They Can't Kill Us All

by Wesley Lowery

  Another report, titled “The Negro in Harlem: A Report on Social and Economic Conditions Responsible for the Outbreak of March 19, 1935,” concluded that the unrest came as the result of the accumulating effect of “injustices of discrimination in employment, the aggressions of the police, and the racial segregation.”

  Those who have studied the 1935 Harlem riot say that while the underlying issues in the neighborhood spoke to deep systemic inequality, it was the perceived disregard and devaluation of the black body, and of black life, that called forth the rage that enveloped the black men and women of Harlem on that day.

  The same can be said for the violence in Ferguson. Those who set fire to the QuikTrip, and who smashed the windows of Sam’s Meat Market and Red’s BBQ, did so, at least in part, out of communal rage over the death of Mike Brown. Yet were it not for the deep, abiding inequality through which the black residents of Ferguson lived their lives, it is unclear if those blocks of Ferguson would ever have burst into flames.

  “The Harlem riot of 1935, now the subject of a comprehensive report, demonstrated that ‘the Negro is not merely the man who shouldn’t be forgotten; he is the man who cannot safely be ignored,’” the writer and philosopher Alain Locke, the first black Rhodes Scholar, wrote in 1936. “Eleven brief years ago Harlem was full of the thrill and ferment of sudden progress and prosperity.… Today, with that same Harlem prostrate in the grip of the depression and throes of social unrest, we confront the sobering facts of a serious relapse and premature setback; indeed, find it hard to believe that the rosy enthusiasms and hopes of 1925 were more than bright illusions or a cruelly deceptive mirage. Yet after all there was a renaissance, with its poetic spurt of cultural and spiritual advance, vital with significant but uneven accomplishments; what we face in Harlem today is the first scene of the next act—the prosy ordeal of the reformation with its stubborn tasks of economic reconstruction and social and civic reform.”

  Decades after the 1935 Harlem riot and yet decades before Ferguson, James Baldwin, who grew up on these same Harlem streets, warned that there would be more of this brand of unrest, invoking Biblical imagery to remind a nation then grappling with the civil rights movement that a just God had promised that his next judgment on an unjust world would come by flames, not water. Baldwin wrote in 1963, “If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the other—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the world.

  “If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time.”

  By the time the sun rose over Ferguson on August 11, two days after Mike Brown’s death, the QuikTrip gas station would be nothing but charred remains—the large metal post that once displayed the red and white QT logo now declaring THE QT PEOPLE’S PARK. LIBERATED 8/10/14 in black spray paint.

  More than two dozen friends and family members attended an afternoon press conference at the Jennings Mason Temple church in St. Louis, where the forceful words of civil rights attorney Ben Crump echoed off the wooden fixtures and at times rattled the stained-glass windows.

  This was my first stop after arriving in St. Louis, on the afternoon of August 11, two days after Mike Brown had been killed.

  The press conference was just beginning as I found my way up the stairs to the second-floor sanctuary, sliding into a pew behind the local news cameramen and grabbing a seat between two correspondents for MSNBC. It was a scene we had all, unfortunately, grown familiar with. A grieving family, with T-shirts reading REST IN PEACE, would step to the microphone to demand justice, knowing how unlikely it would be that they would get it.

  I’d been in this room before. Midway through an internship at the Boston Globe, I’d been dispatched to the scene of a police shooting of a young black man. Officers said he had fled on foot after a traffic stop, then pulled a gun on them. The investigation into the killing took well over a year, and the slain man’s mother had taken to community meetings to confront police officials, sobbing and pleading with them to give her the name of the officer who had killed her son. I’d sit with my head angled down as I listened to her desperate cries.

  Knowing that a police officer is responsible causes a special, deep pain for the families of those killed, because the person who gunned down their loved one was not a mythical “bad guy,” not a gangbanger or a thug or a random criminal. For the families of those killed by the police, it is often most shattering that their loved one was killed by the very people sworn to protect them. A family and a community’s fundamental understanding of safety and security in our society is threatened when those pledged to protect kill.

  Similar cries, the frantic gasps of a mother now without her child, were coming from the back of the sanctuary as Mike Brown’s family made their way to the microphone.

  Immediately, I found myself with a small but consequential logistical decision to make. I was armed with a notebook, a phone, and my two hands. In most cases, I would opt to record audio with my phone while taking notes by hand. But that would mean not sending real-time updates on a story where a national audience was hungry for new information. So I opted against recording. This was a story that had played out on social media; I reasoned that that was where my reporting efforts should continue to focus for now. I’d use my phone to send tweets and take notes by hand—even if it meant I’d end up with a more disjointed and incomplete set of direct quotations.

  “He was executed, in broad daylight, when it was clear he had no weapon,” declared Crump, a Florida-based attorney who was first thrust into the national spotlight when he represented the family of Trayvon Martin. “Their baby was executed in broad daylight!” he yelled. Crump said that Martin’s father had called the Brown family before listing name after name of young black men gunned down in controversial shootings in recent years—Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Jonathan Ferrell.

