Police in riot gear detain a demonstrator in Ferguson, Missouri, August 19, 2014. (photo: Reuters/Joshua Lott)
Why America Will Never Be the Same Post-Ferguson
03 September 13
Michael Brown's death has created a new reality. Here's what happens when a generation feels it has nothing to lose
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Thursday, I boarded a bus with about 40 people for an 18-hour bus ride
to Ferguson, Missouri, as part of what we termed the Black Lives Matter Rides.
Twenty hours later, we joined riders from all over the country who
descended on St. Louis and Ferguson to show solidarity with local
activists and residents still fighting for justice in the police killing
of 18-year-old unarmed teenager Michael Brown.
As we made preparations over about a two-week period
to go — raising thousands of dollars, securing accommodations and
working with local activists to determine a plan of action that would be
most useful to the people who live in Ferguson — a conversation emerged
about whether the uprising in Ferguson constitutes a moment or a
movement.
Before leaving, I could only offer educated
conjecture. Movements take a long time to build and are generally an
accumulation of critical moments. The Greensboro sit-ins of 1960 were
part of a longer trajectory of college students practicing the
“stool-sitting” technique begun in the early 1940s by college students
at Howard University and other historically black colleges. The 1963
March on Washington was the culmination of a 22-year March on Washington
Movement that began in 1941 when A. Philip Randolph threatened to march
on Washington as a tactic to force Harry Truman to desegregate federal
employment agencies.
Movements rarely appear to be movements in the midst
of them. We have the benefit of hindsight now as we look at the core
years of the Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968. But I am sure that
in some key moments, particularly the period from 1955 to 1961, the
time between the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and the Freedom Rides, it might
not have always seemed clear what the “movement” was. Surely people
felt the tides changing, but they could not foresee the trajectory.
We should, I think, not miss the moment trying to theorize the movement. We have to leave certain conversations to history.
Yet, having spent time in Ferguson this weekend,
marching, standing in community over the site where Mike Brown’s body
lay unceremoniously uncovered for four hours, and organizing with
activists in the basement of a local church, I am clearer now that this
is a movement.
Seven years ago, as a graduate student at Emory
University, I participated with undergraduates there in organizing a
response to the Jena Six incidents in Jena, Louisiana. We traveled
overnight to Jena to march with a community outraged over the treatment
of six black high school students, one of whom was charged with
attempted murder, over a racially charged high school brawl. Even then,
the over-policing of black teen boys drew us to the cause.
What I remember most, in addition to my frustration
with the disorganization of the protests, was an overwhelming feeling
that Jena was a missed opportunity. Thousands of young, pumped-up,
inspired folks gathered there, and there were no organizing sessions,
workshops or dialogues with people in the community. We rode in, marched
and rode out.
Ferguson is an altogether different story. There are
multiple grounds of leadership, multiple organizations working on the
ground to register people to vote, advocate for changes in legislation,
and create teams of people to monitor the police. There is also a vocal
contingent of young women and men unafraid to agitate, unafraid to take
to the streets in peaceful, but passionate protest.
But beyond all of that, there is something else – a
refrain that we heard throughout the weekend. On Saturday morning before
we marched, Tef Poe,
a local rapper and activist, addressed our group at the St. John’s
Church where we gathered. He said to us, “I am not afraid to die” in
order to bring about change in Ferguson. Later at a local cookout
sponsored by one of the local coalitions, some young brothers from a new
local group called “Lost Voices”
repeated the same thing. Along with a group of young women, they have
been sleeping out on the streets, as a kind of vigil until justice is
obtained for Mike Brown. And they, too, told us that they are “unafraid
to die.” Over the weekend, they awoke to a noose hanging at the place they were sleeping.
These young men, and the young women activists who
have joined them faithfully on the front lines, are unafraid to die for
the simple right to live unharassed in their own communities. They
remain unmoved by tanks, tear gas and nooses.
As we piled back onto the buses, throughout the
weekend, that is the refrain – “we are unafraid to die” — that stuck
with many of us, that let us know something is different.
But it is different for different reasons than I might
have imagined. What does it mean to be “unafraid to die” in order to
bring about change? As those words echoed in my mind, on the bus ride
home, I was reminded of Notorious B.I.G., the slain rapper whose debut
album “Ready to Die” turns 20 years old this month.
Some of the Ferguson riders are 20 years old. They
were birthed in the crucible of the Tupac-Biggie moment, the height of
20th century black nihilism. The same year that Biggie dropped “Ready to
Die,” Cornel West published the classic “Race Matters.” In the first
chapter, “Nihilism in Black America,” he argued, “the major enemy of
black survival in America has been and is neither oppression nor
exploitation but rather the nihilistic threat — that is loss of hope and
absence of meaning. … The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic
threat is that without hope there can be no future, that without meaning
there can be no struggle.”
Mike Brown’s death has brought new meaning to local
black struggle. His death has come to mean something more, something
greater than his life might have been taken to mean, as a poor young
black man from a working-class suburb. His death, and officer Darren
Wilson’s callous disregard for his life, has made the precariousness of
black life visible for a whole new generation of black youth. The
precariousness has been made visible and it has been deemed unacceptable
– by both the old and the young. One of the riders, a 10-year-old girl
from Los Angeles, told us in a church service on Sunday morning, “I am
here because I am worried about my life. I’m only 10 years old. I should
not have to be worried.”
Mike’s death, his blood seeping out and onto the
pavement, has created the fertile soil of movement. It has remixed the
nihilism of the sagging pants generation with a new message. These
generational sons and daughters of Tupac and Biggie still have little to
no “fucks to give” as the colloquial saying goes. They might not be
“ready to die” but they are “unafraid to die.” They aren’t knocking on
death’s door but they will not retreat when it knocks on theirs. For
them, having nothing to lose is more clearly iterated in the words some
of us recited as we held hands around Mike Brown’s street memorial: “We
have nothing to lose but our chains.”
To this new generation of voices, I became the elder
sister sitting in the back of the bus, being consulted about what it
“was like when Rodney King happened.” I was only 10 years old when
Rodney King “happened” but everyone in movement work knows that the
young movers trust no one over 30. One of our riders, a 17-year-old high
school senior named Nia, let me know in no uncertain terms that “young
people have always led the revolutions.”
As someone not quite ready to be too old and not
nearly seasoned enough to claim the status of elder, I am reminded that
MLK was 34, the age I’m soon to be, the age of Michael Brown’s mother,
when he gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. Still, a real test of our
movements will be whether we will be able to hold intergenerational
space for all the wisdom and all the limitations that all of us bring to
the table.
We went to Ferguson with a simple message: Black Lives
Matter. All black lives. And we are prepared to have our nation hear
that message with all the fullness, complexity and responsibility that
it entails. In the words of Trayvon Martin’s mom to Michael Brown’s mom:
“If they don’t hear us, we will make them feel us.” We will make them hear us, see us and feel us. Or we will die trying.
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