Next up for Reed was Saint Louis University, where she had studied nursing—but it soon became clear to her that a medical career wasn’t for her. She did fine in the classes but didn’t enjoy them. Maybe she should pursue public service, she thought. In the meantime, she began volunteering with a program that mentored high school students and picked up two jobs, one at the pharmacy and the second at a furniture shop.
On that day in August 2014, a coworker arrived comically late, and when asked why, explained that all hell had broken loose. She lived in the Canfield Green apartment complex in Ferguson, and the police had shot someone.
Reed didn’t go out to Canfield that day. Later that weekend, at the beckoning of her friend Tef Poe, the local rapper who would soon become one of the faces of the protests, she did. When she arrived, she stood stunned—staring at the same police dogs, armed officers, and tear gas that would soon mobilize thousands across the country.
As she stood watching the chaos that played out night after night on Ferguson’s streets, Reed tried to think of ways she could help the people she saw, who were so hurt and so angry. Her curiosity ignited, she, too, kept coming out night after night.
“What kept bringing me out was that the police were just not letting people hold space—gather in the street and on the sidewalks—for a young man who had just lost his life,” Reed recalled. “People were being teargassed, and people were running. There was that fear, and then also the determination not to back down. To show back up the next night. That was really inspiring for me.”
A few weeks later, Reed was helping lead the chants outside the Ferguson Police Department each night.
“Indict, convict, send that killa cop to jail. The whole damn system is guilty as hell.”
It was sometime before the grand jury decision, as she watched another night of protests end with arrests and confusion, when Reed decided it was time for her to become more formally involved.
“We need to do something more than just show up. We’ve got to get organized,” Reed recalled thinking.
She began organizing meetings with other young protesters—Netta Elzie, DeRay Mckesson, Brittany Packnett, Tef Poe, Tory Russell, and others. They started sharing information about upcoming protests and comparing tactics. Essential, they all agreed, was not losing the momentum. But equally important, Reed knew, was finding ways to support the young people who had flooded the streets. Many were underemployed, underhoused, and underfed. These young would-be activists, these black residents of Ferguson and St. Louis County who had been crucially responsible for her awakening, how might she now pay them back?
“In that moment I realized that I could do more than just be there and lead a chant. I could be a part of a bigger strategy. And I could be part of the group of people who were envisioning what this movement could be.”
By the time the media descended on Ferguson again, one year later, in August 2015, Reed had become one of the enduring presences on the ground. She served as a primary point of contact for activists seeking housing and began working full-time with the Organization for Black Struggle, a local activist group that often charged her with representing the demands and the passions of the streets in meetings with nonprofits and elected officials—what she has described as the “nonromantic work behind policy change.”
Activists titled the first-anniversary weekend United We Fight and planned massive marches and rallies to commemorate the day Michael Brown died. On the afternoon of August 9, 2015, thousands packed the street that snakes through the Canfield Green apartments, pausing with solemnly bowed heads for four and a half minutes to remember the four and a half hours during which Michael Brown’s body had lain on the ground.
It was a moment of solidarity after what had been a year of anxiety, anger, and, among the activist ranks, internal discord. Several of the activists and activist groups who had been thrust to the forefront of the Ferguson unrest had one year later left the spotlight. Many who remained in St. Louis after the death of Mike Brown were angered as they watched the national media link them to #BlackLivesMatter. Many in Ferguson couldn’t remember the activist network ever being a prominent presence on the ground. That conflation, and other tactical and rhetorical disagreements, caused infighting that often spilled over in public. For outside observers, it was not uncommon to perceive that the young people at the center of this activism had seized the spotlight only to get in a fistfight beneath it.
“One year later,” Reed recalled, “St. Louis was exhausted. Meanwhile, people nationwide were looking to replicate what the people in Ferguson did. But there was no blueprint for it. It was an organic moment.”
Standing near the front of the crowd that day on Canfield Drive was Tony Rice, who was perhaps Ferguson’s most faithful protester. Since the early days of August 2014, Rice had been everywhere—at the protests, at the sites of police shootings, at the important meetings between activist groups—and constantly tweeting from his Search4Swag Twitter account. His omnipresence on the street continued for months after the cameras had left. How could he be everywhere (so much so that some journalists and fellow activists began joking that he must be the Feds) and also manage to be right in the center of the action, night after night? If and when something went down in Ferguson, Tony Rice’s Twitter account was the first place to look for information.
As I spoke with him over the course of the year, Tony’s enthusiasm gave way to dejected cynicism. He’d lived in Ferguson about twelve years, one of just a handful of local activists who actually lived within the city limits. When groups called marches, he would walk near the front, live streaming or posting video clips later. When the tactic changed to disrupting city council meetings, Rice was among the first to empty his pockets and walk through the newly installed Ferguson City Hall metal detector each night. When several activists began a petition to recall Ferguson mayor James Knowles III, Tony Rice hit the streets with them, walking door to door for days to collect signatures.