  Those names represented the first wave of black death to come during the Obama administration, a series of shootings—joined by that of Oscar Grant, subject of a police shooting that occurred in 2009 but drew sustained national attention in 2013 after being depicted in the film Fruitvale Station—that brought new urgency to the peril of black life.

  “To some it has become a cliché, to us these are our children,” Crump declared, voice booming. “Our children, don’t they deserve the dignity and respect of law enforcement?”

  Brown’s mother stepped to the microphone, overcome with emotion as members of her family wailed in the sanctuary’s front row. Along the sides of the room sat friends of the family, their shirts declaring NO JUSTICE NO PEACE. Unable to deliver her prepared remarks, Lezley McSpadden said she would have been overjoyed to drop her son off at college. Mike Brown, having finally completed the summer course he needed to get his high school diploma, was supposed to be starting his classes at a vocational school that very day. Instead, McSpadden said, she was planning his burial. “That was my firstborn son.… Ask anyone and they’d tell you how much I loved my son.… I just wish I could have been there to help him, my son…,” she muttered before breaking down in tears. Lifting her head as tears dropped onto the podium, she added: “No violence, just justice.”

  At the end of the service, I slipped out in front of the family, hoping to catch one or two of them as they made their way to their cars. But they were overcome, the pain of the death still fresh. As they neared the exit, Brown’s grandmother, with whom for a time he had lived, fell to the ground as she wailed. “Oh, God, they took my baby!” Tears were bursting from her eyes as she was carried toward a car.

  Moments later I found Charles Ewing, one of Brown’s uncles and a local pastor, who insisted to me that there was no way his nephew would have attacked a police officer. “We called him the gentle giant, he was a gentle giant,” Ewing told me,
calling Brown—whose attack on the liquor store worker was not yet known—a nonviolent kid to his core. “He was like a big teddy bear,” Ewing said. “We tried to get him to play football but he was too timid.”

  I wanted my readers to feel like they knew Michael Brown, and I wanted to know him myself. Who was this young man, what were his hopes and his dreams, his strengths and his faults? Why did he end up in that liquor store that day, with his hand gripping the collar of that cashier?

  A journalist’s portrait of the deceased is often used by the casual reader to decide if the tragic outcome that befell him or her could have happened to us, or, as is often implied to be the case in those killed by police officers, if this tragic fate was reserved for someone innately criminal who behaved in a way we never would.

  We focus on personal details of the dead not only because readers want to know, but because we in the media do, too. We believe that if we can somehow figure out the character and life of the person at the center of the story, we can somehow understand what happened that day. We fall into the fallacy of believing we can litigate the complicated story before us into a black-and-white binary of good guys and bad guys. There are no isolated incidents, yet the media’s focus on the victim and the officer inadvertently erases the context of the nation’s history as it relates to race, policing, and training for law enforcement. And by focusing on the character of the victim, we inadvertently take the focus off the powerful and instead train our eyes and judgment on the powerless.

  In reality, knowing whether Michael Brown liked football, was truly a “gentle giant,” or was an honors student or a dropout provides little insight into what happened on Canfield Green that day. Even less relevant were the tidbits meant to “prove” Brown was somehow deserving of his fate—that he smoked weed with his friends or rapped sexual lyrics in the makeshift studio he had constructed in his grandmother’s basement.

  In those early days, the national media litigated Mike Brown, rather than litigating the shooting. We placed the burden of proof on the dead teenager, not the officer who had shot and killed him.

  To many white Americans, Mike Brown was a young man who lived a very different life, in a very different country. He robbed a liquor store and then got in a scuffle with a police officer. The specifics of the shooting appeared to absolve the conscience of anyone who might have felt responsible for weighing whether Michael Brown’s death, legally justified or not, fit a broader pattern and whether that pattern was one rooted in systemic injustice.

  A shortsighted framing, divorced from historical context, led us to litigate and relitigate each specific detail of the shooting without fully grasping the groundswell of pain and frustration fuming from the pores of the people of Ferguson—which also left us blindsided by what was to come.

  We had met less than a minute earlier, on the steps outside one of Greater St. Louis’s largest black churches, but Netta’s brow was already furrowed and a string of teasing taunts had begun its seamless flow from her lips.

  “I mean, I know you said you were light-skinned, but you didn’t say you were this light-skinned!” she said matter-of-factly, standing outside a hastily called meeting of the NAACP in response to the protests and the riots. After the family press conference, this was my second stop in Ferguson.

  Netta’s frank declaration and piercing facial expressions as she stared at the overdressed reporter standing in front of her were disarming.

  “Okay. Well, we already have a white friend named white Wes,” she said, reaching over to point to a labor organizer standing with their group. “So we can call you point-five Wes.” Unyieldingly blunt, with a face that betrays both passion and skepticism, this was Johnetta Elzie.

