By Stefan M. Bradley, author of If We Don’t Get It
At this time of intense state repression and government overreach, we have much to learn from the young leaders of the Ferguson Uprising of 2014-2015. Without formal political experience, those bold organizers and activists forced a spotlight on policing and injustice in Black and brown communities. The body-snatching, gas-lighting, blame, and brutality of militarized police are recognizable to those who were there for the Uprising. Like those scooped up by masked ICE agents toting semiautomatic weapons, the most powerless in Ferguson, meaning those without firearms and with hands in the air, became targets of the state. Optically, the residents of the sleepy suburban city just outside of St. Louis did not stand a chance. That was until they manifested the most effective weapon against governmental imposition: people power.
On August 9, 2014, a young American perished at the hands of law enforcement, igniting an unexpected year-long uprising. Historically, August has always been a significant month in terms of Black rebellion. In the sweltering heat of August, the nation has been reminded that when justice is denied, the fires of reform and resistance burn hottest. The Haitian Revolution started in August 1791, and it led to the creation of the first Black republic in the western hemisphere. Nat Turner led a revolt in August 1831 continued the tradition of putting slaveholders and supporters of the peculiar institution on notice that enslaved people were not satisfied in bondage. Black Chicagoans took to the streets in 1919 in protest of the drowning death of 17-year-old Eugene Williams, whom white segregationists stoned in the water at a beach near 29th Street. In 1943, a white police officer in Harlem shot a Black soldier who had attempted to protect a Black woman from the police who were aggressively restraining her. Later, in the midst of WWII, Black Harlemites rebelled in such a way that the mayor called on the U.S. Army to quell the uprising, which listed six people dead and 500 arrested.
Mamie Till, in August 1955, made the unlikely decision to allow pictures of her son, Emmett Till, whom two white vigilantes mutilated after the boy allegedly flirted with a white woman in their family, to circulate widely. To show what racism did to her “Beau,” Mamie Till released to the universe the gruesome image of her boy’s body that the white vigilantes tortured. It set the civilized world ablaze.
On August 28, the same date white racism killed Till, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963, gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Justice. Two years later, Black people in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, pushed back against the police who they observed brutalize 21-year-old Marquette Frye and his mother after a traffic stop. This August marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Watts Uprising.
America’s solution to Black rebellion was incarceration.
On August 7, 1971, in a Marin County (California) courthouse, Jonathan Jackson led an effort to free members of the Black Guerilla Family,. In the altercation, Jonathan Jackson took the judge, attorney general, and three jurors hostage. As he fled with the hostages, police killed him on the scene. Two weeks later, Jonathan Jackson’s revolutionary brother, George Jackson, was in San Quentin penitentiary facing murder charge for the killing of a prison guard. George Jackson, on the way to his cell, produced a pistol, took a guard hostage, and initiated a rebellion in which other inmates participated. Three white guards were killed, along with two white inmates; another three guards survived, sustaining gunshot and stab wounds. George Jackson was killed in the prison yard. Jackson, in his will, stipulated the royalties from the books he had written be donated to the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.
High school graduate Michael Brown, Jr. of Ferguson, Missouri may not have known the history of Black rebellion in the month of August, but he and his peers had certainly heard what happened to Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis in 2012, when they did not comply with white vigilantes. Brown lived in a city and country where law enforcement focused heavily on submission and compliance when it came to Black people.
On August 9, after taking a box of cigarillos and pushing past an employee of a local convenience store, Brown found himself in one of the most fateful struggles of the new millennium. Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson police officer, confronted the teenager in the street, and a physical altercation ensued, with Wilson shooting the unarmed Brown dead in proximity of his mother’s apartment. The community response to the death of Brown altered the history of St. Louis and situated Brown and Ferguson squarely in the legacy of what radicals know as Black August.
The moment called for leadership, and the unlikeliest of patriots stepped into their roles as rescuers of democracy. They cursed, sagged their pants, sported neck tattoos, wore colored dreadlocks, smelled of weed, and did not need anyone to tell them the brutal response they met was wrong Some were homeless, some queer, others misunderstood, but all were believers that the U.S. Constitution applied to them. They understood that, as long as they operated in fear, the state could bully them, and so they reframed their approach, taking to the streets. They chanted: “If we don’t get it, shut it down!” The “it” was the highway, mall, airport, theatre, and the “whole damn system,” which they described as “guilty as hell.” Without fear and concern about the feelings of those oppressing them, these non-traditional leaders consolidated power with members of the working class and young professionals, as well as those organizers who had established deep roots in the community.
Their campaign was effective. They motivated the Department of Justice to investigate the Ferguson Police Department. That resulted in the city’s consent decree for the reform of biased patterns and practices. Additionally, democracy in Ferguson and St. Louis expanded to include higher numbers of elected Black officials, some coming from the ranks of Uprising organizers. It manifested in the city’s revision of traffic fining systems and the employment of higher numbers of Black law enforcement officers. Area institutions and companies also invested capital into “urban” programs in ways they had not in the past.
The lessons that we can learn from the Ferguson Uprising and the Black rescuers of democracy are easy to write but difficult to execute. First, psychologically, we must value the people above all else, and that includes systems and policies. Second, the leaders of the Uprising taught us that we have to be willing to put our physical bodies on the line to protect one another from a heavily armed and overbearing opponent. Young organizers showed that commitment to the cause, resilience in the struggle, and innovation in accessing resources are recipes for success in a battle against empire. Ferguson taught that we must allow the most vulnerable to lead and organize. When they are safe and properly cared for, everyone else will thrive as well.
Finally, and perhaps most important, we learn from the freedom fighters of Ferguson that there will be consequences for asserting the rights of Black and marginalized people. There are those who have died mysterious deaths after their work in Ferguson and some are still incarcerated. Then, of course, there is the psychological trauma associated with constant struggle. Victory does not come without scars. Democratic institutions will not survive authoritarian impulses without active, informed, and collective resistance. As contemporary policies, from voting restrictions to expanded surveillance and punitive policing, threaten the rights of marginalized communities, engaged scholarship and public action is imperative. We must translate the insights of Ferguson into strategies that challenge inequity in schools, courts, legislatures, and the streets. If we do not, the unfinished project of American democracy will necessarily crumble.
