Michael Brown’s death sparked a decade of reckoning on race

Kayla Reed was born in a predominantly African American section of St. Louis where, like her own kin, many Black families had been transplanted out of the Deep South.

After the death of her grandmother, Reed moved with her father from the city to a St. Louis County town located within one mile of Ferguson, Missouri, where 10 years ago, a Black teenager’s fatal shooting by a white police officer changed Reed’s life and shook awake a nation.

“It was like in my backyard,” she recalls. “I don’t really feel like I considered myself much of an activist. I definitely think I had the type of Black consciousness that comes with being raised by a Black preacher and seeing Black people go through so much.”

Reed was not a community organizer. She was a pharmacy technician with a second job at a furniture store. Like so many others, on Aug. 9, 2014, she learned by word of mouth, as she clocked out of a shift, that an unarmed 18-year-old from the neighborhood had been killed.

His name was Michael Brown.

A march toward measurable change

When Reed joined hundreds of grieving community members out at the scene, Brown’s bloodied body had been removed from the middle of Canfield Drive, a two-lane street in Ferguson, a majority-Black city where the relationship between local police and residents had long been tenuous. The tensions worsened after detectives left Brown’s corpse covered with a white sheet for four traumatizing hours in the summer heat, in full view of an apartment complex.

Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who fatally shot Brown, had driven a police vehicle up to the teenager and his friend on Canfield Drive. The officer ordered them to get up on the sidewalk before a scuffle ensued. Although Brown was unarmed, Wilson described Brown as menacing at 6-foot-4 and claimed the teenager charged at him before he opened fire.

Some nearby residents said Brown had his hands up in surrender when he was shot.

For Reed, Brown’s encounter with the Ferguson officer was familiar. Her brothers, her dad and other loved ones had been subjected to mistreatment, disrespect and indignity by the area’s police. Nonetheless, she was shocked.

“I just found myself sort of returning to (Canfield Drive) day after day, and then to what becomes the uprising,” says Reed, who became an organizer amid the protests and civil unrest.

Largely peaceful demonstrations — some blemished by vandalism, theft and arson among residents and outside opportunists — were met with violent police response. But the demonstrations weren’t contained to Ferguson. Over the next decade, the deaths of Black people at the hands of police and vigilantes would draw support, resources and democratic change to communities all over the nation. “This time,” residents vowed, things must be different.

Today, Reed is the executive director of Action St. Louis, a Black-led political activist group that she co-founded in 2014. She says the passage of time has proven that what began as an uprising in Ferguson has resulted in measurable change for Black Americans.

Movement-minded leaders have been elected and anti-progressive leaders unseated. Local legislation has been passed to dismantle prisons and jails, and federal legislation has been introduced in Congress. Most critically, more people are politically educated and engaged with the idea that they can build communities that work for them and not simply exist in an ecosystem of systemic racism.

“What we’ve tried to show over the last 10 years is that there is no landmark piece of legislation that we’re chasing,” Reed says. “What we are chasing is the fundamental uprooting of a system rooted in anti-Blackness, rooted in the form of white supremacy that has been continuously violent for over a century to our people.”

Strength in numbers — and coalitions

The death of Michael Brown prompted an eruption of protests and gave a boost to a then-nascent Black Lives Matter movement. In subsequent years, a new generation stepped forward to pick up the work of civil rights and racial justice started by their parents and grandparents. In racial justice movements, the uprooting of white supremacy is a lesser-invoked aim — one that also demands white people reckon with their race’s complicity in generations of disadvantage faced by Black Americans and other people of color.

It’s not just BLM. Over the last decade, Indigenous people defended land and water, Latinos resisted draconian immigration detention and deportation practices, and Asian American activists pushed back on xenophobia that endangers their lives. Together these movements, benefitting from multiracial coalition-building, are changing American democracy and the broader culture, encouraging activism the world over.

Michael Brown inspired much of that. But a decade later, the future of racial justice in the United States remains in question.