  It was August 11, and I had been in St. Louis for roughly three hours. But Netta was one of the only people I knew I needed to talk to. For days I had watched her fire off tweet after tweet from the ground, often providing vivid emotional detail along with photos and videos of the protests and the police response. She seemed to be always on the scene and always in the know about the planned demonstrations.

  Netta was a “day one” protester, one of the people who flooded the streets in the hours after the shooting and who saw with their own eyes the chaos of August 9, 2014—the police dogs, the devastation of Michael Brown’s parents, and the dead teen’s body baking on the asphalt.

  As I boarded a plane to St. Louis, I’d sent her a private message on Twitter explaining that I was on my way to Ferguson and wanted to touch base and get any context I would need to make sure I told the story accurately. She replied with her cell phone number and told me to hit her up when I landed. Before I could reply, she had sent out this tweet to her growing list of followers.

  “Reporters from the Washington Post are on their way to #STL #ferguson to cover the #MikeBrown story the correct way. THIS IS LOVE.”

  The news of Big Mike’s death wasn’t broken by a local reporter, although many of them were on the scene not long after the shooting. The first dispatches came from Emanuel Freeman, a twenty-seven-year-old local rapper who goes by the stage name Thee Pharoah and who lived in the Canfield Green apartment complex. He heard the first gunshot and raced to the window, phone in hand, sending emotional updates. “I JUST SAW SOMEONE DIE OMFG,” Freeman tweeted at 10:03 a.m. on August 9, 2014. “the police just shot someone dead in front of my crib yo,” he sent in response to someone who inquired for more information. “no reason! He was running!” Then another update, this one containing a blurry image of Officer Darren Wilson standing over Mike Brown’s body.

  Johnetta Elzie quickly became the most prominent of the citizen journalists telling the story of Ferguson. To her followers, she seemed omnipresent—at the police department, at the spot where Mike Brown had been killed, outside the gas station, shocked and scared as it began to burn. And all of it was documented, line by line and exclamation by exclamation. Her unchecked emotion was captivating. If someone online attacked her, she attacked back, and hit harder—with none of the faux humility or fake good faith that colors the way most of the prominent chattering class interacts and debates on social media. Her criticism of the police and of the media was searing. For a journalist used to reading the often carefully-calculated social media dispatches of fellow political reporters and elected officials, her honesty was a refreshing burst of real, an injection of vivid life into a story about a gruesome death.

  Netta had spent nearly all of her twenty-five years in St. Louis, raised by her mother, Relonda, who for years owned and operated a beauty salon she had named Ree’s Hair Explosion. Netta grew up listening to the older black clientele argue about men, and fashion, and politics, picking up their mannerisms and at times hyperbolic attitudes. Things weren’t always great between Netta and her mother, with frequent clashes between the strong-willed single mother and her even stronger-willed daughter.

  But Netta always knew her mother was proud of the grades she brought home from Our Lady of Good Counsel, a private school paid for with money earned at the salon. For Netta, often the only black child in her classes, it was a special pride to outwork her white classmates. She longed to see the look on their faces each time a quiz or assignment was handed back and she could proudly declare that she—the girl from the rough side of town—had bested them.

  As Netta entered her early teens, Relonda decided she wanted to start a nonprofit to mentor young girls—especially those like her, who found themselves young mothers. It wasn’t long before she was pestering her daughter for help with paperwork, and for recommendations for speakers even if the idea never got fully off the ground.

  Relonda had been sick for a long time, in and out of the hospital with a variety of ailments. Not long before Netta was set to graduate from high school and head to college came Relonda’s diagnosis of lupus.

  By the time Netta moved back to St. Louis after her freshman year at Southeast Missouri State, things had gotten much worse, and she was getting 2 a.m. calls from her mother for help getting to and fr
om emergency trips to the hospital.

  “A week before she died, I sat down and she looked at me and she read my whole life,” Netta told me later. “‘I know exactly what’s going on with you,’ she told me, and then she listed every worry that I had—I really wanted to be independent, I wanted to pay all of my bills on my own, I wanted to stop having to answer to or fight through my freedom with my family. She sat there and she told me that she was going to fix it all.

  “And I remember looking at her and saying: ‘What are you going to do, you’re a sick woman.’

  “Toward the end, she would tell me that she loved me, and I would tell her that I loved her back. For the first time I’d let her hug me and kiss me. I let her be my mother.”

  Just after 2014 began, Relonda Elzie died.

  For years, Netta had turned to social media the way most men and women of her generation do—as a hybrid newsfeed, broadcasting platform, and ongoing group therapy space. Her wide eyes would oscillate between her television and Twitter feeds as she watched Love & Hip Hop or political news shows, her computer and smartphone serving as her second screens. She posted Facebook statuses about Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis.

  Netta tweeted her way through her freshman year as she navigated the parties and classrooms, before ultimately—after several incidents in which men on campus attempted to sexually assault her—giving up on college altogether and moving home. She tweeted about her mother’s death, leaning heavily on the support provided by the small section of the Internet she had carved out for herself as she worked up the courage to explain to her younger sister that their mother was gone.