As the nightly news showed the escalating conflict between the police and the protesters in Ferguson, members of Congress, federal agents, and older civil rights leaders such as Reverend Al Sharpton and Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr. made their way there, presumably to help bring calm to an increasingly explosive situation. But the young people in the streets—the multiracial coalition of both local and out-of-town protesters—were not eager to cede their leadership to these elders. In her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor chronicles what happened next:
By the time Sharpton arrived in Ferguson, it was too late. Young Black people had already endured two standoffs with police that had ended with tear gas and rubber bullets. People were furious. These bullying tactics had transformed the marches into much more than a struggle for Mike Brown. The battle in the Ferguson streets was also fueled by the deep grievances of the young people, whose future was being stolen by the never-ending cycle of fines, fees, warrants, and arrests. They were fighting for their right to be on the street and to be freed from the vice grip of the Ferguson police. They had experienced their own collective power and were drawing strength from outlasting the police. They were losing their fear. And they were not about to stand down or move aside to accommodate Sharpton’s arrival as the spokesperson for a local movement already in place. The conflict was almost immediate.98
In his first public statements, Sharpton’s rhetoric was critical of some of the protesters, urging them to contain their anger and using terms like gangster and thug to describe them. In Ferguson, Sharpton, Jackson, and other established civil rights leaders were rejected as part of a generation out of touch with the young people’s struggles.99 Dontey Carter, a young Ferguson activist, said of these older leaders, “I feel in my heart that they failed us. They’re the reason things are like this now. They don’t represent us. That’s why we’re here for a new movement. And we have some warriors out here.”100
The rift between the old guard and the new generation of activists continued to grow as the community waited to hear whether Officer Darren Wilson would be indicted by a grand jury to stand trial for the shooting of Michael Brown. The youth wanted to increase the pressure on public officials while their elders pushed for patience and allowing the justice system to run its course. On November 24, 2014, the process played out in favor of Darren Wilson. There was no indictment. President Obama urged restraint in the face of the grand jury’s decision, reminding his television audience that “we are a nation built on the rule of law,” but Ferguson youth weren’t listening. That night there was a firestorm in Ferguson.101
By then, however, the issues of concern had moved beyond the individual case of Michael Brown. Many of the young activists had begun to link police shootings to a broader analysis of racism and inequality in the United States. Millennial Activists United activist Ashley Yates observed that “the youth knew something very early in that the older generation didn’t. We knew that the system had already failed even before they began to show their hand publicly. We knew that not only was the murder of Mike Brown unjustified, it was another example of how the systems in place made it acceptable to gun us down. We are the generation that was ignited by Trayvon Martin’s murder and placed our faith in a justice system that failed us in a very public and intentional manner.”102
Just ten days later, the system failed them again. On December 3, 2014, the decision not to indict Officer Pantaleo for the choking death of Eric Garner generated nationwide protests, again large and multiracial in composition. Where there had been conflicting narratives about the shooting death of Mike Brown, in the case of Eric Garner the video was clear. “Hundreds of thousands of people had watched the video of him pleading for his life and repeating, eleven times, ‘I can’t breathe,’ while Pantaleo squeezed the life out of his body.”103 Yet, inexplicably to many, the grand jury found no grounds on which to bring the officer to trial.
Whether it was professional athletes wearing “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts, medical students in “White Coats for Black Lives” staging die-ins, Bay Area public defenders organizing demonstrations, Stanford students blocking the San Mateo bridge, or the thousands of college students mobilizing protests on their own campuses, their rallying cry of “Black Lives Matter” had the nation’s attention.104 Twitter and other social media platforms were the strategic glue that linked the demonstrations and helped them spread without the benefit of more traditional structures of the kind the previous civil rights generation had used. DeRay McKesson, one of the most visible activists during the Ferguson uprising, explains:
It is not that we’re anti-organization. There are structures that have formed as a result of protest, that are really powerful. It is just that you did not need those structures to begin protest. You are enough to start a movement. Individual people can come together around things they know are unjust. And they can spark change. Your body can be part of the protest; you don’t need a VIP pass to protest. And Twitter allowed that to happen.… I think that what we are doing is building a radical new community in struggle that did not exist before. Twitter has enabled us to create community.105
In the months that followed Michael Brown’s and Eric Garner’s deaths (and the failures to indict the officers that killed them), the names (and videos) of unarmed Black youth killed by police just kept coming. There was twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, playing in a park near his home with a toy gun. Perceiving him to be an “active shooter,” a police car pulled up, and within two seconds of their arrival, they shot him dead.106 On April 4, 2015, in North Charleston, South Carolina, Walter Scott, a fifty-year-old Marine Corps veteran, initially pulled over for a missing taillight on his car, tried to escape while the officer, Michael Slager, was busy checking his registration and license. Slager caught up with Scott, but after a brief struggle, Scott broke free and started running away again. That was when Slager pulled out his gun and shot the unarmed Scott several times in the back, and then placed his own stun gun next to the dying man’s body in an apparent attempt to make it look like Scott had threatened him with it. Indeed, Slager told his supervisors that he shot Scott because he feared for his life. Unbeknownst to Slager, there was a witness, Feidin Santana, who captured cell phone video of the fatal shooting and Slager’s planting of the weapon. When Santana realized that the version of the shooting being reported in the local news was contradicted by what he had recorded, he reached out to the attorney representing the Scott family and turned over his video. Millions of viewers were able to see what Mr. Santana saw—the execution of an unarmed man as he ran away. This time, in light of the video evidence, the officer was fired immediately and charged with murder, yet the jury could not reach a unanimous decision, and the case ended in a mistrial.
