On the Other Side of Freedom Read online

  I would even go so far as to say that many who decry hope the loudest could eventually be the most hopeful among us. They are doing the pre-work of hope, deconstructing our current realities. But they are afraid that they may fail, so they hesitate to build. Or they fear that the work will be so long-term that it will result in disappointment—and they are trying to guard against disappointment—so they challenge. They explore and unpack but are slow to create. And they publicly decry any efforts to bring forth a better world, because of the possibility and weight of disappointment. To them it sounds fluffy and hollow.

  But a belief in tomorrow has never been hollow. It wasn’t hollow to those who fought before us. We do not stand in the shadows of those who came before us, but in their glow. And that glow exists because they put forth a vision of the future and they fought for it. We did not invent resistance or discover injustice in August 2014. We exist in a legacy of struggle, a legacy rooted in hope.

  We have a hope rooted in a belief that as sure as hands have made the buildings that dominate the skylines of our cities, hands have made the institutions, practices, and customs that perpetuate racism and injustice that permeate those same cities. What is made by human hands requires maintenance. Buildings can be torn down and built over. Parking lots can become parks and vice versa. Institutions can evolve, change, or be dismantled.

  We can win. And if we do, it will be because more of us understood that this is a system of choices, and we have learned how to build power to make new choices. When they say that power concedes nothing without a demand, they are reminding us that the demand has to create something new—a new power dynamic, a new reality. And hope is the fuel of this demand.

  Hope is not magic. Hope is work. Let’s get to the work.

  TWO

  How Am I Supposed to Respond to Murder?

  When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.

  —TONI MORRISON

  It was illegal to stand still on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in August, September, and October 2014. This wasn’t on account of any law that had existed prior to the presence of hundreds and thousands of protesters in the streets; it wasn’t on account of any law at all. It was a rule, if one could even call it that, born of hubris and desperation. The police were simply out of ideas for how to coax the swelling ranks of protesters out of the streets. So they thought they’d wear us out. And before we knew it, we were walking, day and night.

  It became known as the Five-Second rule: Anyone who stood still for more than five seconds was arrested. Being forced to walk day and night is one of the things I will never forget, a reminder that the law in practice is never neutral, that it can change at the whim of those in power, and that the battles our elders fought are not as far behind us as we had been raised to believe. In the courthouse in downtown St. Louis, there are images of Lady Liberty, but I know that justice is not blind; she chooses not to see my humanity.

  Days before the Five-Second rule, Governor Jay Nixon of Missouri, in a news conference, imposed a midnight curfew that he claimed was “not to silence the people of Ferguson, but to address those who are drowning out the voice of the people with their actions.” State Highway Patrol Commander Captain Ronald S. Johnson subsequently declared, “We won’t enforce it with trucks, we won’t enforce it with tear gas, we will enforce it with communication. . . . We will be telling the people, ‘It’s time to go home.’”

  On the first night of the citywide midnight curfew in Ferguson, the tear gas began at eight o’clock.

  Before we ever saw or felt it, we heard the sound of the canister leaving the barrel of the gun—a sound between a large firework and a cartoon cannon—followed by a whiz as it moved through the air. My most vivid memory of that night was seeing a child, maybe five years old, frantically running, directionless and alone. He seemed to notice first what I only realized moments later—that two canisters had fallen near us. By the time I saw that he was crying, he was swept up by a parent and I was stuck in a cloud. I tried to outrun the tear gas but I was surrounded—there were cars behind me, a gate to my side, and the gas was moving quickly. This was not the scene I’d envisioned just one day ago when I arrived.

  The afternoon before, I had prepared for this. I’d been at another protester’s house for the first training led by the street medics—current and former medical professionals—who had just arrived in Ferguson. Street medics assist activists in protest since ambulances rarely, if ever, visit active protest sites. I had never even thought about such a team of people existing, let alone that I’d be in one of their training sessions. And yet there I was, one of eight people spending the better part of an afternoon learning how to flush my eyes out in the event of being teargassed and how to properly assist those around me in distress. I first met Alexis Templeton and Johnetta Elzie at that training; they were two St. Louis natives whose lives would intertwine with mine in unexpected ways over the following days and then months and then years. But we were just getting to know one another then, and none of us had expected to make use of this information so soon. We were told that tear gas can sear your contacts to your eyes—I considered removing mine, but in the end decided not to. Not twenty-four hours later, I was putting my head in my shirt and running through smoke.

  When I got through to the other side of the smoke, I uncovered my head and was thankful that I could still see. I didn’t have more than a few seconds to consider my sight before I was swept up in a cloud of protesters, all of us seemingly running for our lives. I felt like my life was hanging in the balance and time was standing still. The police, armed with rubber bullets, were in SWAT vehicles chasing us up West Florissant Avenue, the main site of the protests. They drove us in every direction, in their supposed effort to clear the street.

  It was like we were being hunted.

