The officers took us downstairs and placed Ryan and me in a cell that had a pay phone in the corner. We could, we were told, make as many calls as we wanted. Ryan was able to reach his dad, but the only numbers I could remember were my parents’ home line and a cell phone that had, at least at one point, belonged to my high school girlfriend. After trying and failing to get ahold of my mom, I gave up—if I was going to catch up with a long-lost high school love it should probably come under different circumstances.
It wouldn’t matter. About half an hour after we arrived at Ferguson police headquarters, Ryan and I were turned loose. Inundated with phone calls from other reporters and media outlets, Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson had ordered us released. By the time we were given back our belongings—unlaced shoes, notebooks, phones—it was clear we’d become momentary media celebrities.
My editors called and emailed. Then came the text messages, from Mom as well as nearly every friend from high school and college. Check-ins from sources and government officials. And then the overwhelming wave of radio and television producers. Within moments, we were discussing our arrest on The Rachel Maddow Show as we remained seated in the lobby of the Ferguson Police Department, hoping to secure paperwork that would tell us the names of the police officers who had roughed us up.
It wasn’t until hours later that our arrest began to sink in. I’d arrived in Ferguson two days earlier thinking I’d be there for just a couple of days. I’d write a feature or two, and then I’d go back to DC and to writing about politics. But as I paced the carpeted floor of my hotel room in downtown St. Louis that night, it became clear that I wasn’t escaping Ferguson anytime soon.
Resident after resident had told more stories of being profiled, of feeling harassed. These protests, they insisted, were not just about Mike Brown. What was clear, from the first day, was that residents of Ferguson, and all who had traveled there to join them, had no trust in, and virtually no relationship with, the police. The police, in turn, seemed to exhibit next to no humanity toward the pained residents they were charged with protecting.
Ferguson would birth a movement and set the nation on a course for a still-ongoing public hearing on race that stretched far past the killing of unarmed residents—from daily policing to Confederate imagery to respectability politics to cultural appropriation. The social justice movement spawned from Mike Brown’s blood would force city after city to grapple with its own fraught histories of race and policing. As protests propelled by tweets and hashtags spread under the banner of Black Lives Matter and with cell phone and body camera video shining new light on the way police interact with minority communities, America was forced to consider that not everyone marching in the streets could be wrong. Even if you believe Mike Brown’s own questionable choices sealed his fate, did Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and Sandra Bland all deserve to die?
It’s worth remembering now, as the Obama presidency has come to its close, what it was like to live inside the moment when his ascendancy was a still-unfolding fact. After a seemingly never-ending sea of firsts—first black mayors, first black governors, and first black senators—to have reached that ultimate electoral mountaintop, the presidency, seemed then to have validated decades of struggle. But the nation’s grappling with race and the legacy of its original sin—ongoing since the first slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619—was and is far from over. Any façade of a postracial reality was soon melted away amid the all-consuming eight-year flame of racial reckoning that Obama’s election sparked.
Ferguson would mark the arrival on the national stage of a new generation of black political activists—young leaders whose parents and grandparents had been born as recently as the 1970s and 1980s, an era many considered to be post–civil rights. Their parents’ parents had been largely focused on winning the opportunity to participate in the political process and gaining access to the protections promised them as citizens. Their parents focused on using the newfound opportunities and safeties provided by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts to claim seats at the table, with political and activist strategies often focused on registering as many black voters and electing as many black leaders to public office as possible. For at least two decades, the days of taking the struggle to the streets had seemed, to many politically active black Americans, far in the rearview mirror.
For many of the post–Joshua Generation—the young men and women who, like me, first cast their ballots in 2008, who had grown up in integrated schools and neighborhoods in a world where black entertainers like Michaels Jackson and Jordan were widely recognized as the world’s greatest—the seemingly unrelenting wave of black death required an accounting. Despite the talks so many of us of this generation received from parents, teachers, and coaches—Don’t run from the cops. Keep your hands out of your pockets. Be conscious of where you’re wandering…—the young black bodies we kept seeing in our Facebook newsfeeds could have been our own. How could we explain this to ourselves or each other?
Now we were able to share what we saw and how we felt about it instantaneously with thousands of others who were going through similar awakenings. Conversations once had at Bible studies and on barroom stools were happening on our phones and on Facebook, allowing both instant access to information and a means of instant feedback. Social media made it possible for young black people to document interactions they believed to be injustices, and exposed their white friends and family members to their experiences.
As President Obama’s second term toiled on, it became increasingly clear that talk of a postracial America was no more than cheap political punditry. A new generation of black Americans were, if anything, as emboldened by our black president as they were unsurprised by the failure of his election to usher in a fantasy period of racial healing. From the death of Oscar Grant on New Year’s Eve in 2009 after he was shot by a transit officer in Oakland, California, to the death of Trayvon Martin in February 2012 by the gun of neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, the headlines of the Obama years often seemed a yearbook of black death, raising a morbid and depressing quandary for black men and women: Why had the promise and potential of such a transformative presidency not yet reached down to the lives of those who elected him? Even the historic Obama presidency could not suspend the injunction that playing by the rules wasn’t enough to keep you safe. What protection was offered by a black presidency when, as James Baldwin once wrote, the world is white, and we are black?