But as 2014 became 2015, Rice found himself lonely. The movement birthed in Ferguson soon left the small town behind.
Too often, it seems, the eyes of the nation can gaze in just one direction. Once the grand jury had finished its work, the Ferguson activists found that the country was no longer hanging on their every chant. The terrible march of black death that followed the decision not to charge Darren Wilson—the deaths of Tamir Rice, Sam DuBose, Sandra Bland, and Walter Scott—seized attention previously showered on those in Greater St. Louis, forcing newly minted activists and veteran activist groups alike to conduct their work in the shadows and without recognition.
Netta Elzie, DeRay Mckesson, and others like them had become national figures: they were giving talks around the country, sitting on discussion panels, and conducting media interviews, in addition to their work as activists. Brittany Packnett had been appointed to the state-level Ferguson Commission and the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Others, like Reed, had joined legacy organizations in St. Louis, eagerly committing their professional lives to the same righteous indignation that had drawn them to the street protests. And others still were working to restabilize the lives they had upended to join the protests.
“Some days I want to quit this movement,” Alexis Templeton told me on the phone one day late in 2015. “Well, a lot of days.”
A year before the protests began, on July 6, 2013, Templeton had been a passenger in a deadly car crash that killed her father, her uncle, and her partner. The survivor’s guilt was almost impossible to shake and led to a debilitating two-year depression fueled by constant flashbacks and a feeling of helplessness that comes with knowing that it’s only by chance that you’re still alive. “I didn’t feel like I deserved to be here, and I didn’t want to be here,” Templeton said.
On August 13, 2014, Templeton sat in an empty bedroom with a loaded gun in one hand, tears streaming beneath the cold barrel pressed to her forehead. Even in that crucial moment, she couldn’t shake the images of protest pou
ring out of Ferguson. A childhood friend, the rapper Thee Pharoah, had been among the first to tweet photos from the scene of Michael Brown’s death. Templeton had watched intently, glued to her phone, as demonstrators were teargassed night after night. Next came the media coverage, and then more tear gas. By that point it had been going on for days.
Why not go outside, Templeton rationalized that day, and see what this is all about? This gun will still be here tomorrow.
“I went outside and I never came back in,” Templeton later told me. Night after night, late into the night, she stayed out with the protesters, each passing hour further dispersing the demons left back in that bedroom. As the community of activists evolved into a de facto family, Templeton realized that these people, and this fight, were worth living for. Ultimately, Templeton met Brittany Ferrell, a fellow activist who cofounded Millennial Activists United. The two fell in love, and by the time the Ferguson anniversary came around, they were married.
“This movement saved so many lives,” Templeton told me. Though jaded by the politics of organizing and frustrated by the infighting that had derailed what could have been many more alliances between prominent Ferguson protesters in the year since the unrest, Templeton saw the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Sandra Bland as a crucial awakening, one with the power to restore life to those who had forfeited it. Their deaths could never be in vain because they had forced others to live.
“If I had not been consumed, if I hadn’t been so enraged by Mike Brown, I wouldn’t be here,” Templeton told me. “I attribute being alive to Mike Brown. Mike Brown saved my life.”
For most of the year after Michael Brown’s death, my reporting focused on policing policy—tactics, training, best practices, and reform—with race serving as an ever-present subplot. My goal was and is to pull back the veil over a profession that had become among the least accessible and least transparent corners of government.
The team I was with at the Washington Post worked daily to track police shootings—recording almost four hundred fatal shootings by police officers during the first five months of 2015. In the meantime, we reported what I considered a stunning finding, that nearly one in three of these fatal shootings included mental illness as a factor. Soon we’d dive into deeply reported pieces on body cameras, and on “repeaters”—officers who had previously been involved in fatal shootings who ended up shooting and killing again. But first, with the anniversary of Ferguson quickly approaching, we knew it was important to explore the role of race in police killings. After collecting data for half of a year, what could we say about the police shootings of black men and women—specifically when they were unarmed? Between January and August 2015, twenty-four unarmed black people had been shot and killed by police. While black men and women make up just 12 percent of the nation’s population, they accounted for nearly 25 percent of those who were being shot and killed by the police.
At the same time, a national conversation had taken hold about the demonization of black youth in the media. Among the first hashtags to trend nationally during Ferguson was #iftheygunmedown, in which young people of color posted photos of their graduations, or with family members—photos that portrayed them in a positive light—next to photos that showed them partying or goofing off, the implication being that were they to be killed by the police, the media would certainly frame their life using the less flattering images. On the day of Michael Brown’s funeral, the feature on his life on the front page of the New York Times included the declaration that Brown was “no angel.”
Tanya Brown could have told you herself that her son Brandon was “no angel.” It was one of the first things she said to me when I first spoke with her in July 2015.
Brandon Jones had always been big for his age and, according to his mother, had a learning disability, which resulted in some bullying in school from children intimidated by his size. As he got older, Brandon was embarrassed at how far behind he’d fallen in his classes. And as he approached high school age, he still lacked most advanced reading skills.
