After his final shot, Stith said, he thrust with his legs, forcing Lett off him and flat onto his back on the ground.
Lett was dead, five bullets lodged in his body. The medical examiner later concluded that there was a significant amount of cocaine in his system. By the end of February, a Florida grand jury had concluded that Stith’s actions were justified.
“I don’t know what the fuck was wrong with this fucking guy, but he just started coming at me and coming at me,” Stith told one of the first officers to arrive on the scene after the shooting. Later, while speaking to a commanding officer still at the scene, he got emotional.
“I just kept firing because he wouldn’t stop fucking coming,” he said.
For critics, cases like that of Jeremy Lett served as examples of the flaws in the ideology of the movement for black lives. Didn’t this man, or others like him, deserve to die? Wasn’t his fate sealed by his own poor decision-making?
But the protest chants were never meant to assert the innocence of every slain black man and woman. The protests were an assertion of their humanity and a demand for a system of policing and justice that was transparent, equitable, and fair.
Who is a perfect victim? Michael Brown? Kajieme Powell? Eric Garner? Sandra Bland? Freddie Gray? Young activists reframed the question: Does it matter?
For too long, many of the activists declared, black bodies had been extinguished by police officers without public accountability or explanation. For all the stories of police abuse, brutality, and impunity that had been shared at black dinner tables, barbershops, and barstools for generations, these basic facts went ignored or unacknowledged by the nation at large.
“It doesn’t matter what race the cop is, it’s about the culture of policing in America,” Anthony Jordan, another of Tanya Brown’s attorneys, told me. “It’s unquestionably a race issue. But it’s not this cartoon image we get in our heads, of police officers going home and putting on Klan garb. It’s about a culture that’s devaluing black men.”
Unlike the civil rights generation before them, young activists on the front lines today refuse to poll-test their martyrs, a practice they see as yet another bastion of respectability politics. Insisting that the burden of proof rests with the body of the slain black man or woman is to argue that black life, on its own, does not matter.
Clifton Kinnie grew up in Spanish Lake, a neighborhood about three minutes from where Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson.
Kinnie’s dad had worked at General Motors and was a brilliant man, he told me. But he was also an alcoholic, often emptying his wallet into the hands of bartenders and liquor store cashiers even as his family struggled through poverty. Kinnie is the third oldest of eight children.
On July 16, 2014, just a month before he was set to begin his senior year of high school, Kinnie’s mother died. It was three weeks later, as the seventeen-year-old battled the depression and crippling anxiety that plagued him after his mother’s death, that he first saw the Instagram posts.
He was sitting at home, scrolling through his phone, when he saw Michael Brown’s body. At first he assumed it was a screenshot from a movie; there was no way a body would just be lying out in the street like that in real life. Then he saw the location: Canfield Drive. Soon text messages were pouring in from friends, asking if he knew Mike Brown (he didn’t) and asking if he was going to see what happened.
“I don’t know what it was, that force, a combination of anger and tiredness, it pulled me out there,” Kinnie recalled. “I stood out on the street for an hour and a half and I witnessed everything: the police being aggressive toward the community, the dogs, the riot gear.
“Seeing his mother scream, seeing his body on the ground, it put me in a traumatized state again. It reminded me of my own mother,” Kinnie said. “I had to drive home, to gather myself. I had to think.”
Days later, Kinnie and a friend joined the now-bustling protests, only to be teargassed and struck with rubber bullets minutes after arriving.
“At first I’m thinking that it’s smoke, that something is on fire. So I stopped, dropped, and rolled,” Kinnie recalled with a laugh. “And then all of a sudden my body is beginning to sting. This smoke is burning my nostrils. I couldn’t breathe, I started to throw up, and then I began to cry.
“I wasn’t crying because I was in pain, I was crying because I didn’t believe that something like this could happen in America. That the police would harm me this way in America, in 2014.”
That was the day Kinnie became a protester.
“Hands up, don’t shoot!” became his rallying cry—and not only because he believed that it had been among Michael Brown’s final words. For the Ferguson protesters, it was as much a personal plea as a rhetorical declaration. Please, they were screaming to the officers who responded to each protest, do not shoot us, our hands are up.
Before she died, Kinnie’s mother had fought to get him admitted to Lutheran High School North, a private Christian school not far from Ferguson. The public school he had been attending, Hazelwood East, had lost its accreditation.
“My mom always instilled in me that education came first,” Kinnie recalled, noting that even as she battled several rounds of cancer, his mother returned to college to get a degree in social work. She was too sick to work full-time, but she would do “freelance social work,” helping out friends and family members. “I don’t know who else would think to do that but my mom. I guess she was just an angel.”
As he sat in English class on August 13, 2014, the morning after he’d been teargassed, and as I sat on a plane tens of thousands of miles overhead en route to St. Louis, his teacher began to riff about the ongoing protests.
“I wish those people would stop looting and burning stuff,” Kinnie recalled his teacher declaring.