By the time a grand jury concluded in November 2014 that there was not enough evidence to charge Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson with a crime in the killing of Mike Brown, I’d been in that city for the better part of three months. I didn’t know then that I’d spend the next eight months crisscrossing the country, visiting city after city to report on and understand the social movement that vowed to awaken a sleeping nation and insisted it begin to truly value black life. Each day, it seemed, there was another shooting.
In city after city, I found police departments whose largely white ranks looked little like the communities of color they were charged with protecting, officers whose actions were at worst criminal and at best lacked racial sensitivity, and black and brown bodies disproportionately gunned down by those sworn to serve and protect.
How many? At the time Mike Brown was killed, it wasn’t completely clear. There had been several efforts by citizen journalists to count the number of people killed by the police each year, but full, comprehensive data on police violence wasn’t available at the national level, certainly not in real time. The lack of information made it impossible to have an educated conversation about race and policing during those early days—police unions and law enforcement sympathizers would claim that Mike Brown’s death was a one-off, while civil rights groups and emerging young activists would claim that Brown was a stand-in for countless others. Those deaths were black communities’ reality, though they were left with no way to quantify that truth to a skeptical ma
jority-white media, or by extension the nation. In interviews over the months I spent in Ferguson, residents described Mike Brown as a symbol of their own oppression. In a city where, federal investigators would later conclude, traffic tickets and arrest warrants were used systematically to target impoverished black residents, Brown’s death afforded an opportunity through protest for otherwise ignored voices to be heard. On many nights protesters would refuse to provide their names to reporters who approached them for interviews. “My name is Mike Brown,” they would reply.
In the year following Ferguson, my colleagues and I at the Post compiled the number of police killings as a way of establishing an accurate count. The picture we painted would reveal how common it had become for unarmed black men to be killed by police officers—one unarmed black person shot and killed by police every ten days. The stories of these men, and a few women, stared out at me from the sea of white men and women who were also left dead at the hands of police officers. Almost all of these shootings—990 of them in total in 2015 alone—would be ruled legally justified. And in a plurality if not a majority of the cases, officers, it seemed, had little option but to fire their weapons. But in hundreds of the cases, the circumstances were much muddier.
What does justice look like for those who are killed by officers who, according to the way our laws are written, have committed no crime but who through tactic or restraint could have avoided taking a life? What should be said to those grieving families, what recourse awaits them once the grand jury returns no bill? Justice is a hard concept to wrestle with when your eyes are filled with scenes of death.
On that first night in Ferguson, I was sucked into the story I wanted to cover and understand, even if I would struggle for the next year to reconcile my own role in the chaos. When I’d been a reporter for all of three years, my beat became the nation’s biggest domestic story line. The young leaders behind many of the protests often trusted me because we could have been classmates or childhood playmates—in some cases, we had been. The streets of Ferguson, and later Baltimore, were flooded with newly declared citizen journalists as well as writers and reporters with well-stated partisan or ideological loyalties. They, along with scores of live streamers—who used phone apps to broadcast live images and audio from the often chaotic demonstrations and nights of rioting—played a crucial role in the creation of the movement. But my role, I knew, was different. My fundamental professional obligation was to fairness and truth.
Among those truths, however, were these: I’m a black man in America who is often tasked with telling the story of black men and women killed on American streets by those who are sworn to protect them but who historically have seen and treated those men, women, and even their children as anything but American. That story didn’t start or end on the streets of Ferguson.
I wrote this book from the messy notes I compiled as I reported, by looking back at what I wrote in the Washington Post, and from hundreds of interviews with young protest leaders, elected officials, police officers and chiefs, and the families and friends of those who in death became national symbols. The messages of the Ferguson protester, of the Cleveland protester, of the Charleston protester, the Baltimore protester, the Missouri protester, and the Baton Rouge protester were in many ways different—nuanced demands specific to each locale. But there was an underlying message, a defiant declaration, bursting from the protest chants in each of these cities, perhaps best captured by a sign left by a demonstrator near the site of the shooting of Antonio Brown, who was the last in the string of black men killed by St. Louis police in 2014: YOU CAN’T KILL US ALL.
The story of Ferguson, Cleveland, and Baltimore is that of the fractured and neglected relationship that exists between those who walk the streets without a badge and those who wear one. This gulf of trust only widens and becomes harder still to fill with each shooting. And the conversation about accountability and reform stalls each time, as we saw earlier this year in Dallas and Baton Rouge, when an officer’s life is deliberately targeted in the name of vigilante justice.
