by Reggie Yates
But then the film went out on BBC Three and all disappointments connected to not realising the subject matter’s potential were alleviated. As the credits rolled, I did my usual fear-fuelled scroll through all of my social channels. Twitter was very positive, Instagram was glowing and Snapchat held lots of thumbs up videos and the occasional erect penis. God bless social media.
Unexpectedly, venturing into my direct messages made me emotional. I’d received several messages essentially saying the same thing. There were young guys and girls across the country reaching out to tell me that they had watched the film with their parents. A totally deliberate act, they’d wanted to see their folks react to the stories on screen in an effort to start a scary conversation. Several of my followers on social media had watched the film with their families and come out as the credits rolled. The film gave them the confidence to share with their parents what had become their biggest secret.
I sat staring at my phone totally flummoxed, suddenly seeing the power of what had been achieved. In my programme-maker’s arrogance, I’d put my ideals for the perfect film above the potential of what we actually had to affect change, regardless of my personal ambitions.
It ended up being a decent documentary that might not have changed the world but, as I learned from my grateful personal messages on social media, had maybe changed something huge in the lives of a lot of British men and women – and perhaps even given them that vital voice they lacked.
CHAPTER 10
RACE RIOTS AND ME
Race isn’t something most kids think about, but due to my surroundings I had no choice but to be aware. The food, colour and culture of my heritage were unavoidable. My parents and pretty much every adult in my family shared the same West African heritage and, until recently, I had no idea how proud of that I was as a child.
Thinking back, my favourite teacher during my primary school years was Nikki. She had that perfect teacher balance of someone you’d have fun with, but also had the ability to shoot you a look. The kind mum would throw if we were visiting relatives and I was acting up. The kind that rendered you silent in seconds and probably meant you’d be getting a smack when you got home. Now, I’m fully aware it might sound odd that I’m referring to my teacher by her given name, but in the school I attended we didn’t call our teachers sir or miss.
As part of filming a piece about the relationships between children and their teachers, I went back to school and had an amazing catch up with Nikki, who I hadn’t seen in decades. She remembered how an afternoon of show and tell filled with goldfish and a pocket watch from the war had a sudden spike of excitement as I jumped up to perform a traditional tribal dance. I apparently wore a dashiki and explained its origins while sharing the history of the Ashanti tribe I belonged to. I was six.
From as far back as I can remember I never saw my race as a hindrance. According to Nikki, even as a child I was proud of what made me culturally different to my classmates. That pride remains to this day, but in my early teens I quickly learned how the wider world would see me and just how different perception could be from my reality.
The drama class I attended on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons made me feel as though I was part of a special club. The Anna Scher Theatre in Islington started my career on screen and represents the only form of training (outside of doing the job itself) I’ve ever received. The group of young actors I belonged to was made up entirely of kids just like me. We’d grown up together and we became teenagers with acting careers thanks to Anna.
Anna was tough, encouraging, eccentric and inspirational. She was the kind of leader you wanted to impress and she knew it. She placed so much value on her favourite word, ubuntu, that she’d learned from close friend Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It meant community care and collectiveness and hearing her drum on about it every week eventually instilled a sense of ubuntu in us.
The class was special in so many ways, but the conversations we were encouraged to have on race, class and current affairs always stick out in my mind. We were so young, yet being asked to really think about what was in the news and find a way to apply it to our improvised plays and performances.
One of the biggest news stories of the mid-nineties was the racially motivated killing of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, and the subsequent police investigation. We discussed the story during a class, but felt the impact of the murder much more personally when the killing was dramatised by ITV. The TV film starred our classmate Leon Black as Stephen, and watching Leon be attacked, stabbed and killed, albeit on screen, hit home in an unnervingly real way. The case became the biggest story at the time, and my mum, the news, everyone was talking about race. So to learn as a teenager that Stephen died because of racism and was targeted because of his skin colour forced me to accept that for some people, my colour would be a problem.
Throughout my teens, I had constant reminders that not everybody in this world shared my desire to take people as they found them. By the time I was in my late twenties, I’d grown an unhealthily thick skin to news of stabbings or shootings as it had touched my life through friends and family members continually.
So when the death of Mark Duggan at the hands of the Metropolitan police sparked riots across the entire country in 2011, I felt for his family but my experiences of race, class, police and violence didn’t reflect the shock I’d go on to see in the newspapers and on TV.
There was a strange feeling in London during the summer of 2011, it was almost as if something was about to explode. Every teenager who stopped me in the street seemed to be angry, frustrated and struggling with something. They were asking for help, guidance, a job or any kind of opportunity, and whatever was going on in the capital would go on to be the same feelings reflected across the country.
Young people in particular were angry and had every right to be. Those in charge were showing themselves to be untrustworthy in every way possible. Stop and search powers were being abused; bankers had become thieves, yet millennials were increasingly labelled as a lost generation.
