Hundreds of well-armed police cloaked in military garb staring down crowds of Black civilians in T-shirts and jeans. A QuikTrip gas station engulfed in flames set against the night sky. The body of Michael Brown Jr. left for hours in the St. Louis summer heat. These are among the enduring images of the Ferguson uprising that are not easily forgotten.
What makes a single event far outlive the brief moment of its occurrence—that causes it to imprint itself, not just into the minds of nearby observers but even the most remote of witnesses? None could have predicted the repercussions of August 9, 2014. This was hardly the first and would not be the last in an endless series of street executions by the cops patrolling St. Louis and its surrounds. That the cop was white and the slain boy Black was, itself, unremarkable.
And yet, something broke that day. Or rather, something was broken, by force and with great intention. The façade of peaceful coexistence was broken, and the young Black dissidents in the street did the breaking. They weren’t yet “protesters,” or even “activists,” as many would come to be characterized. They were the vanguard of resistance against an oppressive force. And they called into question the very nature and origin of that oppression.
But if it was a breaking, it was also a process of creation. In those moments of grief and rage, new solidarities were formed. New visions began to emerge, fueled by the organizers, visual artists, musicians, photographers, and storytellers of St. Louis. Ferguson—this suburban municipality of just over twenty thousand people—was transformed into a universal symbol of struggle for human rights and dignity that traveled from Hollywood to the White House and across an ocean to the United Nations. This homegrown rebellion changed the terms of debate in public life across the globe, but nowhere more than in Ferguson’s own backyard. By the fall of 2015, the region’s leadership class had been cowed by the spectacle of those thousands of young Black people (and no shortage of allies) in the streets, city halls, county councils, and shopping malls. They offered an explicit trade: your peace for our justice.
An early indication of the changes underway was the proliferation of an updated public vocabulary to reflect the new social consciousness. Words and phrases like “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” and “racial equity” echoed from boardrooms and lecture halls to legislative chambers. Anyone who knew St. Louis intimately noticed the shift. After all, the city’s geographic placement at the junction of the Midwest and South has long meant, among other things, an alternating commitment to empty politeness and charming mendacity. In this cultural and political tradition, easy lies reign supreme over hard truths.
The subsequent months and years brought with them some acknowledgement that the region would have to change: a high-profile Department of Justice investigation of corruption and abuse within the criminal legal system of Ferguson with broad implications for St. Louis as a whole; establishment of the largest federal Promise Zone in the country, with the “promise” being an infusion of tens of millions of dollars into majority-Black North St. Louis City and County; a wave of appointed and elected Black leadership at city, county, and municipal levels; sustained pressure, legislation, and litigation driving down St. Louis’ notoriously high levels of tickets, warrants, and debtors’ prison revenues; statewide progressive policy changes through popular ballot initiatives, like a minimum wage increase in 2018 and marijuana legalization four years later; and, of course, a slew of regional commitments made to honor the 189 “calls to action” painstakingly crafted through a monthslong public engagement process and put forth in a report by the Ferguson Commission, which had been established by the governor and endorsed by every prominent leader in the region.
But these shifts and concessions, however hard-won, were answers to a different set of questions than those forged in the flames of the uprising. Those questions—about who we really are, how we have come to this place, and what is required of us if we are ever to escape it fully—were more fundamental. What of our collective ambition to upend prevailing social relations, reconceptualize major pillars of our public life from safety to housing to democracy, rearrange the economic order, and dismantle racial capitalism in all its forms? The resounding answer in the immediate term has proven to be: very little.
As the ever-widening distance from the moment of rupture in Ferguson continues to grow, it has become increasingly clear that the fundamentals have remained unchanged as the propensity for honest introspection has diminished—both among those for whom the pre-rebellion order served well and faithfully and those for whom remembering is too painful in the face of their fellow citizens’ indifference. Meanwhile, liberals and centrists alike counsel, in the grand American tradition, that we must moderate radical impulses lest we lend fuel to the neofascist flames now raging. That such moderation also serves the material interests of those who offer such caution is, we are told, beside the point.
And yet the collective trauma, the seeds of revolutionary possibility, and the contagious courage of that youthful vanguard—those cannot be erased from our shared memory. They have reshaped our lives and the trajectory of the future unfolding before us, bringing us into a movement rooted in love and freedom, and challenging us to be as rigorous in the personal practice of our values as in the pursuit of a liberatory political vision.