Kinnie was stunned. He’d been at the protest the entire previous night. He had been hit with tear gas and rubber bullets as he stood peacefully chanting in a parking lot. But the condemnation he was hearing from a teacher was of the residents, not the police? The paralyzing shock he felt soon turned to mobilizing rage. He stood up and stormed out of the classroom.
When he got home, he sent a group text message to dozens of friends at his school and others. They needed to do something, he said. They needed to join the protests and make people understand. He asked twenty friends to come to his place for a planning meeting. Each spread the word, and more than fifty people showed up.
The coalition of high school students soon took the name Our Destiny STL and began cohosting protests, joining the evening marches and chants organized by the older protest groups, and holding voter registration drives at local high schools, hoping to get as many eighteen-year-old high school seniors registered as possible.
“The students, the young people, we had to take a stance. Here we are, in these schools right around Ferguson, and Mike Brown had just graduated from one, he was about to go to college,” Kinnie told me later. “This case showed us that a high school degree wouldn’t protect us from state violence.”
In November, Kinnie organized a massive walkout—a larger form of his own personal protest—in which more than eight hundred students from St. Louis–area high schools agreed to leave class and campus on the Monday after the announcement that Darren Wilson would not be charged. This at a time when much of the media was speculating that activism in Ferguson would be coming to an end; after all, the wait for the grand jury decision was now over.
Most striking to me about Kinnie has always been his level of introspection—he speaks with poise, confidence, and a wisdom far beyond his experience. It’s unclear if the tumult of his teen years forced him to acquire this maturity, or if it was always there. When he speaks about his life, and about Ferguson, he sprinkles in historical references, placing each rhetorical point in the context of racial justice leaders and movements of the past. What is clear with Kinnie, more so than with many of the other young leaders who emerged since Ferguson, is that he is first and foremost a student.
/> “I used to learn about all of those guys and women, and now we’re here, in our own civil rights movement,” Kinnie told me. “I really have to sit sometimes and think about the time and the moment that we’re in right now. It can be unreal.”
In February 2015, Kinnie’s work to organize high school students near Ferguson was recognized with the Ambassador Andrew Young Distinguished Leader Award and, during his trip to accept the honor, the young organizer found himself seated next to Andrew Young, one of the civil rights giants he had studied so intensely.
“Thank you,” Young would lean in to tell the young man.
“We’re just continuing your fight, we’re fighting your fight,” Kinnie responded.
“No, no, no,” Young replied. “This is all of our fight. You all are just the next ones up. You all are the next leaders.”
Kinnie had decided, when his mother died, that he would make sure he attended college. That had been her dream for him, and in the short time since her death, he had vowed not to let down her legacy. Halfway through August 2015, I got a call from DeRay Mckesson: Kinnie had chosen to go to Howard University—the school had given him a prestigious scholarship, in part because of the organizing work he had done while in Ferguson—and a group of activists were going to help him move in.
I met Kinnie and the group on August 15 at Ben’s Next Door, a bar and restaurant next to Ben’s Chili Bowl on U Street in DC. At the table were Mckesson, Netta Elzie, Brittany Packnett, and Justin Hansford, who had spent the day treating Kinnie like their own child, making sure he filled out the move-in forms correctly, making runs to Target and Bed Bath & Beyond for bedding, amenities, and a dorm room’s worth of snack food, and nudging him toward certain clubs and organizations that had booths set up near the center of campus.
In the year since Michael Brown had been killed, these young leaders had found fame, notoriety, influence, and each other. For months, Mckesson had preached to me that the power of protest is found in the communal space it creates—that by connecting marginalized people, the protests create a combined force that is powerful where singular voices would be weak.
As the group debated an upcoming congressional race in Missouri, Kinnie listened intently. At a pause in the conversation, he interjected—bursting with excitement as he detailed his plans for the upcoming year—that he was going to make sure he didn’t lose the energy of Ferguson. He was going to find the right activist organization, he vowed, and would start his own if needed to ensure that this moment continued.
“The movement,” he declared with youthful hubris to the rest of us at the table, “is coming to campus.”
Martese Johnson wasn’t supposed to succeed. He wasn’t supposed to become one of the most recognized leaders on one of the nation’s most storied, predominantly white college campuses. And he wasn’t supposed to become one of the faces of the movement.
He grew up poor and black. He was raised by a single parent. And worst of all, he was from Chicago, the rough side.
Johnson moved at least a dozen times as a kid, bouncing from home to home with his mother and two of his brothers, almost always on the South Side of Chicago.
Those moves traced the struggles of a single mother, working as a social worker, who was trying against the odds to build a better life for her boys. The family moved from school district to school district, spending one semester in a predominantly Latino district in Chicago and the next in an almost-all-white school across the state line in Indiana. By the time Martese was in middle school, the annual move to a new apartment and a new school had become normal.
Nearly all the males he knew growing up were gang affiliated, from the boys playing dice on the corner to the man behind the counter selling bags of fruit chew candy for a dollar. For many, the neighborhood gang was little more than a cliché, a pack of friends, a means of finding camaraderie and belonging in a lonely and underachieving sliver of the city. And with that affiliation came a code, a set of rules that extended beyond the roster of self-proclaimed members and into the minds and actions of the rest of the boys in the neighborhood.
