We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (16 page)

Sekou was a third-generation Pentecostal preacher with an unusual pedigree. He had studied under Kwame Touré, who had given him his African name, and trained him to be ready for revolution. In his twenties he had been hired to teach teenagers at the Cochran Gardens housing projects and Stevens Middle School in St. Louis City, but he would say that he had studied under them too. From the teens, he learned that the hip-hop he had loved as a youth could catalyze consciousness in a new generation. In 2004, he became a key organizer for the National Hip-Hop Political Convention.

Ten years later, he was the formation and justice pastor of First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, where he led a spoken-word and hip-hop ministry for queer youths of color. He was not easy on his peers and elders. It wasn’t about age, he insisted, it was about attitude. “What do you fundamentally believe about young people?” he asked them. “Do you believe that they have value? Are you more concerned about their profanity than about the profane conditions that they live in?”

On the day Michael Brown was killed, Sekou was a scholar-in-residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, working on a book on the relevance of King’s work to the present. When Sekou saw the news, he decided to come home. “I got on a plane on Thursday,” he said, “and I flew back in time.”

At Stanford, Sekou said, “I spent most of the time studying [King’s] mistakes.” He learned that when King came to Watts in 1965, he stepped off the plane and immediately spoke to reporters without having talked to anyone on the ground. When King finally made it across town to Watts, he was met by angry community members who had heard his press conference and chastised him for speaking out of turn.

Sekou decided that when he returned home, he would follow the lead of the twentysomethings, especially the queer Black women who were leading protesters to nonviolently face down the police and their firepower. He showed up and listened. He cooked meals for them and got arrested with them. In that way he earned their trust and became a target.

Four days after Governor Nixon declared a state of emergency, Sekou’s house burned down under mysterious circumstances. At the same time, a letter circulated among the local clergy urging them to censure Sekou, accusing him of consorting with the likes of anarchists and refusing to condemn violence. In response, Sekou wrote his post–civil rights version of “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:

I am a preacher of the gospel of Jesus—a poor dispossessed peasant whose life was cut short by state violence. For over a century, men and women in my family have preached that a hunted and hated people must always respond with dignity and deep abiding love.…

In August, when militarized police occupied Ferguson, Phil Agnew, co-founder of the Dream Defenders, presented me with a challenge: “Ferguson will determine whether or not the church is still relevant.” Our teargas summer has become a bitter winter of waiting, and the clergy seem to be running that risk of irrelevancy.…

Hence we are called to choose sides. Clergy must not only “support” protesters. We are called to be protesters—at once outraged and disciplined. By placing our bodies on the cross of a militarized police, deep infrastructural racial bias and a system that profits from human misery, a new way of being and seeing America and all its promise is being born.…

A willingness to be bruised, broken or detained for the sake of the gospel is our only option. Once we make this choice then and only then will our presence be warranted and blessed by the youth who quite reasonably distrust us. The side of love requires that we are uncomfortable.
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The piece was published on Sunday, November 23. The next night, after McCulloch’s announcement, Sekou was back on West Florissant with his staff and a New York writer. Gunfire was erupting up and down the street. Buildings were on fire all around them. The police and their weaponry were on the move.

MSNBC had a compound on the street and had asked Sekou to come on the air, but they would not allow him to bring in his staff to safety. So he cursed them out and drove his staff across the street into a parking lot behind a chop suey, where they would try to wait out the running battles. After an hour or so, Sekou stepped out of the little station wagon to smoke a cigarette, and a police helicopter flew up and dropped a spotlight on him. He feared he might be killed in that instant. He walked away from his car, and strode quickly toward the police line.

“You better call off your boy,” he yelled at the police lieutenant.

The cop laughed and said, “Oh, we like fucking with you, Rev.” And the helicopter flew off.

The next night, when he heard that hundreds of police had again amassed at the corner of Grand and Arsenal in front of MoKaBe’s, Sekou came to the café. He entered through the back alley the police had teargassed the night before, and when he came out to the front, he saw the riot police lines and hundreds of restless patrons on the patio. Police had already issued dispersal orders and seemed prepared to gas MoKaBe’s again.

Sekou mounted a table and quieted the crowd. “My first thing is I need you to be safe,” he said. “Do not engage them. Do not agitate them.” He asked them to lock arms. He was improvising, he admitted, and a palliating laughter rippled through the crowd. And then Sekou took a leap of imagination or perhaps, he would say, of faith.

“We have already won,” he said as he pointed back to the cops across the street. “They don’t do
that
when we’re losing. When they bring that out, that’s because we’ve won already.”

He remembered something the Occupy activist Lisa Fithian had taught him. He asked the crowd, “What does a heartbeat sound like?”

Someone said, “You mean the way it’s going like boomboomboomboom right now?” The crowd roared.

“On a normal day!” Sekou said. “On a normal day, your heart goes…” And he hit his chest twice with his hand. He asked the crowd to unlock their arms and they joined him, pounding their hearts into a rhythm that could be heard across the street. The air itself seemed to change.

He turned to face the police now. “You are on the wrong side of history, and we have already won,” he said to them. “We are peacefully gathered here in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Gandhi … This multiracial gathering is possible because of nonviolence. And that is the heartbeat of democracy that you hear.

“And so whoever your captain is, stand down. Go home,” he said. “We’ll be alright.”
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The crowd laughed again. All along the police line, stiffened backs seemed to wilt. Then the cops turned to the left in file, turned again, and marched silently away down Grand Street.

*   *   *

Into the new year, a shocking but steady list of names filled the social media scrolls—Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Renisha McBride, Antonio Zambrano-Montes, Akai Gurley, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald.

