On August 9, 2014, 18-year-old Mike Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown’s killing ignited one of the first waves of the larger movement against police brutality in the United States, which has at many points coincided with larger anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist social movements.
The protests against Brown’s killing began the very next day, which only grew stronger as the shocking details around the shooting emerged. Thousands of people from Ferguson took to the streets night after night in outrage. In several instances, protests escalated into property destruction, especially after demonstrators began to be confronted with police repression. Despite media reports characterizing the protests as violent, on the ground reports found that police launched brutal attacks against peaceful protests. A new wave of protest reemerged on November 24, 2014, after it was announced that a grand jury would not indict Wilson for the murder of Brown.
Wilson never faced any consequences for Brown’s killing, even after multiple processes and investigations by many layers of the US justice system. Wilson’s conviction for murder was a central demand of the movement that emerged out of Ferguson. In an on the ground report from the streets of Ferguson, a protester is asked by activist Gloria La Riva, “What will bring peace to the streets of Ferguson?” The woman holds up her cardboard sign, which reads, “Arrest the cop (murderer), press charges, release his mugshot, until then we will not be moved.”
But the demand to arrest Brown’s killer was by no means the only demand for change coming from the streets of the US. The shocking circumstances of Mike Brown’s murder ignited a mass movement that would question the foundations of policing in the United States. Brown was a young, unarmed Black teenager who was committing no crime at the time of his killing. After he died, the state continued to show him immense cruelty. Police left his body out in the summer heat on the asphalt for four hours, not allowing his family to access him and traumatizing the local community.
Beyond becoming an isolated incident of brutality, Brown became a symbol for oppressed people in the United States. “Every young Black man in Ferguson knows that could have been him,” penned anti-police brutality activists Gloria La Riva and Eugene Puryear at the time.
In marking the tenth year anniversary of Brown’s killing, Puryear told Peoples Dispatch, “The murder of Michael Brown ripped the veil off rampant police terror in the United States. It exposed that over 1,000 people every year are killed by police. It led to the exposure of the depths of police militarization.” Brown’s murder and the subsequent mass protest revealed that Ferguson police were systematically preying upon Black residents by leveling economically exploitative fines and violating constitutional rights. The overmilitarized response to protests, with the city and county of St. Louis spending USD 325,000 on so-called “riot gear” and the governor of Missouri declaring a state of emergency in anticipation of protests just before it was announced that Wilson would not be indicted.
Puryear continued, “Most importantly, the uprising resulting from the anger at Michael Brown’s brutal murder reasserted the power of the exploited and oppressed when they fight back, and, especially timely now, renewed the bonds of solidarity between the Black and Palestinian liberation movements.”
The mass protest movement in Ferguson had reverberations that lasted for years, with several other uprisings sparking following police killings of other Black men including Freddie Gray in Baltimore and Eric Garner in New York City. The demonstrations in Ferguson would become an inspiration for those protesting police brutality throughout the ten years since, including laying that foundations for the 2020 uprisings, the largest anti-racist protest movement in US history.
Assassinations of activists result in suspicion
The protests in Ferguson also became a textbook case of severe police repression. Police brutalized anyone from protesters such as Missouri Senate member Maria Chappelle-Nadal, to Mya Aaten-White, who was shot in the head non fatally by police, to journalists. Al Jazeera America released a statement following their correspondents being tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets by Ferguson police in August of 2014, labeling police action an “egregious assault on the freedom of the press that was clearly intended to have a chilling effect on our ability to cover this important story.”
In the years following the protests, there was also a string of suspicious deaths of prominent Ferguson activists and individuals. This began with 20-year-old DeAndre Joshua, an acquaintance of Brown, whose body was found shot, sitting in a burned parked car near where Brown was killed. Joshua’s killing happened just hours after it was announced that Wilson would not be indicted, on November 25 of 2014. His family seemed to have little hope that police would ever find Joshua’s killer, telling USA Today back in 2014, “police don’t care—he’s black.”
Years later, on September 6, 2016, the body of protest leader Darren Seals was found in a burned parked car, in a similar manner to Joshua. Much like Joshua, police never discovered who killed Seals. Edward Crawford, the subject of a defiant photograph of a protester throwing a tear gas canister away from the crowd and back towards police, was also found dead in 2017. Police labeled Crawford’s death a suicide, although Crawford’s father disputes this, claiming that his son “was wonderful, great, always in a good mood… He just got a new apartment and was training for a new job.”
In 2018, another Ferguson activist, Palestinian-American Bassem Masri, 31, who livestreamed many of the protests was found unresponsive on a bus and later pronounced dead. Reportedly, he died of a heart attack as a result of a fentanyl overdose. Masri was well known for producing his own media around the mass protest movement, because, as he told an interviewer in 2014, the mainstream media can’t be relied upon. “They ain’t gonna say the truth. They ain’t gonna never say the truth. They got their own narrative.” The unsolved cases continue to be a source of extreme suspicion within the movement, but are indicative of the clear desire of certain sectors to attempt to instill fear and quash the people’s rebellion against racism.
Black and Palestinian liberation
The way that the movement for Black lives, as the anti-police brutality movement in the US is often dubbed, shaped international political consciousness is a success in itself. Often cited is the support coming out of Palestine, whose people are all too familiar with the brutality of the Israeli state. During the weeks of protests against Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Palestinians were even offering advice to Ferguson protesters on how to deal with the effects of tear gas through Twitter. The same year that protests ignited in Ferguson, Gaza experienced a brutal military attack by Israel.
In the years following the Ferguson uprisings, anti-police brutality activists would strengthen the ties between the Black and Palestinian struggles, including by traveling in delegations to occupied Palestine. These important connections would be drawn on in the many anti-police terror struggles to come, including after the killing of George Floyd, after which Palestinians memorialized him forever through murals on the infamous “apartheid wall” in the West Bank.
What has changed?
The frequency of police killings has not abated, as evidenced by examples such as that of Sonya Massey, shot dead by a white police officer who she had called into her own home in the hopes of protection. It is still extremely unlikely that a police officer will be prosecuted and convicted for murder. However, the people of Ferguson inspired wave after wave of mass protest, and collectively raised the consciousness of millions of young and oppressed people who continue to advance social movements in the United States.