“It was really hard being that close in proximity to constant gang activity; it means that the gang mentality is really big for you as a kid. And with that comes the idea that we hate the police, that they’re an enemy,” Johnson told me, reflecting on his childhood. “My mom would always tell me when I went out—no matter what the police said to me, don’t say anything back and do exactly what they tell me to do, or I could lose my life.”
Johnson never joined a gang, but he never felt much need to go out of his way to avoid his friends who were affiliated, either. The kids on the block now dealing on the side, now carrying a piece, were his friends, his playmates; staying cool with them didn’t seem like something that would endanger him. If anything, he figured, the proximity might keep him safe.
When he was thirteen, just shy of high school, he was hanging out with one of these friends, a kid from the block who had been the standout in elementary and middle school for singing and the arts.
“He was a really good kid,” Johnson recalled with a knowing chuckle. “That he was affiliated with the local gang, that part was just another facet to this kid.”
What Johnson didn’t know as he stood on the corner with his friend and several others was that earlier that summer day his friend had been involved in a drive-by shooting targeting a rival gang. As he and his friends stood outside their apartment building, the gang that had been targeted earlier had piled into a car and was searching for them.
Johnson can still see the car, with faded paint, pulling up slowly as he joked with his buddies. Almost in slow motion, the vehicle stopped, arms extended out the windows, and the silent stillness was shattered by the popping of gunfire.
“We all just scattered,” Johnson recalled. “I ran into the apartment building and crouched down in one of the breezeways until the shooting stopped. Then I ran home.
“When you grow up in that environment, being in a gang feels so natural,” said Johnson. “But getting shot at was another level. That was not natural. That was not the life I wanted.
“It was a pivotal moment for me, it alluded to what my future could be. I had always been a smart kid; that was the moment I decided to prioritize those smarts.”
Johnson was ambitious and driven. He excelled at Kenwood Academy, where his mentors pushed him toward business school. The summer before his senior year, they signed him up for a summer business institute at the University of Virginia, a school the young man with the soothing baritone voice had never even heard of before. Unable to make the basketball team, he picked up volleyball, which soon became his chief adolescent passion. He loved volleyball because it required skill and precision, unlike basketball and football, which could be dominated by kids who had been blessed with an early growth spurt.
It was in high school that Johnson says his perception of the police began to slowly shift as well. To be clear, he still didn’t completely trust them. But maybe they weren’t the enemy. If he played by the rules and stayed out of trouble, he thought, they could be allies.
He recalled for me that one day, in either his junior or senior year, he was followed and taunted by a few of the guys from the block. As part of his business leadership program, he wore a shirt and tie, which made him an easy and obvious target of ridicule as he made his way home through some of the city’s rougher neighborhoods. Johnson said he tried to ignore the kids, but they kept following him. He got scared and broke into a jog.
“These kids just kept following, and eventually they were all chasing me. I’m running for my life, and at that moment, a police officer comes out of nowhere.” The officer flashed his lights and blared his sirens, and the crowd chasing Johnson dispersed. He waved to the officer and finished his walk home.
“Up to that point my only experience with the police was them coming up to me and my friends and harassing us—‘Why are you outside? Shouldn’t you have someplace to be?’ I had always expe
rienced what I considered biased policing. And here was a moment in which a police officer was actually helping me. It was such a big moment for me because it had never happened before.”
Johnson’s dream was to go to the University of Southern California. During his high school years he had taken to rooting for USC in football and basketball, but when he visited campus he found himself intimidated by Los Angeles. The designer jeans and vanilla lattes made the campus feel like a world far different from the one he was used to. The bright lights of Hollywood can be a shining beacon, attracting those from afar, but for Johnson they were more like the flashing brights that catch your eye in the oncoming lane. After committing to USC, he decided he wasn’t ready for a move to Los Angeles.
He had applied to and been accepted by more than two dozen schools, but there was only one other on his list that he thought would work: that grassy campus on the East Coast where he had stayed in a dorm during the business institute the previous summer. Johnson called the admissions office of UVA and told them he was headed to campus.
Freshman year is tough for most, and Johnson was no exception. He was the only black male in his dorm of more than 150 students, and it was hard for him not to perceive slights and insensitivities from some of his classmates—some of whom, he soon became convinced, had never before encountered a black person. Some of them started teasingly calling him the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
“I’d walk into parties and everyone would be white; I’d stick out,” Johnson said. “Everyone would stare from across the room and eventually someone would ask: ‘Do you go to UVA?’” And those were just the parties he could get into; often he’d be greeted at the door of an all-white fraternity and told he wasn’t welcome.
Things got better his sophomore year, when he decided to dive into the black organizations on campus with the hope of finding friends with whom he had more in common (or who at the very least wouldn’t tease him with insensitive nicknames). He pledged a fraternity and joined the Black Student Alliance. By his senior year, he had been named to the Honor Committee, an elite student council that helps enforce the campus honor code and weighs in on student disciplinary matters. Of the twenty-seven members of the council, he was the sole black student.
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