  Hours later, SWAT vehicles drove down the streets while officers hung off them, shining flashlights into cars. They were still looking to round us up. I’d eventually made it back to my car on the side street where I’d parked it. I knew that I’d have to drive down West Florissant to get to where I was sleeping that night, but my only instinct was to hide. I was sitting with the lights off when it clicked: in that moment, on Nesbit Drive, I couldn’t be in my car. I couldn’t be on that street. I made myself as small as possible, hiding under my steering wheel, praying that the light wouldn’t expose me. It would be hours before I finally drove away.

  Days later, I’d be out in the streets again, and four police officers would inform me that I was walking too slowly; that I could not pace back and forth in a given area; that standing still was now illegal.* Even the reporters had to walk, either because the police forced them to, or because we the protesters demanded it: “You don’t get to come down here and watch us like animals,” one protester yelled to a reporter, “you’ve gotta keep it moving too, or you’ve gotta go.” They would not simply be voyeurs of our pain. And that particular reporter got the message. He walked.

  Those of us who were there remember the Five-Second rule as a defining characteristic of the beginning of this movement. We remember adapting to it and meeting it as a challenge. Instead of tiring us out, it only firmed our resolve. We couldn’t stand still? Okay. We would march all day and all night, and we would make the police do the same. We wouldn’t be the only people exhausted, we reminded them.

  I often wondered where was this “nation of laws” that was so often invoked in political discourse, when it was so easy for the police to unilaterally create and enforce a set of rules in the name of public safety. Why was it so easy for them to obscure the reality of why we were in the streets in the first place?

  I’ve read stories about search parties rounding up black men and women. I’ve seen the photos of protesters bloodied for daring to march in politically inconvenient places. But I never thought that in an American city in 2014 it would be illeg
al to stand still. I never thought I’d have to hide under my steering wheel to escape the police. I never thought I’d learn to maneuver in tear gas like I learned how to tie my shoes, awkwardly and slowly at first and then with grace. It wasn’t that I thought America was better than teargassing its own citizens—I knew that was not so. But I thought those tactics were a thing of the past. Instead, the default reaction to black bodies assembled in protest was to treat us as a threat.

  * * *

  —

  WHAT IT’S TAUGHT ME is that freedom is fragile, and that’s a lesson that I never want to forget.

  Indeed, it’s something I actively try to remember. It’s the reason that I still wear my blue Patagonia down vest. We were in the street for four hundred days, through all four seasons. And during the first winter, I needed something to wear that would keep me warm, but that I’d never have to pack. That was when I started wearing the vest. It was simple, warm, and never felt bulky. When the weather got cold, I’d just put a hoodie under it. I got used to wearing it, like a safety blanket of sorts. But it also serves as a reminder. I’ve worn it every day since the winter of 2014. I had it on when we got pepper sprayed, smoke bombed, and shot at with rubber bullets in Ferguson, in Baltimore, in Charleston, and in every city I was invited to after the initial wave of protests ended. It may seem silly, but it keeps me grounded in the reality of all that has happened.

  And that specific reality is all the more important as accounts of the days and months following the Ferguson protests are told, as the history of this movement is penned. Already the story has been framed and retold by people who were not a sustained presence either in person or virtually before the movement became popular, before we’d built the critical mass of supporters across the world. And it is being taken over either to stand in for a range of intellectual experiences or to reinforce particular narratives that fit personal ends. I think this may be a danger of the internet, of feigned proximity.

  But those of us who were there, we remember. We remember how quickly the safe houses were established, how smoothly the bail fund operated. We remember the lawyers, like the ArchCity Defenders and the legal observers, who set up clinics to close active warrants of protesters, and the dinners by Cathy Daniels, affectionately called Mama Cat, who served us meals—at times our only meals—in all types of weather and tense moments. We remember Johnetta Elzie collecting supplies at the QuikTrip, before she and I began to work on the daily newsletter together, along with Brittany Packnett. And Tef Poe leading the long marches from West Florissant to the Ferguson Police Department headquarters.

  We remember Tony Rice and others holding down the fort in the white tent at Andy Wurm’s lot across from the Ferguson Police Department, and The Lost Voices becoming an active group within the larger protest community. We remember Tribe X planning and executing the first mall shutdowns. And the old Ferguson Burger Bar, which fed us when every other place seemed too afraid to stay open. I especially remember all the donations of water in those first hundred days, how supporters would order pizza online and have it delivered to places close to where we were.

  I remember too all the people that told us that protest was not the way to make a difference, that we were wasting our time, that we needed to try different methods that were more acceptable. When the protests began, I still worked for Minneapolis Public Schools. The steady stream of hate calls I began to receive—and the flood of complaints that members of the Board of Education were receiving—forced us to remove everyone’s office phone number from the Minneapolis Public Schools’ Human Capital website. Today, people talk about the protests as an important part of the ecosystem of citizenship, but that was not the case in the beginning.