In Baltimore, just eight days after the shooting of Walter Scott, on April 12, 2015, a young African American named Freddie Gray spotted police officers on patrol and began running away from them. They pursued him, and when he was caught, they arrested him, though it is not clear why. He was not engaged in any criminal behavior.107 Two bystander videos captured the forceful arrest, with Gray screaming in pain as he was dragged in handcuffs and placed facedown in the back of a police van without a seat belt, counter to standard police procedure. By the time the van arrived at the police station, four stops later, Gray was losing consciousness. He went into a coma and died a week later, the result of a fatal spinal cord injury. Exactly when or how the injury occurred is unknown (perhaps during the rough arrest or while sliding around the back of the van without a seat belt). Though each of the six officers was to be tried individually for their role in his death, after four trials and no convictions, the state’s attorney, Marilyn Mosby, dropped the remaining charges.108
In the spring of 2015, the Twitter-enabled activist community chanting “Black Lives Matter!” had more and more to protest. A number of organizations formed since the murder of Trayvon Martin are engaged in this activism. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, “From the B
YP [Black Youth Project] 100, Dream Defenders, Hands Up United, Ferguson Action, and Millennials United to perhaps the most well known of the new organizations, #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM), this new era has produced an important cohort of activist organizations. Thus far, #BLM has become the largest and most visible group, with at least twenty-six chapters. #BLM describes itself as a ‘decentralized network aiming to build the leadership and power of black people.’”109
That “Black Lives Matter” can be understood in multiple ways—as an online hashtag, a slogan, a “movement,” and/or its own organizational network (#BLM)—leads to confusion in the media. Local protests of police shootings might be described as part of the Black Lives Matter movement writ large, but might be the work of an organization completely unaffiliated with the #BLM network.
It is worth noting here, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor does, that unlike in previous generations, women’s leadership has been visibly central to the development of this new era of protest. While Black women have always been integral to the struggle for civil and human rights, more often it was the male leaders who were on center stage.
Today, though, the face of the Black Lives Matter movement is largely queer and female. How has this come to be? Female leadership may actually have been an outcome of the deeply racist policing Black men have experienced in Ferguson. According to the US Census Bureau, while there are 1,182 African American women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four living in Ferguson, there are only 577 African American men in this age group. More than 40 percent of Black men in both the 20–24 and 35–54 age groups in Ferguson are missing. It’s not just Ferguson. Across the United States, 1.5 million Black men are “missing”—snatched from society by imprisonment or premature death.110
Taylor concludes that whether the result of male absence or the reality of the devastating impact of police violence in women’s lives, families, and communities, the leadership of women has brought an intersectional perspective, highlighting the ways that the social categories of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, gender expression, immigrant status, and ability converge. This convergence results in the further societal devaluing of the people who embody those multiple identities, often making their struggles invisible.111 The emphasis of these women leaders on inclusivity is notably different from the civil rights activism of the past. Charlene Carruthers of Black Youth Project 100 explains, “It’s important because we are really serious about creating freedom and justice for all Black people, but all too often Black women and girls, Black LGBTQ folks, are left on the sidelines. And if we are going to be serious about liberation we have to include all Black people. It’s really that simple.”112
To that end, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, whose work on intersectionality has been an important influence in the thinking of these young activists,113 has coauthored, with lawyer Andrea Ritchie, a report called Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women as a project of the African American Policy Forum and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School. Among the many cases they highlight are those of Tanisha Anderson, killed just days before the Tamir Rice shooting by Cleveland police, who used excessive force as they restrained her; Michelle Cusseaux, shot by police in her Phoenix home as she held a hammer in her hand, just days after Michael Brown’s death; and Yvette Smith, killed almost instantly, shot in the head, when she opened the door for police investigating a domestic disturbance between two men. Though there is no readily available national database on police violence, in New York City—one of the jurisdictions with the most extensive data collection on police stops—the rates of racial disparities in stops, frisks, and arrests are identical for Black men and Black women, clearly demonstrating the need to keep Black women’s stories as well as those of Black transgender people visibly part of the justice-seeking narrative in the Black Lives Matter movement.114
One Black woman’s story that captured national attention began with a traffic stop in Waller County, Texas, on July 10, 2015. Sandra Bland was pulled over for a minor traffic violation—failing to signal a lane change. That stop turned into an arrest, captured on video, with Bland pinned to the ground and surrounded by police officers. Charged with assault, she was taken to the Waller County Jail, where, three days later, she was found dead in her cell. Her jailers claimed that she committed suicide. Her family rejects that explanation and believes there was police wrongdoing involved.