One of the most enduring legacies of the uprising has been the emergence of countless young Black St. Louisans who revealed the lie of Black inferiority for what it is. The conditions of social and economic precarity that disproportionately afflict Black people in this country are the result of generational theft, malicious social policy, and poorly concealed structural violence. Blackness itself is not the affliction. In the earliest moments of organic rebellion, mainstream media sought to depict the young people on television screens across the globe as reckless discontents, lost youth who were acting out in violent and noncompliant ways. Conservatives depicted the acts of resistance as a product of cultural decay, a damning expression of Black urban pathology stemming from a failure to instill values of respect and decency. Meanwhile, liberal narratives centered on the notion of disruption as a cry for help. Yes, these were lost souls, but if they were lost it was because “we” had neglected to find them and bring them into the world on equal footing.
What remains absent from these mainstream narratives is a recognition of the sheer genius of the rebellion. This renaissance took many forms: the powerful oratory and creative rhetorical strategies reflected in chants, songs, signage, and social media hashtags; new forms of digital organizing; effective and distributed leadership—strikingly femme and queer—that kept ordinary people engaged and mobilized for months after the initial, deadly spark; political savvy and highly sophisticated negotiation skills; and artistic expression through visual arts, music, spoken word, literature, photography, videography, and more.
Even less appreciated is the flourishing of that brilliance since 2014. Examples are far too numerous to do it justice here; I will only attempt to represent its range. Kayla Reed, a pharmacy tech turned Ferguson frontliner, was a constant and powerful presence in months of direct actions in 2014 and 2015. In 2016 she and her friend Michelle Higgins formed the grassroots organizing collective St. Louis Action Council in the basement of a local church. Kayla now leads Action St. Louis, the Black feminist racial justice powerhouse that grew out of that early work and has become one of the most effective organizations in the region on questions of police and prison abolition, electoral justice, and tenants’ rights. Brittany Ferrell, an early member of the St. Louis Action Council, went on to complete bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing and public health, and to pursue a PhD in nursing science, while applying her education to organizing around issues of Black maternal health and directing a documentary film on the subject, You Lucky You Got a Mama. Another early member, Mike Milton, became the St. Louis site director for the Bail Project, leading his team in freeing thousands of poor St. Louisans jailed on cash bail. He then went on to found Freedom Community Center, an organization seeking to build a movement of survivors of violence and end mass incarceration through transformative justice approaches. Higgins has continued to anchor multiple organizing efforts, including through Faith for Justice, the radical faith-based organization that she founded. She is now senior pastor at St. John’s the Beloved Community in North St. Louis, the very church where St. Louis Action Council first convened.
Then there are artists like the rapper Tef Poe, who cofounded Hands Up United during the Ferguson uprising. Tef has continued to produce music infused with social and political critique and was one of the early leaders of Black Men Build, a grassroots membership organization committed to engaging Black men through personal and political development, organizing, and mutual aid. Damon Davis, a multimedia artist and musician who engaged in powerful public art projects during the uprising, has built a network of progressive artists in St. Louis. He codirected the award-winning documentary Whose Streets? with filmmaker Sabaah Folayan about the killing of Michael Brown and the activism it inspired.
These are only a handful whom I have come to know and call friends and partners, and whose collective struggles have become mine as well. Many of us have listened and studied enough to know the privilege and comfort we enjoy relative to those who came before us—the fact that there are now so many paths offering financial stability to those working toward radical social change is a recent phenomenon. Work that once meant likely financial ruin and professional ostracism now offers access to a philanthropic and nonprofit managerial class that believes wholeheartedly in the mantra of “doing well while doing good.” Critiques of the nonprofit industrial complex abound, and those critiques are, in the main, undoubtedly valid.
But this material privilege can belie a more complicated psychological and emotional terrain. We and our loved ones have been demonized, belittled, and disrespected. We have been the subjects of coordinated campaigns by so-called leaders and media outlets alike to diminish our work, delegitimize our ideas, and cast suspicion on our very motives. We and our organizations have been investigated, cited, doxxed, smeared, and sued. We and our communities have been the constant targets of lies and bad-faith distortions. And too many of our beloveds and comrades have suffered premature deaths. However steadfast we remain in our political commitments, we, too, are human, and feel this onslaught intimately and intensely.