I was at Dan’s house and no, ‘Benny’ wasn’t dragging me to the carpet for a WWF wrestle. We were hanging out, eating badly and flicking through the TV when his Blackberry began to explode. His teenage cousin Sonny was less than a mile away in Camden and was forwarding instant messages he’d received. He had up-to-the-minute updates of the next targets for looting that were being shared. We switched channels and watched in shock what was happening across the country unfold live on TV.
Despite the monologues from disconnected politicians and the tabloid press, the 2011 riots in England weren’t fuelled by a generation rife with entitlement burning down their own manors to steal trainers and tracksuits. In my opinion, they were about distrust of the police, economic disparity and the death of a young black man.
If the news was to be believed, the scary kids in hoods from the tower blocks were having a party in the streets. The press filled pages and screen time with stories of teenagers running into sports stores to carry home as many pairs of trainers as they could stuff in their school bags. What was neglected, however, was the large number of kids stealing eggs and milk to take home to empty fridges. Poverty and frustration were overshadowed by criminality, seeing all focus placed on acts of crime while totally ignoring the cause.
This was the first time I’d witnessed riots and had never imagined the events of Brixton in 1981 could repeat themselves in my lifetime. Back in ’81, a young black man had been stabbed in a bar fight and in his attempts to escape ran into a police officer. According to the watching community, the bleeding kid was thrown into a police van and arrested rather than helped or taken to the hospital. This incident on Brixton’s famous Railton Road would be the beginnings of rioting and clashes with the police that lasted for days.
Just a couple of years before I was born, Brixton (at the time, the capital of black Britain) was a warning for what could happen when a community feels targeted because of its culture, or the colour of its skin. Only a
few years later in Tottenham, 1985 saw the Broadwater Farm riots. A resident died during a police raid; days later an officer died in the resulting unrest. Police presence was increased as were arrests and riots erupted on the estate.
To see history repeat itself in almost exact detail, gave the view that race relations in the capital were as bad as they’d ever been a level of credence. In the eighties, both Tottenham and Brixton riots saw the Metropolitan police blame a lawless minority rather than admitting their tactics with the community had been ill judged.
Then, two years after the riots in Tottenham, 2013 saw the beginnings of a movement across the pond that would become embroiled in the same stages of protest to unrest as seen in the UK. A simple hashtag used on social network Twitter would grow into a force debated, supported and resented. #BlackLivesMatter or #BLM began in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a man arrested for shooting and killing African-American teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida.
As the movement grew, street demonstrations became a natural progression and inevitable response, particularly following two further highly publicised deaths, this time at the hands of the police. African-Americans Michael Brown and Eric Garner lost their lives to police bullets and choke holds, sparking countrywide demonstrations and global outrage. Racial bias and violence committed by the American police force was no longer fobbed off as an unfounded claim by African-Americans. The frequency and extreme nature of police behaviour usually exerted by white officers was now being caught on camera and the world was watching.
As a black man, I was affected by watching what seemed to be an endless stream of imagery showing African-American men and women harassed, killed and assaulted by law enforcement. Aggressors cloaked as those employed to protect and serve became a dreaded subject matter between friends and me. What became daily stories of black lives being lost, twinned with the apparent minimal chances of change, even talking about the latest death or assault became painful. And yet, when the opportunity arose to front a film discussing the issue through the eyes of the community in Ferguson, where protests and riots had followed the police killing of young black man Michael Brown, the fact it was such nuanced material that I found personally affecting made getting on the flight a no brainer. This was a film I needed to front.
He was a kid … he was a kid
Young voices had become galvanised by the untimely deaths of countless African-American men and women. I felt privileged in being given the opportunity to attempt to see the world through their eyes. Growing up, I had a love affair with the US and first travelled to America at eighteen with one of my closest friends at the time.
Dev was in my drama class at the Anna Scher Theatre and even though he was younger than Dan and I, we hung out as friends. By the time we were in our late teens we were thick as thieves and took our first trip to New York together.
We were totally naïve to the ID requirements and 21 age minimum for bars in the States. Between my provisional driver’s licence clearly stating my age and Dev’s best ‘I’m eighteen too’ face, most doormen just laughed and sent us on our way. We couldn’t get into any clubs or bars and as a result spent the entire trip buying trainers. We’d walk around Brooklyn and Harlem trying to sample the culture we’d idolised from afar for years. We believed we were seeing the life of real New Yorkers, but ended most days watching Dave Chappelle’s show in our hotel room.
What a pair of tits. Regardless of our stupidity, we had an incredible time and returned to the UK with suitcases full of mixtapes, New Era Caps and sneakers. We were teenagers, what else were we going to spend our money on? We arrived home a week later with our heads held high believing we’d seen and been a part of black America.
I grew up immersed in the pop culture churned out by America and for a time idolised the black American experience as one that us black Brits could only dream of. Black American TV and sports stars were superheroes to me. Like the rest of the world, the graphic reality of black men and women dying at the hands of the law shared online and picked up by newspapers and TV left me rocked.
