They Can't Kill Us All

by Wesley Lowery

  “You need me to come in?” she asked.

  Minutes later she landed the first major scoop of Ferguson: the emotional reaction of Michael Brown’s mother as she arrived at the scene.

  As Brittany raced across town, residents of the Canfield Green apartment complex began flooding the streets. The shooting had happened on a quiet side street, in a spot surrounded by four-level apartment buildings. As the crowds gathered, others took to windows and porches, looking down at the chaos developing below. Within minutes after the shooting, word spread through the surrounding apartments, and beyond, that Brown’s hands were up in the air when the fatal shots were fired by Officer Darren Wilson, who had encountered Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson while responding to a call about two young men, matching their description, who had just been involved in the robbery of a nearby liquor store.

  As police officers scrambled to secure the scene, an enraged, agitated crowd was quickly gathering. Why is Brown’s body still out there? Why was he shot and killed in the first place? And why do we keep hearing that he had his hands up?

  “Get us several more units over here,” one of the responding officers demanded over the police radio. “There’s gonna be a problem.”

  Johnson and Brown had entered Ferguson Market & Liquor at 11:53 that morning—with Brown, the younger of the two men, grabbing a thirty-four-dollar box of Swisher Sweets and attempting to walk out. The employee working behind the counter that day told Brown that he had to pay for the smokes, and in response the teen grabbed the man by the collar and shoved him. One of the store’s security cameras captured the violent exchange, an eleven-second video clip that would be the last living image of Brown.

  But in the hours and days after Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson, none of the residents of Ferguson knew about the liquor store robbery. That information wouldn’t come out for days, when still-frame images from surveillance cameras were released by Ferguson PD. In fact, in those early days, police refused to release any information or answer any question of substance.

  Why had Brown been shot and killed? Who was the officer involved? What was the potential threat to the officer that prompted his use of deadly force? But a vacuum of information always finds a way to be filled, especially in a crowded apartment complex full of dozens of people who claimed to have seen the struggle and the shooting.

  The Canfield Green apartments are a cluster of half a dozen cream-colored buildings with green and brown trim. The thirty-seven-acre complex contains more than 414 apartments, one- and two-bedroom units, for which Canfield’s almost exclusively black residents fork over about five hundred dollars a month.It’s a relatively low-income sliver of Ferguson, a city that is socioeconomically diverse. Residents complain of gang activity, of break-ins, and of their ears too frequently seizing at the sharp cackle of gunshots.

  During my first days on the ground in Ferguson, many Canfield residents believed that Brown—after being confronted by Wilson for jaywalking—had been shot in the back as he ran away. Dorian Johnson, Brown’s friend who was with him when he was killed, claimed that after an initial struggle and gunfire, Brown ran away from Wilson, turned around, put his hands up, and shouted out, “Don’t shoot!” Johnson ran away after Brown and Wilson began struggling, ducking behind a nearby vehicle as the fatal shots were fired. An even more inflammatory rumor, later proven untrue, was soon circulating throughout Ferguson: that Officer Wilson had stood over Brown’s dying body and fired an execution shot into the dying teen’s chest.

  For many of those first nights after Brown’s death, people believed that there was video of the shooting, with rumors flying that officers had seized residents’ cell phones to keep the videos from spreading. And there was anger about the number of bullets fired by Wilson.

  Why would Wilson need to shoot Mike Brown six times? Why didn’t he have a Taser? Why did it take so long for Brown’s body to be moved from the ground?

  “I could see how [the officer] could be intimidated, but that ain’t a reason to be gunned down, not nine times, not with your hands up,” said Duane Finnie, thirty-six, a childhood friend of Brown’s father and friend of the family, who was one of the first people I interviewed after arriving in Ferguson. “I just put myself in Mike’s shoes, and like, your last seconds of life you’re getting executed by somebody who is supposed to protect and serve you.

  “People are tired of being misused and mistreated, and this is an outlet for them to express their outrage and anger; everyone is looking for an outlet to express their emotions,” he told me on August 11, two days after the shooting. “This is a reason…all the looting and what’s going on, but people want to be heard, and they don’t know how to do it. So that’s why they lash out.”

  “They’re not trying to let this one get swept under the table,” a friend of Finnie’s, who had been standing alongside him while we spoke, chimed in.

  Investigators would later conclude that Brown’s hands were most likely not up and that the altercation began when the eighteen-year-old punched Darren Wilson after the officer, responding to the robbery call, attempted to stop him on the street.

  Whether Brown was attempting to surrender or attempting to attack Officer Wilson when the fatal shots were fired remains murky. The evidence shows that “Hands up, don’t shoot”—a national rallying cry, the chief chorus of the dead boy’s defenders—was based on a falsehood. But as anger boiled into rage, no one in Ferguson could have known that yet.

  They did know that the police in Ferguson looked nothing like them: an almost-all-white force charged with serving and protecting a majority black city. They knew all too well about the near-constant traffic tickets they were being given, and how often those tickets turned into warrants.

  And they knew that Mike Mike, the quiet kid who got his hair cut up the street on West Florissant and who was often seen walking around in this neighborhood, was dead.