For those seeking to carry forward the demands for justice that emerged in Ferguson, these are not merely individual challenges; they are challenges for an entire movement ecosystem. It is no small feat to persevere in the face of our work’s misrepresentation, the abandonment of positions now deemed too extreme, and a gradual but steady resource decline. These feed fatigue, competition, and disillusionment. From COINTELPRO to the FBI infiltration of BLM protests in 2020, history is replete with coordinated attempts to wedge Black activists against one another and to alienate them from the oppressed communities that they seek to organize. Against this backdrop, forging sustained solidarities grows even more difficult. The awareness of these challenges imposes its own unshakeable weight.
We who were radicalized by Ferguson remain in struggle together because we believe that time is real and justice cannot wait. But we now wonder what to make of our own endeavors. It comes as no surprise that systems resist meaningful change. It has been true that “power concedes nothing without a demand” since Frederick Douglass spoke those words in 1857. But, like anyone moving through the stages of life, we are also attempting to take an honest measure of our efforts to date and glean from them some sense of direction. There is, after all, another evergreen truth: none of us is as young as we used to be.
The Ferguson generation is tired. But we are far from defeated because we are far from alone. With the wind at our backs or in our faces, whether welcomed or resisted, the fight for justice that began in the streets of Ferguson will continue. Those who need to pass the baton will do so. The legacy of the uprising will continue to take shape not only in the rich landscape of organizations and projects that grew out of the rebellion but also in the ever-evolving contest for political power.
Rarely does a consensus emerge in moments of crisis, but in the face of the uncontainable rage of the Ferguson uprising, most could agree that the political processes had failed. Not only had they failed to prevent the conditions of crisis; they had actively fostered these conditions for decades. The elected class in St. Louis had long been hostile, or apathetic, to the interests of the Black masses. But in the pre-Ferguson period, the political machinery of the region had ceased even attempting to placate Black interests through the typical, and typically dubious, means of racial representation. In Ferguson itself, a white old-guard political class governed the former sundown town that had become two-thirds Black and increasingly poor and working-class. This obvious imbalance between the government and the governed not only allowed for a vicious weaponization of the local legal and judicial processes in Ferguson—harassing, ticketing, and jailing Black motorists and pedestrians with abandon while running a municipal court with scenes that mirrored those of Black debtors trapped in a peonage system—but also made it possible for these practices to persist for so long with little challenge to formal authority.
As those in resistance surveyed the political landscape more broadly, it became clear that the problem was in no way limited to the city of Ferguson: it was at the core of political representation and governance in the entire region. The political class throughout the county and many of its municipalities was perhaps not marked by the same stark racial misrepresentation as Ferguson, but it was equally blind to the defining features of widening racial disparity and Black suffering. Against this backdrop, many organizers and newly politicized youngsters made a strategic decision to contest for power in the electoral arena, despite awareness of the tradeoffs that such a contest always promises.
Electoral politics have long posed a conundrum for Black people amidst the embedded anti-Blackness of the American project, with the near-inevitable betrayal of broken promises on the one hand and the existential risk of fully ceding the terrain on the other. None other than Black intellectual giant W. E. B. Du Bois powerfully articulated the case for abstaining in a 1956 essay titled “I Won’t Vote.” In the waning days of McCarthyism’s stranglehold on American politics, Du Bois wrote: “In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no ‘two evils’ exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.”
Du Bois’s sentiment would be largely overshadowed in the years that followed as Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, Martin Luther King Jr., and so many other towering figures cast voting as a central pillar of their vision of multiracial democracy. Their collective efforts culminated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet the more complicated legacy of these achievements renders the question of electoral politics an ongoing debate among Black Americans. Is it a key site of struggle or, as Du Bois posited in 1956, a “dumb farce”? One thing remains clear: if it is a farce, those invested in white political hegemony certainly do not know it. A tremendous effort has been expended, and continues to be expended, to diminish the voting power of Black people, from the poll taxes and literacy tests of the past to the voter ID laws and felon disenfranchisement of today.
But even an embrace of political power does not answer the question of what one is meant to do with it when it is finally, improbably, won. This question has persistently faced a progressive post-Ferguson coalition which has done a great deal of electoral winning over the past decade.
Some local figures began their public lives in protest in Ferguson and have gone on to win elected office. Rasheen Aldridge, a teenage labor organizer in Ferguson, went on to become a state representative and now serves as a member of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen. He serves alongside Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier, who was a student activist before she first won public office on the Board of Education. In Ferguson itself, Francesca Griffin was among the boots on the ground in the uprising before she won a seat on the Ferguson City Council. And perhaps most famously, the uprising was the path to politics for Cori Bush, a pastor, nurse, and activist who currently represents St. Louis City and much of St. Louis County, including Ferguson, in Congress.