Black America was about so much more than the pile of crap I’d filled my suitcase with as a teenager. The obvious oppression seen in countless videos of killings and protests showed pain and struggle. It was now unavoidable to see what it really meant to be African-American in all of its beautiful and painful entirety. This was the other side of black America. I had the gut-wrenching feeling that if I had lived there, I could have become a victim, just like Trayvon Martin.
You could see the blood flowing
I arrived in Ferguson, Missouri, a northern suburb of St Louis and was promptly ferried to a gigantic soulless hotel minutes from the airport. The place was huge, characterless and full of business types busy with conferences for people in bad suits. This would serve as home for the fortnight I’d spend in town. But I was still excited to be somewhere totally new and so jumped in the crew car and headed out for a drive. Every turn delivered another street I’d seen on the news, only now the fires were out, the National Guard had gone and the sidewalks were empty.
The sun was out but the streets were silent and the air felt eerily still. This was sleepy, small-town America and regardless of the countless USA immigration stamps I had in my passport, I’d never experienced this version of the States. It wore its clichés with pride as I couldn’t move for American flags and churches. The single police and fire stations were outnumbered by over thirty Christian places of worship.
The dust had settled, at face value at least. My drive through town painted a picture of calm and small-town charm, but some streets were still blotted with signs of what had happened a year prior. A row of manicured businesses would occasionally be broken by a burnt or boarded-up property. Most things seemed to be back as they’d always been, but was that for the better of the town or not?
At the time of Michael Brown’s death, young black men in America were twenty-one times more likely to be killed by police officers as white men of the same age. Brown, an unarmed black teenager, lost his life to a police bullet fired from a white officer’s gun and Ferguson found itself on the world’s radar.
Eighteen-year-old Clifton Kinnie was a friend of Brown’s from the neighbourhood and one of the many young men who found themselves in the centre of the furore following the shooting. We met in a black-owned restaurant clearly proud of the town it belonged to that had become famous for staying open during the protests. Ferguson Burger bar was a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ eatery hidden in a typically American strip mall. Owner Charles Davis greeted me with a stoic hello, as Clifton polished off his sandwich eager to show me what he called ground zero.
We walked the street now famously known as the site where a year ago clashes between demonstrators and police boiled over into something else entirely. It was on this street that Brown was caught on camera allegedly stealing cigars from a gas station. Minutes later Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson were spotted by officer Darren Wilson and an altercation led to Wilson firing repeatedly.
Six bullets hit Brown in the chest, forehead and arm. Dorian Johnson went on to claim that Brown had his hands up when officer Wilson discharged his weapon, but according to the official enquiry no other witnesses could verify his statement. With there being no video evidence, what actually happened continues to be debated, but the one thing that everyone agrees on, is that Michael Brown was unarmed.
Clifton talked me through the moment he spotted Michael Brown’s body in the street. His first-hand account took what I’d heard described countless times by reporters and experts on the news and made it so much more personal. Clifton was seventeen at the time of the incident and what he saw had undoubtedly scarred him.
Clifton parked his car, walked the sidewalk and spotted (as he called him) ‘Mike Mike’ lying still, face down in the middle of the road. ‘You could see the blood flowing,’ he explained. At this point, the police had taped off the area holding a growing crowd back. Clifton glazed over as he sp
oke about the way Mike Mike’s mother cried and screamed for her bleeding and lifeless son.
He explained just how angry, confused and frustrated everyone was. The crowd was made up almost entirely of neighbours and people who knew Brown. The body was in plain view of the surrounding houses, pulling families outside and bringing kids to tears as they tried to work out why Mike Mike wouldn’t get up.
The police responded by coming at the watching distressed crowd with dogs. Pushed back by cops and held in place by tape, the aggressive tactics riled the crowd, especially as at this point hours had passed and the body hadn’t been covered or moved. Michael Brown was lying dead on the tarmac for over four hours, uncovered and in full view of the crying women and children who knew and loved him.
I stood on the side of Canfield Drive with Clifton, silenced by the vivid picture he painted, which no longer felt like the news footage I’d seen a million times. His pained and personal connection to Brown humanised what I knew to be a horrific story. Clifton was able to describe a character I’d built a picture of based entirely on news clippings and photos released by his family. He made Michael Brown just another teenager on the block, he made him real. Suddenly, I was being told the story of Mike Mike not the kid from the news.
We stood in silence staring at the large dark square in the road where new tarmac had been laid. The exact spot of Mike Mike’s death would forever be visible, a landmark that no one asked for. ‘He was a kid, he was a kid …’
Clifton was eighteen and about to go to college, and at the time of his death so was Mike Mike. Devastated and fighting to manage his emotions, he didn’t understand why a life was lost and why there were still no answers.
There is a dangerous dynamic in the night
The story of the shooting went from local to national news overnight and, as word of the shooting spread, people outside of Brown’s neighbourhood took to the streets. Armed with placards, Clifton and his school friends joined the protests living the odd duality of student by day, activist by night.