then said, ‘I’m gonna die if I go back there.’”
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A half hour later, Randle-King was found dead in her cell, hanging by her own red T-shirt.

Family and friends quickly gathered at the Pagedale jail in protest. They said she hadn’t been anything close to suicidal. That case would soon find uncanny echoes in those of Sandra Bland and Kindra Chapman, and helped inspire a national campaign called #SayHerName that highlighted the impact of police brutality on African American women.

The last incident occurred on October 8, two days before the start of Ferguson October. When VonDerrit Myers and some friends emerged from a night market after buying sandwiches, an off-duty cop who was working a nighttime security job in his police uniform stopped them on a “pedestrian check.” The cop identified at least one of the group as suspicious and carrying a weapon. Myers and his friends ran, and the cop gave chase before losing them.

Myers went up to his apartment to eat and put on a sweatshirt, then came back down to the street, where he encountered the cop again. What happened next remains a mystery. There were no official witnesses. But when it was all over, the cop had unloaded an entire clip, and Myers had been shot seven times in the back.

Police said Myers had been killed in a shootout and that there was gunshot residue on his hand to prove it. They noted Myers had been wearing a GPS ankle bracelet—a consequence of being out on bail for recent charges of unlawful use of a weapon and resisting arrest. The media was fed Instagram photos of Myers posing with guns.

But in the days that followed, the police modified their account of the night’s events several times, talking of bushes that Myers had shot from that did not exist, and changing the make of the gun Myers supposedly carried. The officer, whose name would not be made public either, refused to be interviewed by a prosecutor.

Myers’s family argued that a gun had been planted on him, and that he had been executed. The prosecutor agreed that the bullets fired at him could have explained the residue evidence, and Myers’s DNA did not turn up on the gun that was found. Yet the prosecutor still decided not to take the case to the grand jury, stating that the evidence was inconclusive.

Perhaps Powell, Randle-King, and Myers did not appear to be as respectable victims as Brown. But then again, Ferguson police had tried hard with the store video release to make Brown appear not so respectable either. In the matter of Black lives, from Medgar Evers to the present, perhaps the perfect victim had never existed. Instead, there would be the stacked battle over sight and perception, the arduous struggle over the narratives made of complicated lives.

As Ashley Yates told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman, “Once we start realizing that we really are being weaponized—like our Black skin is being weaponized, people are seeing our melanin as a threat—then we can move forward.”
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Ferguson October officially began on October 13.
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In the dramatic week that followed, tens of thousands marched. Young Activists United occupied the St. Louis city hall rotunda. Bearing signs that said “Stop Killing Us” and chanting “Black lives matter,” Millennial Activists United shut down the Plaza Frontenac. Protesters also closed Emerson Electric Corporation, and shut down two Walmarts and a Democratic Party fund-raiser. At the police station, dozens more were arrested, including Cornel West, the Reverend Osagyefo Sekou, and other religious leaders.