Others were not embedded in the Black movement activism of Ferguson, but have shaped their political identities around many of the issues and priorities that emerged from that period and benefited greatly from having a political coalition committed to those priorities: people such as former St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, and St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell.
The elevation of each of these figures, in different ways and to different degrees, should rightly be understood as a display of electoral power by a new governing coalition in the wake of the regional reckoning in Ferguson. In that time, organizers and activists across St. Louis have made the ballot box a key site for shaping public consciousness and building power. But amidst this shift in the political center of gravity, we have been challenged repeatedly to define the bounds of acceptable compromise in governance. Our governing institutions (both public and the private powers that have long captured them) appear destined to squander the political gains of an organic movement that began in Ferguson. Too many of our regional leaders, with a striking penchant for self-pity and delusions of grandeur, would rather complain about unruly activists and posture at a commitment to equity than embrace the opportunity of a people primed for a structural reimagining. So we get token programs instead of policy, sophisticated lip service instead of social justice. It is precisely the gap between our aspirations for systemic change and the comparatively slow and minor change we see in governance that yields frustration and disengagement.
We experienced this tension in the saga of Circuit Attorney Gardner, first elected in 2016 after promising a new era of reform and accountability. Most mainstream narratives have focused on her adversarial relationship with the local police brass and unions, along with their right-wing backers in state government. These developments were largely welcomed by the constituency of Black St. Louisans and progressives that elected her. Black voters in particular saw clearly the racist and sexist vitriol that animated insults and threats against her, which explain how she went from 47 percent of the vote in 2016 to 61 percent four years later. But there was genuine disappointment with Gardner among her 2016 base—both abolitionists like myself and those who identify as criminal justice reformers—over her failure to meaningfully upend practices of bail and pretrial detention or dismantle extractive systems of caging and compliance that target poor and Black St. Louisans. By the time Gardner’s white reactionary detractors made their final move to oust her, few were still sufficiently invested in her political prospects to mount a proportional defense.
Like Gardner, part of what endeared then-treasurer Tishaura Jones to the political coalition that emerged in the post-Ferguson era was her willingness to take bold stances that challenged the status quo. In September 2016, more than a year before the emergence of a grassroots campaign that would lead to the emptying and defunding of the Workhouse jail in St Louis, Jones authored a column for the Black weekly St. Louis American titled “Shut down the Workhouse,” pointing to the inhumane conditions, neglectful approach to mental health, and $16 million spent annually on the jail that could be put to better, life-sustaining use. Months later, Jones wrote a scathing public letter about her refusal to even interview with the editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the region’s largest daily newspaper, over its penchant for anti-Black dogwhistling and lack of attention to the defining regional ills of poverty and racism.
Jones was narrowly defeated in the mayoral race that year but prevailed four years later to much fanfare. I was among those who saw enough transformative potential in the underlying politics that gave rise to the election of Mayor Jones that I agreed to join her transition team in the spring and summer months of 2021. Those early months were full of exciting signals of change: an immediate announcement that the Workhouse was closing; a $4 million reallocation from the police budget to affordable housing, homeless services, victims’ support, and civil rights enforcement; establishment of a Stimulus Advisory Board tasked, in part, with creating a structure for participatory budgeting; and Jones herself vocally endorsing and joining a national network of mayors committed to reparations for Black residents.
But in the years since, the organizations, campaigns, and coalitions that drove Jones’s ascendance have repeatedly been at odds with her administration over her renewed commitment to increased police funding; increasingly hostile treatment of people in homeless encampments; a pattern of violence, neglect, and lack of transparency among jail guards and administrators; support for an increased police presence downtown, and an apparent disinterest in the topic of reparations. This seeming disregard for the post-Ferguson movement’s core priorities has led many to question the wisdom of a political investment that has wrought such disappointment. As we have grown more strident in our critiques, Jones, too, has grown more vocal in dismissing those whom she now sees as driven by unrealistic expectations. Meanwhile, the same Post-Dispatch editorial board Jones lambasted years earlier now regularly congratulates her on distancing herself from the “extremist klatch of activists” that made up her base.
The starkest contrast within the enduring political legacy of the Ferguson Uprising can be seen in the electoral contest between Cori Bush and Wesley Bell.
