Luke Skywalker
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A protester stands in front of the Ferguson Police Department as the snow falls Nov. 26, 2014.(Photo: Alexey Furman, EPA)
ST. LOUIS — In a cold late fall drizzle, dozens of fast-food workers gathered at a downtown plaza for a protest this week where they tied their call for increasing their state's minimum wage to their anger over the police shooting death of Michael Brown.
To Carlos Robinson, one of the protest organizers, connecting the causes made perfect sense.
"When you look at what happened in Ferguson and what's happening to minimum wage workers, you are talking about two groups of people who are fighting for their very basic rights," said Robinson, 23, a new father who is struggling to make ends meet at his $7.50 per hour job at a Burger King.
Organizers at the center of the nearly 4-month-old movement that erupted here following the shooting death of Brown -- whose protests primarily focused on police brutality and racial profiling of African-Americans -- are seeing their cause transform into a touchstone for activists pushing for changes covering a broad set of issues affecting America.
Protesters hit the streets last week for sometimes violent demonstrations after St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced that a grand jury would not indict former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Brown, who was black and unarmed. And they took to the streets again this week after prosecutors in New York City announced that a grand jury there found no reasonable cause to indict a white police officer for the chokehold death of Eric Garner, a 43-year African-American man who was illegally selling untaxed cigarettes.
From Washington, D.C. to Portland, Ore., demonstrators are increasingly connecting their outrage over the grand jury decisions in the Brown and Garner cases with calls for government action to eradicate poverty, overhaul the public education system, end corporate welfare and overhaul American consumer culture.
Problems of police brutality and racial profiling are closely tied to ongoing crises of education, health care and unemployment in the African-American community, says Brittany Packnett, executive director of Teach For America-St. Louis and a member of Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon's Ferguson Commission.
"'Ferguson has laid bare many systematic injustices that are present in urban communities of color and in suburbs," she said. "Across the country, we know that low income people and people of color suffer disproportionately from certain injustices and that most of those injustices are highly interconnected."
Activists who have been at the center of the movement in Ferguson say it's an important signal that others have been inspired by the Ferguson protests and are looking to shed light on issues of importance to Americans. But some Ferguson activists say they are also mindful that tying too many different messages to the Michael Brown cause could diminish their movement's central goals.
"In the end, I think it's important that the focus remain on black and minority issues," said Travis Martin, 27, a white activist and law student who has helped organize demonstrations in the St. Louis area.
TACTICS and BLACK LIVES
The periodic tensions that have surfaced between the local activists and people from outside the community who have more recently joined the cause have centered around rhetoric and tactics.
Local activists grumble that some of the most violent actions — including last week's widespread looting and arson following the announcement that no indictment would be filed against Wilson -- were primarily instigated by demonstrators from outside the area.
To be certain, many activists that were arrested during looting and arson were St. Louis-area residents. (A video of Brown's step-father, Louis Head, urging a crowd to "burn this **** down" raised the prospect of a police investigation. He has since apologized.) Still, local protest leaders insist that some outsiders with ulterior motives are sparking many unnecessary clashes with law enforcement.
Derrick Robinson, a St. Louis pastor and organizer, said during a recent Black Friday protest in front of the Ferguson police station that he has told a protest group with whom he is aligned to separate themselves from a group of out-of-town protesters who seemed intent on sparking a physical confrontation with police.
The protesters, Robinson said, identified themselves as communists. Other protest leaders have also previously complained that outsiders have tried to incite riots during demonstrations in Ferguson, and have posted video and photos on social media to document their concerns. Fifteen of the 16 protesters arrested by police one night were from outside Missouri.
"If that is their assignment, I commend them for it," Robinson said. "But we're not going to be part of it."
Protesters in Boston hold up signs while chanting "Black Lives Matter" during a demonstration against the deaths of two unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers in New York City and Ferguson, Mo., on Dec. 4, 2014.(Photo: Charles Krupa, AP)
Differing opinions on the way forward have also surfaced on social media.
For months, the words "black lives matter" have been a rallying cry and, in a sense, the central message of activists who gathered regularly in front of the Ferguson Police Department to vent their grievances. The slogan and hashtag on Twitter -- #BlackLivesMatter — comes from a collective of black national leaders created in 2012 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi.
The women founded the group Black Lives Matter after a jury in Florida acquitted George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old African-American teen.
During marches, sit-ins and rallies, protesters in St. Louis and Ferguson yelled the words, plastered it on posters and printed it on T-shirts.Yet recently, there has been a debate onTwitterabout amending that slogan to "all lives matter."
Ashley Yates, 29, of St. Louis, co-founder of Millennial Activists United, says changing the slogan would take away from the focus that blacks suffer fatal injustices as a result of discrimination.
"Saying black lives matter and affirming the value in black life does not strip value from anyone else's lives," she said. "We know that white lives matter. ... People aren't grasping the reality of the situation which is the first thing you have to do to address these issues. It's a form of co-opting. You don't go into a cancer campaign and yell what about all the other diseases."
THE OCCUPY WALL STREET EFFECT
In Ferguson, many organizers say they are mindful of what happened with the Occupy Wall Street protest movement against social and economic inequality that began in 2011 and captured worldwide attention, before seeing its message fizzle over time.
Yet lessons learned from the Occupy movement have paid dividends in Ferguson.
Activists here put more emphasis on having lawyers and bail money ready to assist protesters who get arrested. The demonstrators have also sharpened their use of live-streaming of demonstrations, allowing activists to reach more Americans with information about their cause without the filter of the traditional media.
Demonstrators march in front of the Justice Department headquarters chanting "Hands up! Don't shoot!" and "I can't breath!" in protest against recent decisions by grand juries in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, Dec. 4, in Washington.(Photo: Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images)
Wylie Stecklow, who provided legal advice to arrested activists during Occupy, said that Occupy has also brought to Ferguson what the activist-writer Noam Chomsky called the "community of mutual support" — a solidarity built around the idea that when one part of the community is hurting, the entire community is ailing.
"There isn't just one issue here," Stecklow said. "It's not just about the police in Ferguson, it's not just about economic inequality in the country, and it's not just about LGBTQ adults and teens … being abused by the police. Everyone has their own personal experience that is impacting why they are going to the street."
James Hayes, political director for the Ohio Students Association who traveled to Ferguson in October to take part in the protests, says he is happy the movement is spreading.
This week, he and others met with President Obama at the White House to discuss their concerns. Afterward, Hayes said, the movement must stay focused on growing and that working with groups like Occupy activists may have advantages.
In the end, however, Hayes said the Ferguson movement should remain true to itself.
"This is a movement that started and is being led by black youth, by young people of color," Hayes said. "Any sort of collaborations are going to have to be worked out to make sure that doesn't get reversed so broadening out doesn't become a movement led by white radicals."
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