Two years after America’s great awakening to the reality of police violence in the streets of Ferguson, the same distrust, pain, and suspicion that drove thousands into the streets flow through the veins of millions of black and brown Americans.
The story of Ferguson remains the story of America.
CHAPTER ONE
Ferguson: A City Holds Its Breath
The first time I saw the name Michael Brown was on Instagram.
I typically checked Instagram once or twice a week to see old college friends partying, or journalism colleagues posting from airports en route to an assignment. As I scrolled through my feed on the afternoon of August 9, my finger stopped when I reached a series of videos uploaded by Brittany Noble, a local news reporter in St. Louis whom I consider an older sister. The clip showed a disheveled woman screaming, crying. The police, she said, had killed her firstborn son. Over her shoulder a crowd had gathered.
I first met Brit-tan-ney, as she always teasingly insisted we pronounce it, at one of the annual gatherings of the National Association of Black Journalists. We were then both job-hungry college students and quickly hit it off while discussing the feedback we’d received on our résumés from recruiters and comparing invites to the conference’s nightly receptions. Five years later, we remained part of a core group of friends from those conferences who stayed in semifrequent touch as we tried to navigate entry-level journalism jobs.
Brittany had graduated a few years earlier than me, and after bouncing around several smaller-market television stations, she’d settled into a gig with KMOV, the CBS affiliate in St. Louis, which was both her hometown and that of her fiancé, Mike. As they prepared for the wedding, they decided to live in a racially diverse town not far from the city: Ferguson.
Two years after taking the gig in Missouri, Brittany was working weekends, giving her Friday nights to the job and then, after a few hours of sleep, heading back out into the field for early-Saturday- and Sunday-morning live shots. It’s the type of thankless work done by many young reporters, but she was glad to be back home.
The only thing bigger than Brittany’s smile is her drive, and that ambition meant she was often looking for a way to stand out on the job, constantly searching for a small scoop or a neighborhood feature that her competition might have overlooked. It didn’t hurt that she had connections. Her mother, before she retired, had been one of the highest-ranking black women in the history of the St. Louis Police Department. Her soon-to-be father-in-law ran a prominent black church in the city. On many days, Brittany’s email and voice mail were full of story tips and ideas. Not all of the leads panned out, but it wasn’t rare for her to come up with a unique angle or tidbit.
Much like my own experience at the Globe, working general assignment can be a mixed bag: one day you’re covering a high school graduation, the next you’re camped out beside crime scene tape.
And then, of course, there are the officer-involved shootings. Brittany’s first came on July 1, 2012, at her first job at a station in Saginaw, Michigan. A homeless black man, Milton Hall, had been shot and killed by the police in the parking lot of a shopping plaza.
The officers responded to a 911 call about a man who had stolen a cup of coffee from a convenience store. When they arrived, they encountered Hall, who was carrying a knife, and they began to argue with him. The forty-nine-year-old had a history of mental illness and had been living on the street.
Eight officers reported to the scene, and they told investigators that when they arrived Hall threatened a female officer with the knife and closed within a few feet of her. After a standoff of several minutes, the officers—who had formed a semicircle around Hall as he staggered forward—opened fire.
With traffic driving past and several bystanders in the parking lot, the officers shot forty-seven bullets in total, with eleven of them riddling Hall’s body. The shooting was caught on cell phone video and soon was playing on loop on CNN. “The c
ommunity was outraged, they said they were going to protest and demonstrate and blow the whole place up if these officers didn’t get indicted,” Brittany recalled to me years later. “And then the officers didn’t get indicted, and nothing happened.”
Before Ferguson, this story line was as common as it was hidden. A community flies into rage after a questionable police shooting, leaders hold vigils and marches, figureheads call for accountability, and then, almost as quickly as the tragedy began, it ends. Everyone but the grieving family moves on with their lives until the next time a radio dispatcher puts out the call:
Need backup. Shots fired. Officer involved.
When that call came on August 9, 2014, Brittany was in St. Louis. Having worked the early-morning Saturday shift, she was across town preparing for her engagement photo shoot.
“Hey, Brittany, you see that the police shot somebody in Ferguson?” her fiancé called out before handing her the phone so she could see for herself. Perhaps he was already tiring of the engagement photos, because he knew full and well what would happen next.
In an industry dominated by white reporters and editors, young black journalists are told early and often that they’ve got to go above and beyond—showing up unasked for a weekend shift, coming in early and staying late on the weekdays, and always being ready, at a moment’s notice, to drop everything and run toward the story. For two years that was what Brittany, one of the only black reporters at her station and one of just a few dozen in St. Louis—a major media market—had been doing. She often felt overlooked or underappreciated, but if she kept doing her job, if she kept chasing and getting “the story,” she knew they couldn’t ignore her and her work forever.
Brittany fired off an email to her bosses, asking if they had anyone headed to the scene. When they didn’t respond, she called a producer directly.
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