Congresswoman Bush is the rare brand of elected official who emerged organically from the grassroots activism of Ferguson. She has not merely stood with Black movement activists in St. Louis through the years, but is fundamentally of them. This self-described “politivist” (her own amalgamation of “politician” and “activist”) shocked the world when she was lifted to victory in 2020 over a ten-term incumbent while supporting Medicare and housing for all, canceling student debt, and defunding the police. On the latter, she refused to abandon Black organizers even after the language of “defund” became an obsession for right-wing pundits and mainstream Democrats, with Bush insisting on the importance of transforming public safety by investing in non-police prevention and responses to harm. In just over three years in Congress, Bush has become a leading progressive voice, sleeping on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to extend the COVID-era eviction moratorium, sharing her personal experience with sexual violence and abortion to underscore the importance of access to reproductive care, and becoming one of the earliest supporters of a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.
That support is what ultimately earned Bush a primary challenge, and as of August 6, a defeat, from sitting St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Wesley Bell, whose campaign, the New York Times reports, was “financed almost entirely by the pro-Israel lobby.” Bell also owes some part of his political fortunes to Ferguson-inspired Black-led organizing, having been the beneficiary of a “Bye Bob” campaign to unseat twenty-eight-year incumbent prosecutor Bob McCulloch, who became known for his failure to indict the Ferguson police officer that shot and killed Michael Brown Jr. Without endorsing Bell or any other opponent, the Bye Bob campaign amplified a very simple message: McCulloch must go. Bell pulled off an upset victory over McCulloch in 2018 by pledging reforms to the office that would lower the jail population, enhance transparency and accountability for police misconduct, and increase the number of cases diverted away from the criminal legal system. Despite significant early press on Bell’s supposed change agenda, the county jail population has skyrocketed in the past eighteen months and is back at roughly the same level as when Bell took office. This rise mirrors a similar rise in Bell’s support from wealthy donors, mainstream Democrats, and centrist reform organizations.
In the matchup between Bush and Bell, we had a microcosm of the struggle to sustain a local political movement born in a moment of insurgency ten years prior. Those who love and hate Bush do so for the same reason: she is accountable not to donors, titans of industry, or party bosses, but to everyday people and to the radical Black movement that produced her. As such, she continues to practice an unapologetic politics of liberation, even at great personal and political cost. Bell posed such a serious electoral threat precisely because he is an inoffensively polite man with political ambition and impressive ideological malleability—a combination that makes him irresistible to those who see politics as transaction and intolerable to those who desire politics as transformation.
The primary election between these two local figures was shaped as much by national forces as by competing political identities. It is revealing that the race drew the interest of such major players as Bernie Sanders and The Squad on the one hand and AIPAC on the other (which spent $8.5 million propping up Bell’s winning campaign). The very existence of such a contest reflects two deeply divergent conceptions of politics after Ferguson.
Given these opposing currents in the politics of St. Louis, it should come as no surprise that a fair number of observers now find themselves disillusioned, exhausted with the perennial cycle of commitments and disappointments. A decade removed from the uprising, we sense an undeniable slide toward principled disengagement—targeted or wholesale—with an electoral arena that has failed to yield the progress that was demanded and promised. And yet, as always, real danger lurks around the corner. This time, it has announced itself loudly and with echoes of its white nationalist and authoritarian forerunners. Debates will continue about whether this should be enough to sustain the political engagement of oppressed people whose oppression persists. We will learn soon whether it will be.
For now, many organizers and ordinary St. Louisans continue fighting to make good on our investment in these democratic processes. In an April 2024 public safety hearing at the St. Louis Board of Aldermen, dozens of longtime supporters of the Close the Workhouse campaign gathered to promote a set of recommendations put forward by a steering committee of directly impacted residents. Much of the testimony focused on opposition to a new plan by Mayor Tishaura Jones to place tiny homes for unhoused people on the remote, industrial site. While deeply invested in expanded homeless services and transitional housing, those who have organized to close the jail consider the proposal anathema to our values: the unhoused should be able to live among the community, not rounded up and isolated in a former jail site miles from the services and resources they need most. Despite explicit rejection of this proposal by the community steering committee, Jones and her administration have insisted on moving forward with the plan.
At the end of the hearing, Alderwoman Sonnier—one of the few who entered politics through the activism of the uprising—sought to offer some encouragement to the frustrated attendees. As if embodying both the power and limitations of the political movement born in Ferguson, she offered her remarks through tears:
I know how many people in this crowd and in our community have worked so hard to elect us and, for a lot of us, to put us in positions because you wanted to see a new direction and you wanted to see new leadership and you wanted to see conversations that are long overdue. And most importantly, you wanted to see action that happened with you and not to you or for you. . . .