  On most nights, I slept on couches, floors, or air mattresses of either old friends I had known in college who happened to live in St. Louis, or new friends I had met in the streets. I think of the protests in two waves: before the nonindictment of Michael Brown Jr.’s killer, Darren Wilson, and after. Before the decision, there was a persistent on-edge feeling: We never knew when the decision would come, but we knew that if it was indeed a nonindictment that the protests would look like something we hadn’t seen yet. Every day it seemed we’d hear rumors and get texts that “today was the day.” And when the day finally came, that night was a night unlike all the rest. Police cars burned; tear gas dissolved in the air in clouds so thick and indistinguishable from all the other smoke that you didn’t realize what it was until you couldn’t breathe. And then there was the National Guard, strewn throughout the area, hiding on main roads behind buildings, ready for action.

  We remember because we learned so much about ourselves in the process, about organizing, about police violence, about liberation beyond survival, and about the difference between the people willing to talk about resistance and the people willing to do the work of resistance.

  We did not know many things in those early days, but we knew a few things well: that Michael Brown Jr. should be alive and that we would not and could not leave the streets. And so we stayed, all night, every night, confident that we were on the right side of justice. And knowing these things was the fuel that led us to stand firm despite, or perhaps because of, the terror that the police were inflicting on us. We may not have known each other’s names, but we knew each other’s hearts. And it was not that we were not afraid—often we were. But we had known fear in our silence too. And we had grown tired of being silent.

  * * *

  —

  Indict! Convict! Send that killer cop to jail! The whole damn system is guilty as hell!

  They say move back, we say fight back. Call: Move back. Response: Fight back.

  WHEN A MESSAGE is spoken loud and clear and in unison when formerly there were whispers or collections of disparate rumblings, it’s easy to think of people as finally having found their voices, as if those voices had been lost. That they are being heard now, though, is an indictment of the listener, not the speaker. We the protesters have never been the voiceless. We have been the unheard. Our storytelling has been key to our survival, as we have spoken about our pain and our joy, even if we were talking to ourselves.

  It is common since the protests began to hear people, confused about our tactics, ask: Why are you doing this? Why are you demanding, now, to be heard?

  Protest is telling the truth in public. Sometimes protest is telling the truth to a public that isn’t quite ready to hear it. Protest is, in its own way, a storytelling. We use our bodies, our words, our art, and our sounds both to tell the truth about the pain that we endure and to demand the justice that we know is possible. It is meant to build a community and to force a response.

  We would never have gone into the streets if Michael Brown Jr. hadn’t been killed. Or if thousands hadn’t been killed before him. The protesters in Minneapolis would not have barricaded the Fourth Precinct police station if Jamar Clark hadn’t been killed, if Rekia Boyd hadn’t been killed as she walked, if Aiyana Jones hadn’t been asleep on her couch and shot through the wall by an officer, or if Philando Castile hadn’t been slain while complying with every request and command from the officer who shot him. We took to the streets as a matter of life and death. What else could we do?

  How, exactly, are we supposed to respond to murder?

  It seems we have two options: We can accept the trauma and go about our daily lives—carry the weight of the violence inflicted upon us and pray that we survive. And if we choose to accept it, to suffocate in surrender, then we must ask ourselves, What kind of life is possible in surrender?

  Or we can challenge the source of the trauma. We can resist. And if we choose to resist, we must ask ourselves, How do we resist and to what end?

  On the streets in Ferguson, and in all the days since, a generation has chosen the latter. We choose to challenge the trauma, and though we know that it won’t be easy, we know that the alternative is impossible, for we have already lived through
the suffocating reality of silence. When Trayvon Martin was killed, we watched in real-time disbelief as the system let his killer go and itself remained relatively unchanged. Florida’s Stand Your Ground law became just another way to justify a modern-day lynching. By the time Michael Brown Jr. was killed two years later, we knew all too well that we were not promised a better tomorrow, but that we would have to force one into existence.

  My generation grew up with the message of progress. Our elders speak of how far we’ve come, that our worst days are behind us. Indeed, that the moral distance we’ve traveled from enslavement to Jim Crow to today is unfathomable. That just a half century ago, it would have been hard to imagine the freedoms that we now have, and thus progress, it would seem, is inevitable.

  The history lessons we learned in school were always ones of struggle and accomplishment—our freedom gained, Constitution changed, national holidays proclaimed, and so on. But when Michael Brown Jr.’s body lay in the street, the latest death in what was becoming a public record of indiscriminate kills by the police, the notion of accomplishment rang hollow. And so we could not remain silent. A response to murder that involves silence only invites more murder. We could not afford to surrender to the faith in a better tomorrow.

  We chose protest as a matter of survival.

  To challenge the source of the trauma offered us, and still offers us, the best chance at a world that we deserve. In making that choice toward challenge and away from surrender, we—I—assert that as sure as there is nothing inevitable about progress toward justice, there is no immutable permanence to injustice. Our ability to choose implies a latent power that is seldom used to its full extent. When we talk about power in the context of protest, we often talk about “empowering” others, as if power is like a bag of candy that one can dole out at will. But one can neither give nor be given power; we can only help one another stand in our own power.