  “That could be any of us. That could have been me dead on the street!” screamed Carl Union, twenty-seven, a local DJ who refused to leave one of the early protests despite multiple rounds of heavy tear gas. Union said that when he saw the images of Brown’s body in the street he thought of his young daughter. When he heard that Brown had been shot by the police, he became angry and decided to join the protest. “It’s like we’re not even human to them,” Union said through tears.

  Mike Brown’s body remained on the hot August ground for four and a half hours—a gruesome, dehumanizing spectacle that further traumatized the residents of Canfield Drive and would later be cited by local police officials as among their major mistakes.

  For some, first in Ferguson and later around the nation, the spectacle of Brown’s body cooling on the asphalt conjured images of the historic horrors of lynchings—the black body of a man robbed of his right to due process and placed on display as a warning to other black residents.

  If the police were willing not only to kill Mike Brown, residents of Canfield Drive would ask me as I interviewed them, but also to let his body sit out that way, what would they be willing to do to the rest of us?

  Within an hour of the shooting, word had traveled to Michael Brown’s family—his mother, stepfather, and father—who each individually made their way to Canfield Drive. Police had sealed off the block, causing a bottleneck of dozens and eventually hundreds of people who began to gather at the corner at West Florissant Avenue. That was where Brittany and the videographer she had with her parked their news van, and where she first approached Lezley McSpadden, the slain boy’s mother.

  Another reporter at Brittany’s station was supposed to interview the family, so initially Brittany focused on getting reaction quotes from enraged local residents. But Brown’s mother was standing just a few feet away, and it didn’t look like any of the reporters were talking to her. Finally, Brittany asked one of the residents she had interviewed—a cousin of Brown’s—if he would make an introduction. Initially she didn’t even bring her cameraman with her, assuming that
her colleague had already interviewed the dead teen’s mother. Instead, Brittany thought, she’d upload the video to Instagram—since that was where she had first heard the story.

  “You didn’t have to shoot him eight times!” McSpadden exclaimed to Brittany. “You just shot all through my baby’s body.”

  Brittany ended up working late into the night, transmitting live shots for every newscast, ending with the 11:30 p.m., and watching as the crowds that gathered became more and more frustrated and angry.

  The Ferguson and St. Louis County police had sent scores of officers, some in full riot gear and tactical vehicles, to deal with the growing crowds and to hold them back as they attempted to investigate for themselves the scene of the shooting. All of this is pretty standard for the scene of a police shooting—police, protesters, angered residents and families—but the scale of the immediate response from both the community and law enforcement signaled that perhaps Ferguson would be different.

  “This was a scene that I had never seen before, a heartbreak that I had never felt before from the people I was interviewing,” Brittany later told me. “I just felt different. Something wasn’t right. This wasn’t the typical police shooting scene.”

  And then, after four hours, as midday turned to late afternoon, officers finally removed Brown’s body from the asphalt. They did not address the crowds who were hungry for answers after spending most of their Saturday hearing inflammatory rumors. “People were like: after all of that, they’re just going to leave?” Brittany said. “They’re not going to say anything? These people were hurt.” As the police began to leave, church groups started walking down Canfield Drive, following the still-hysterical Lezley McSpadden to the spot where crimson blood still stained the ground.

  When they arrived, the groups circled around McSpadden and her husband and began to pray, sing, and hug. Some were older folks from the church up the road, others were younger residents who poured out of the Canfield apartments. What had been a rambunctious crowd had composed itself to create a vigil for a violent death.

  But the tranquility didn’t last. As the prayer group began to break up, the residents of Canfield began to yell. Prayer wasn’t going to fix this. Neither was singing. The police had to answer for this. Why was Mike Brown dead? Why had his body been left out for so long? And when would we get answers?

  Amid the shouting, someone lit a Dumpster on fire. While moments earlier desperate prayers were being sent above, now it was the flash of flames floating into the night air.

  Ferguson survived that first night. The Dumpster fire and the sound of distant gunshots spooked police, but they were nothing compared with what was to come.

  The following day, the Ferguson Police Department still hadn’t explained what had happened or apologized for keeping Brown’s body out on the ground for so long. And church groups were calling for a march in the slain teen’s honor.

  That Sunday afternoon, after services concluded, local pastors and their flocks met at the spot where Brown was killed. Hundreds showed up, surrounding newly erected memorials made of candles, stuffed animals, and liquor bottles that together overflowed the grass shoulders on either side of the two-lane road.

  The crowd started marching and chanting, for the first time, what they believed to be Michael Brown’s own words in his final moments.

  “Hands up, don’t shoot!”

  The cries rang into the air as the crowd, including many students set to begin school the following week, as well as middle-aged residents of the apartment complex, moved forward. As they hit West Florissant and turned left, they were met by a wall of police officers. Soon what had begun as a peaceful march had morphed into a heated standoff, blocking traffic in both directions.

  The scene played out right in front of Brittany, who after spending Saturday night on the job woke up for her 5 a.m. live shot, worked a full day shift, and was again at the corner of Canfield Drive and West Florissant watching her community clash with police.