I just really want to let you all know that I share in your frustration, and that I still believe that we can do better.
The force of such belief has powered visions of radical, inclusive democracy for generations. It is a belief that drove thousands of inspired St. Louisans into political work in the wake of a people’s rebellion. It remains to be seen whether that belief will be enough to keep them there.
At every past inflection point, this region has had a choice. And each time, the choices that it made reflected a set of collective decisions that endorsed and reified a social order dependent upon the subjugation of Black people. These choices leave much to be discouraged about, but this need not be our present or our future. Over the past ten years, there has been a steady, insistent process of building in St. Louis. We have built relationships, campaigns, coalitions, and organizations. We have built political homes in which we develop frameworks for understanding the conditions around us and shared analyses of the social and economic forces that structure our lives. We have built communal practices of self-love and collective care. We have built the infrastructure for a movement to weather the storms of backlash and retrenchment that always come.
A full telling of our post-Ferguson story would recognize the extent to which a visible spirit of resistance continues to shape the St. Louis region and the people in it. The Workhouse and its future remain under scrutiny only because former detainees and concerned community members continue to fight for a vision of healing and repair. A second city jail is now the focus of organizing to remove an apathetic jail administrator and demand humane treatment for those trapped inside, spurred on by daily court watchers and bail fund operators who work to free as many as possible from the fate of being locked up for being poor. Diverse coalitions have come together to secure community oversight in the face of a sprawling network of surveillance and to set new standards of accountability for prosecutorial practices that fuel mass incarceration.
Across multiple campaigns, there is an active movement to abolish all elements of a racist prison-industrial complex, from the death penalty to human caging to policing itself, and invest instead in life-affirming systems that make communities healthy and safe. Peacekeepers are interrupting cycles of violence while healers tend to survivors. Working-class renters are building power together to take on slumlords and corporate profiteers while securing legal protections to prevent evictions. Unhoused people, outreach workers, and advocates are organizing for an unhoused bill of rights, safe shelter, and more transitional housing. Queer and trans people are fighting back against an onslaught of hateful attacks, insisting upon the fullness of their humanity despite coordinated attempts to cast them as inhuman. Courageous women are leading campaigns for abortion access, with Black women leading the charge for an expanded approach to reproductive justice. Parents and teachers have come together to demand that public schools be prioritized and fully funded, and early childhood education made universally accessible. Workers are escalating the fight for fair wages and decent benefits. Long-neglected neighborhoods are combatting food scarcity by planting urban gardens, organizing to counter gentrification, and providing for immediate needs by practicing mutual aid.
In December 2021 a coalition of twenty-five community organizations jointly called for the beginning of an official reparations process in St. Louis. Building on years of organizing, research, and advocacy, the central message of this effort carried an urgency fit for a region shaped by uprising: the time for reparations is now. One year later, St. Louis’ first Reparations Commission began a process of public engagement, historical excavation, and story gathering that is now entering its final phase. Just a month or two after we mark a decade since Mike Brown’s death, the commission will issue an official report with its findings and a proposal to begin repairing the harms of centuries of oppression faced by Black St. Louisans. Few opportunities carry more potential for genuine transformation in a region that has been so committed to capitalist white supremacy as an organizing principle. While much work remains to realize the vision of full reparations for Black people in St. Louis and beyond, the very existence of such an opportunity owes a great deal to the liberatory disruption of Ferguson.
But to a mother and father, the central impact of the past decade will always be the absence of Michael Brown Jr. For Lezley McSpadden and Michael Brown Sr., August 9, 2014 is the day they lost a son. This simple fact sits at the center of it all. It is the irreversible injustice from which none can hide, and the unanswerable challenge laid before us all. We watch as those who loved Brown most in the world pour themselves into the kind of loving witness that seeks to honor his legacy. It is this witness, and the witness of countless other survivors of catastrophe, which anchors our hope that just maybe, in the wake of their intimate disaster, we, like they, might help to produce something good.
The Ferguson Uprising will forever be rooted in tragedy and loss. But that loss yielded a clarity to which many of us still hold tight today. If we understand the uprising as a political project that began—or, perhaps more accurately, was revived—in Ferguson, we should also understand that the project is still underway. It is alive. And like any living thing, it is constantly learning, growing, and changing. The real question facing us at this moment is whether we succumb to the fatigue, manipulation, and cynicism that threaten us, or whether we sustain and forge ahead, resolutely, into that uncertain, promising future.
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