When she was pulled over, Bland was on her way to start a new job at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M University.115 Though she never made it back to her campus, her death in the summer of 2015, coinciding closely with the one-year anniversary of the Ferguson unrest, set the stage for college campus protests all over the nation.
The Movement Goes to College
If Ferguson was the epicenter of the new civil rights movement known as the Black Lives Matter movement, the University of Missouri in Columbia (known as “Mizzou”) became the most visible symbol of campus-based student activism in the fall of 2015. Less than two hours away from Ferguson, the University of Missouri is a campus of thirty-five thousand students, approximately 7 percent of whom are Black. The campus unrest that erupted in 2015 had begun the year before when three young Black women at Mizzou started a “@MU4MikeBrown” account on social media, which quickly attracted the interest of other students.116 Throughout the 2014–2015 school year, the women and their followers hosted campus vigils, rallies, demonstrations, and weekly planning meetings, making connections between the discrimination they experienced on the Columbia campus and the way the Black residents of Ferguson were treated. Coming together was empowering for many. A demonstration and die-in they staged drew hundreds of people. One of the first-time protesters there described his reaction: “It touched me to the core.… It was the first time I saw that many students committed to the cause.”117 Yet not all student responses were positive. Postings on Yik Yak, an anonymous social media app commonly used by students, revealed the tension between those who saw the need to speak up for racial justice and those whose actions reminded others that racism was alive and well in their campus community. “They were calling us monkeys and niggers,” said Ashley Bland, one of the @MU4MikeBrown founders. “It was blatant, it wasn’t even hidden racism.”118
Despite this climate of racial tension, Payton Head, a Black student from Chicago, was elected the 2015–2016 Missouri Students Association president. Earlier in his career at Mizzou, he had been involved in campus government work focused on diversity, social justice, and equity, and now, as a senior and MSA president, he was focused on creating an inclusive community. But on September 12, 2015, Head was painfully reminded of his own outsider status as a Black man on his campus. He and a friend were walking toward downtown Columbia at night when White men in a pickup truck drove up and began screaming racial slurs at them. Just two years before, Payton had experienced a very similar incident when walking by a stretch of fraternity and sorority houses near campus; a group of White students sitting in the back of a pickup truck had begun screaming racial slurs at him. The sense of déjà vu infuriated him. “What made me the most angry about the situation was the fact that I had been working on inclusion initiatives this entire year.… I’m getting to the end of my time in office and I’m still seeing the same things.”119 And he knew he was not alone, that nearly every Black student on campus had had similar experiences. Head wrote about the incident on Facebook, passionately calling for change on campus. His Facebook post went viral, yet there was no immediate response from the university leadership. Six days later, the chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin, issued a statement that left the students unsatisfied, vague in its language and with no specific mention of the MSA president’s experience, stating simply that the university opposed bias and discrimination and was working “to address the issues brought forward.”120
Just as the young activists of Ferguson felt betrayed by President Obama’s inability to stop police violence, Black students on campus
were angry that senior campus leaders were unable to prevent bias incidents on campus—but perhaps of more concern was that leaders’ responses to those incidents too often lacked the sense of urgency that the students themselves felt. Jonathan Butler, a Black graduate student who would eventually play a key role in campus protests, said, “We have this dangerous culture of apathy where things aren’t being addressed. If leadership wasn’t going to do something, we had to do something.”121
To further highlight the concerns of Black students, Jonathan Butler and ten other student activists formed Concerned Student 1950, named for the year when the first Black student enrolled. In October 2015, just a month after Payton Head’s Facebook post, Concerned Student 1950 decided to stage a protest at homecoming by blocking the car in which University of Missouri System president Tim Wolfe was riding, determined to get the attention of the senior administration. During the homecoming parade, they blocked the path of the car, linking arms and speaking passionately about the issue of racial discrimination on campus, but Wolfe remained in his car and never acknowledged them. The students were flabbergasted by Wolfe’s refusal to speak to them. Eventually police dispersed the crowd. Though led by Black students, the protest attracted White students as well. Said one, “I joined in the line because white silence is compliance.… I feel like I can’t just sit by and watch. It’s not my fight, but I support it.”122
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Page 5