Deaths of people of color were nothing new. A Malcolm X Grassroots Movement report in 2012 had documented that every twenty-eight hours a Black person was killed by police, security guards, or vigilantes, “self-appointed enforcers of the law” protected by state codes like the stand-your-ground laws.
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But with personal and surveillance technology and social media, Ferguson activists and the Movement for Black Lives now had the power to reveal what those statistics actually looked like.

As the winter drew on, the growing list sparked public mourning and rage, filling the streets and highways and train stations and bridges with protesters. A new song could be heard coming from the thousands of bodies in motion, written by Luke Nephew of the Peace Poets to memorialize Eric Garner and his last words:

I still hear my brother crying, “I can’t breathe”

Now I’m in the struggle saying, “I can’t leave”

Calling out the violence of these racist police

And we ain’t gonna stop until the people are free …

Hundreds of Black congressional staffers staged a walkout in Washington, D.C., filling the steps of the Capitol with their hands up. Behind them, the Capitol dome was sheathed in scaffolding, a project still under construction and reconstruction.

“We vote, we don’t get what we want. So poor people go out in the street, and we vote with our feet. We’re tired of it,” organizer Tory Russell told Amy Goodman. “President Obama, you must hear us. We’re outside. Please have some sympathy for us.”
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On December 1, the president met with seven young Black and Latino activists from Ferguson and New York, including Ashley Yates, to talk about policing. She mused that just months before, she had been folding clothes at Talbots in Plaza Frontenac. Now, on the anniversary of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, she was meeting the president to talk about race and policing.

The activists urged the president to demilitarize the police by ending the federal 1033 program that distributed surplus military equipment to local departments, to create a task force pushing for policing best practices, and to require the collection of data on police killings. They reminded him that police cameras did not prevent Eric Garner or John Crawford from being killed or denied justice.

Obama pivoted to talk about Black-on-Black crime, working hard, staying in school, and voting. He argued that he was proof that the system worked.
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He urged them to decry the violence of the looters. But the activists insisted the overwhelming violence was being directed at them and their generation through what Phillip Agnew, executive director of the Dream Defenders, called “an investment and incentivizing of criminalization, of clamping down, of militarization, and police occupation and repression in our neighborhoods.”

Yates added, “I wanna be able to refresh my browser 28 hours later and not see another headline that a black, unarmed citizen has been gunned down at the hands of those that are supposed to protect and serve us.”
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*   *   *

Day 366. Sunday, August 9, 2015. At dawn on Canfield Drive, over a hundred people gathered for an interfaith prayer. When they arrived, the parking lots around the apartments at Canfield Green were quiet and nearly empty. The rebellion Sekou praised had now been going on for a year, had reached every corner of the country. On this ground history had been made, but the price had been dear. Dozens of families had left or been evicted.

Under the gray and coquelicot sky, pastors, rabbis, imams, ministers, residents, and visitors formed a large circle across Canfield Drive, the same circle that had been enclosed a year before by yellow tape. In the middle, the community’s memorial to Michael Brown Jr. still stood. There people had placed teddy bears and other stuffed animals, flowers, candles, handwritten poems, #UnitedWeFight postcards, stickers, roses, and daisies. They had decorated the orange police cones with “Copwatch” and “FCK12” stickers and the names of those shot by cops. Someone had left a single burned and tattered American flag where Michael had lain.

Together, those who had gathered joined hands and offered solemn prayers in the address of different faiths. Afterward, they drifted into small groups, some embracing, some talking, some meditating over the memorial. Then they went back to their cars to head to breakfast or to the business of the day’s services. As the last of them lingered, the skies quickly darkened over Canfield Green. A loud rumble of thunder echoed over Ferguson and St. Louis, and down came a sudden, hard, blinding rain.

We will live on

Forever and ever

—Flying Lotus, “The Protest”

Dorian Johnson woke up early in his Canfield Green apartment that Saturday. After getting breakfast for his girlfriend, he decided he needed some cigarillos to roll up some blunts. Down in the parking lot he saw his friend Big Mike helping an aunt get her kids into the car.

Dorian had met Mike Brown a few months earlier when another friend brought him over to play video games. Mike was quiet. “He don’t like to talk to people,” the friend told Dorian.
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At six foot four and 300 pounds, Mike could seem intimidating. Dorian figured the silence was inhospitable—so he chatted Mike up. They found out they liked the same music—Drake, Kanye, Kendrick Lamar. Dorian, who was twenty-two, was impressed by the eighteen-year-old.
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“Everyone else’s mentality be on some nonsense, silliness,” he would say later. “But Mike had his mind set on more than that, helping others. I just got a good feeling from being around him.”
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Dorian had a job, a girl, a new daughter to look after, wore his hair in dreadlocks, sported tats all over his wiry five-foot-seven frame, and was a regular at the basketball courts. Their friendship was young, and Dorian was the new guy in the apartment complex, but the kids looked up to Big Mike, and Mike looked up to Dorian.

Dorian had been through it. He had grown up on the north side of the Delmar Divide at the edge of St. Louis City, four miles from the Canfield Green apartments, in a neighborhood rougher than Ferguson. When he was a young teen, he stepped off the school bus into a gang shootout. A bullet caught him behind his knee. The incident scarred him physically and emotionally.

In 2010, he got his diploma and enrolled in Lincoln University, two hours away, in Jefferson City. It was a historically Black college, but Dorian came to feel that the campus police were treating him and other students from St. Louis differently from those from Atlanta or D.C., harassing him and making him frequently late for class.