  Night was close. The crowd continued shouting at the officers, who were shouting back. And as the church groups began to leave, young men emerged who seemed angrier and more determined to extract revenge for Mike Brown’s death.

  Brittany made her way toward the front of the demonstration, to the spot where the crowd was standing toe-to-toe with the police. A young girl, perhaps in her early teens, ran up and grabbed Brittany’s arm, a look of terror in her eyes. “They knocked out the windows of your truck!” the girl screamed. “And now they’re burning the QuikTrip.”

  Brittany turned to see the shattered glass of the news station van scattered across the ground, and as she moved toward it, she could see men running in and out of the QuikTrip gas station at the corner of West Florissant Avenue and Northwinds Estates Drive.

  It’s unclear how it started, but in the swirl of misinformation and confusion, some in the neighborhood started spreading word that the 911 call to report a robbery by Michael Brown was made by the employees of this gas station. They most likely had confused the gas station with the liquor store up the street.

  That night, armed vandals took advantage of raging protests and demonstrations to break into the QuikTrip gas station that sat just a block away from the spot on Canfield Drive where Brown was killed, grabbing handfuls of chips and sodas, cigarettes and lighters as others ripped the ATM machine from the wall. Before long, the store was ablaze.

  While the photos and videos from the day of Brown’s death had certainly gone viral—viewed and shared thousands of times—it was the destruction of the QuikTrip, not the police shooting of Mike Brown, that brought the microscope of the national media to Ferguson. The unrest in Ferguson had now become a riot. Yet another police shooting in a working-class black neighborhood, even the breaking of a young black body left on public display, didn’t catch the gaze of the national media. It was the community’s enraged response—broken windows and shattered storefronts—that drew the eyes of the nation.

  Most of the so-called race riots of the 1800s and early 1900s consisted of armed clashes between white and black residents—very often precipitated by a black man or woman being somewhere that black folks “didn’t belong.”

  That began to change in the 1930s. The large-scale racial conflicts that began in 1935 consisted primarily not of white Klansmen and residents ransacking black homes and businesses but of black men and women lashing out with violence against symbols of the white establishment: businesses, storefronts, and government buildings.

  And of the more than 100 such race riots since 1935, almost all have been sparked by some type of police incident.

  Between the two world wars, Harlem was believed to be the shining gold standard of what a postracial, renaissance city could look like: the nation’s capital of black culture and society, full of neighborhoods with relatively peaceful integration of blacks, whites, and immigrants. But so much like almost a century later, in the Obama years, to think that Harlem was then some sort of postracial mecca required a willed ignorance of the deep racial inequalities baked into the American experience.

  “The end of the Harlem Renaissance had a postracial zeitgeist never seen before, which caused its own set of anxieties for both black and white residents,” Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the then director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, who has written at length about race riots, told me long after Ferguson. “The truth is, it was in commercial establishments, like the neighborhood dime store, where there was a level of integration and race mixing, a decade after the Great Migration, that had never been seen before. Which meant there was a lot of racial tension.”

  On the afternoon of March 19, 1935, Lino Rivera, a sixteen-year-old black Puerto Rican boy, was caught stealing a penknife from S. H. Kress, a dime store across the street from the storied Apollo Theater. In the time it took for the police to arrive, a crowd gathered outside the storefront.

  The store owner asked police to let Rivera go, but no one told the crow
ds that officers had quietly slipped the teen out the store’s side door. In a vacuum of information, a story spread that a young black boy had been killed for stealing a piece of candy and that the police were hiding his body. A hearse just happened to pull up and park nearby. The crowd assumed the worst.

  More than ten thousand black residents took to the Harlem streets, with some smashing storefront windows and later getting in fights with the white New York Police Department officers who arrived to break up the violent assembly.

  “Police, despite their numbers, were handicapped in dealing with the rioters by the necessity of guarding the windowless stores,” a reporter for the New York Daily News wrote the next day. “Looting of stores was the objective of hundreds of hoodlums who swarmed into the district from Manhattan and the Bronx after news of the riot spread. Burglar alarms and false alarms were ringing constantly in the district, and fires were set in several looted stores.”

  By the time the rioting had concluded a day later, 125 people had been arrested, 3 people were dead, and more than two million dollars of damage had been done to local businesses.

  As is almost always the case after the type of unrest commonly called a race riot, local officials quickly appointed commissions and review boards to tease out what had caused the chaos. Multiple such commissions were created to examine the 1935 unrest in Harlem.

  They all concluded more or less the same thing: that the unrest was as much about systemic discrimination and inequity as it was the specific case of Lino Rivera. The “bi-racial Commission of Investigation” appointed by New York’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, called for increased access to health care, better schools and vocational training, access to better housing, and improved relationships between police officers and black residents of Harlem as its prescription for preventing another riot.

  “This relatively unimportant case of juvenile pilfering would never have taken on the significance which it later took on, had not a fortuitous combination of subsequent events made it the spark which set aflame the smouldering resentments of the city of Harlem against racial discrimination and poverty in the midst of plenty,” the commission wrote in its review. “The insecurity of the individual in Harlem against police aggression is one of the most potent causes for the existing hostility to authority.”