“Michael Brown embodied the anger, that was so obvious and evident after decades of dismissing it, of holding it back, of telling ourselves we’re going to overcome,” says Karla Scott, a communications professor and the former African American Studies program director at St. Louis University. “It just became the moment we said, we can’t be polite anymore. He set fire to all of the anger that had been smoldering for centuries. And it was not just the Black community.”

The Brown case and the Ferguson uprising prompted a generation of activists in Black-led organizations to work collectively on strategy, yielding the policy platform known as “Vision for Black Lives.” But there was also a recognition that the vision couldn’t be achieved without building a multiracial movement, says Loan Tran, national director of Rising Majority, a coalition of advocacy organizations.

“All of these struggles are interconnected,” says Tran, who uses they/them pronouns. “The whole objective under the system that we live under is to pit communities against each other, to participate in an Olympic competition of their own oppression.”

Instead of arguing about who is more oppressed, multiracial coalition building over the last decade has helped communities of color get clear about common problems and opportunities, Tran says.

“We are interested in building powerful movements that actually change and shift the conditions,” they say. “So when we think about this upcoming election, it calls at some of the foundational questions that we’re grappling with: What does a genuine multiracial democracy in this country look like? What does a non-exploitative economy actually look like? And how are we going to get there?”

A glimpse from 10 years down the road

Years after the U.S. Department of Justice issued a scathing indictment of Ferguson’s police department, nearly half of its officers are Black. Police receive training on de-escalation and community relationship building.

Ferguson’s mayor, police chief, city attorney and other leaders are Black. The city’s residents, who are 70% Black and 21% white, can find more jobs in the area because of a career development initiative launched after the protests. But the city remains under federal watch, the result of a consent decree that required sweeping changes to the way its police force and municipal court systems are run.

These changes in Ferguson came as the deaths of Black Americans at the hands of police drew more protests and civil unrest in other cities. In 2015, Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore; in 2016, Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; in 2018, Stephon Clark in Sacramento and Botham Jean in Dallas, Texas.

The backlash to BLM and racial justice conversations was significant. Even though former President Barack Obama convened a task force in which law enforcement leaders and Ferguson protesters compiled recommendations for policing reforms, the fatal ambush of police officers in New York City and Dallas in 2014 and 2016, respectively, brought about strong condemnations of Black protesters and organizers.

Still, the list of Black citizen casualties grew until, in 2020, the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky sparked an unprecedented mobilization of racial justice protests and civil unrest. This time, many felt, things really would be different.

But after four years, Congress hasn’t passed legislation meant to impose national policing reforms. Earlier this month, Democratic senators reintroduced the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that would ban police chokeholds, eliminate the use of no-knock warrants and limit the federal transfer of excess military equipment that local police departments have used to quell protests. There were no Republican cosponsors.

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Even this year, ahead of a national election between a former prosecutor whose record receives mixed reviews among racial justice advocates and a former president who has pledged to offer police immunity from criminal prosecution, hopes for progress appear foggy.

Days before the anniversary of Brown’s death this month, Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, a movement-supported congresswoman who had been teargassed with Ferguson protesters, lost a Democratic primary to St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell. The prosecutor, a Black man who campaigned in 2018 on reopening the Brown case, announced in 2020 that he would not charge the officer who killed the teen.

In Ferguson, residents marked 10 years to the day since Brown was killed. But an afternoon protest ended with a Black Ferguson police officer hospitalized and fighting for his life after he was assaulted by participants. Community leaders cautioned police officials against reviving the us-versus-them mentality, even as they condemned the attack on the Ferguson officer.

The recent developments haven’t deterred movement stalwarts. Reed, the St. Louis area activist, rejects the premise that a decade is long enough to achieve all the aims of any racial justice movement. This is about a “lifetime of work,” she says. “When people ask what have you gotten, what have you won, I say I’m in this until we actually do live in a country … where we are not weaponizing forces to harm our people.”

“For us, it’s not from protest to policy. It’s from protest to power.”