Soon he was no longer attending classes and was hanging around with the wrong types of kids from the neighborhood.
It was after two one morning in March 2015, just a week before what would have been Brandon’s nineteenth birthday, when a woman dialed 911 and informed the Cleveland Division of Police that she was watching as Brandon broke into Parkwood Grocery, the corner store across the street.
Cleveland police said “a struggle ensued when the two officers attempted to take the suspect into custody” and that during the confrontation “one officer fired a shot from his weapon, striking the suspect.”
“What he did was definitely wrong,” Tanya Brown said. “I’ll say it until I’m in my grave: hell no, he shouldn’t have been there, coming out of that store hands full of cigarettes and change. But he should be incarcerated. My son shouldn’t be in my dining room in an urn on the shelf.”
The case, like most police shootings, never drew the national spotlight. In fact, only once did the shooting of Brandon Jones earn a significant round of media coverage: when the local police union announced it would auction off a gun to raise money for the officer involved.
“Because he committed a crime, it just seems like his death doesn’t matter to anyone. You hear all of this talk about unarmed individuals shot by the police, but when I speak about my son those same people are like: who?” Jones’s mother told me through tears. “A life is a life, and a death is a death. What my son did was wrong, but that doesn’t justify taking his life.”
Among the twenty-four black men shot by police in the first eight months of 2015 were several exceptional cases, such as that of Sam DuBose, the black man shot and killed by University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing, who had pulled him over and then ordered him out of the car after DuBose admitted he didn’t have his license with him. The man refused, the officer pulled his gun: seconds later, DuBose was dead.
Tensing was wearing a body camera. For weeks, as prosecutors considered charges, the public clamored to see the tape. Many in Cincinnati felt as if they could still smell the smoke from the 2001 riots that engulfed parts of the city after a similar shooting there. But with video in hand, the local prosecutor announced he would charge the officer.
“I used to defend cops in these cases,” Paul Cristallo, one of the attorneys working with the family of Brandon Jones, told me. “Without video, nobody believes you. If there hadn’t been that videotape, none of us would even know Rodney King’s name. In the absence of video, unfortunately, it’s the officer’s word against the unspoken tale of a dead person.”
Sam DuBose’s death was a rarity, not only in that it had been caught on camera but also in that Ray Tensing was charged with a crime. The shooting joined those of Walter Scott in South Carolina, Eric Harris in Oklahoma, William Chapman in Virginia, Anthony Hill in Georgia, and Corey Jones in Florida as one of only 6 out of the 248 cases of fatal shootings by police of black men in 2015 in which an officer was charged.
In other cases, critics are quick to note, protests erupted in support of the slain only to be undermined by details that surfaced during the investigation. That was the case after Tallahassee police officer David Stith shot and killed Jeremy Lett in February 2015.
The shooting immediately drew local outrage—largely from Florida State University students involved with Dream Defenders, a group formed after the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, who stormed the state’s attorney’s office demanding that Stith be charged.
Protesters adopted the narrative that Lett, an assistant minister at a local church who had been standing outside an apartment building, had been racially profiled. Lett appeared to match the description of a burglary suspect when Stith approached him and a struggle ensued. Photos of Lett in a pinstriped suit and a clerical collar soon circulated on social media. Police had been called at 8:08 that fatal night by John Calman, who reported that Lett was knocking on his door repeatedly, demanding to see Calman�
�s roommate, Denise Skipper.
Lett had first arrived an hour earlier, asking to speak with Skipper. But she was sleeping, so Calman told Lett to come back another time. Lett then went to Skipper’s bedroom window, banging on the glass. When that didn’t earn a response, he went back to the front door at least twice more, banging with his fist.
“He used to live in this complex, was always friendly but haven’t seen him in around about a year,” Skipper wrote in her witness statement. “This was totally unexpected—this visit from him.”
When Officer Stith arrived at the apartment, he later told internal affairs investigators, he discovered Lett lying at the foot of the front stoop, seemingly drunk. He awoke Lett by shining a flashlight in his eyes.
As Stith backed up, he said, Lett leaped to his feet, let out three loud screams, and ran toward the officer, who sidestepped him at the last moment.
“It’s almost as if he, he anticipated trying to tackle me,” Stith told investigators. “He just bit it and went right into the grass.”
Lett then got up to charge again, and Stith said he attempted to use his Taser but missed before again sidestepping Lett, who again fell to the ground. Stith tried once more to stun Lett with the Taser, but the man threw the officer off his back.
“I’m thinking this ain’t working and then I realize that the Taser’s Tasing me in my right hand because of the rain,” Stith said.
As the officer reholstered his Taser and drew his gun, Lett gave one more scream and charged again, prompting the officer to fire one shot.
Then, according to Stith, Lett charged again. But this time, Stith fell to the ground as he backpedaled. He said he kicked his feet up, preventing Lett from mounting him on the ground, and began firing a series of shots into Lett’s chest.
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