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The 2024 season of Urban One’s iOne Digital podcast series, Witness to History, proudly opens with Dr. Cornel West, our treasured scholar and theologian, philosopher and presidential candidate.
This year’s series, Ferguson 10, returns us to Ferguson, Missouri, the St. Louis suburb where a movement was sparked within the hard hours that followed the 12:01 p.m. public execution of Michael Brown Jr. on Saturday, August 9, 2014. The 18-year-old, unarmed Black teenager was known by his teachers to be a nice kid who never “caused any trouble.” He was “ecstatic,” his family said he was to start college two days later, on Monday, August 11.
But Darren Wilson, the white, former Ferguson police officer decided that death was better than college, backing that depraved heart decision up with six of his government-issued bullets, killing Mike Brown Sr.’s and Lesley McSpadden’s first-born child.
Dr. West sits in conversation about their beloved child with series co-producer, Tory Russell. A son of St. Louis and now a father in St. Louis, Tory is a longtime mentor and master organizer in the county that includes both the big city that bears its name and the small city most of us didn’t know until 2014: Ferguson.
Tory Russell, right, front, in Selma, Alabama Source: Tory Russell / Tory Russell
Russell called a community, then a nation and then a global community of nations to action during a season-long stretch of sustained protests against what was a terrifyingly real and public high noon that breath-stealing Ferguson day. Against all the midnight and high noon cop killing on all the days before.
Being killed by police is a leading cause of death for young Black men.
A football coach in 2014, Russell shared once how he got the word as he was leaving practice that year, how his social media and text messages began blowing up, how he was scared reading the description of the 18-year-old victim of white supremacist police violence–Brown was 6-foot-5 and close to 300 pounds. Was he one of the kids I just coached?
He wasn’t.
But from that day forward, Michael Brown, his everlasting spirit, became one of Tory’s young players: Mike Brown, the young man who was known to gather people together, to steer clear of fights. They called him Gentle Giant.
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The first protests in August of 2014 were met by tear gas and bullets–and no, not only rubber ones. Tory put out a national call for people to come to Ferguson in October and stand in strength and solidarity with the Brown family and the Black community of Ferguson and Greater St. Louis. And Ferguson, the city where the population is and was 70% Black, but had known exactly zero Black city leadership ever in 2014.
Dr. West was on the ground in Ferguson most immediately and most intentionally.
In this conversation, Tory recalled their meeting in Ferguson, how right up front Dr. West told the crowd, in the tradition of his own hero, Dr. King, “I didn’t come to give no speeches. I came to get arrested.” West said in so many words, the good young people of Ferguson were not alone. And he put his body on that.
They were not going to have the National Guard’s weapons trained on them, not going to have tear gas sprayed at them Birmingham ‘63 style, not going to be brutalized when they weren’t outright killed, not without the presence and protection of loving and committed veterans who’d done two or more generations in the fight for Black freedom.
That October, West and Tory were among the many arrested–and they were cellmates in that nasty stretch of harsh round-ups of primarily Black activists by primarily white law enforcement. It was the same season that Mike Brown’s killer cop was not arrested. The same season that no cops who shot, beat and brutalized citizens were arrested. Cops whose opening lines included, “Bring it, you f******g animals, bring it!”
Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research.
-Malcolm X
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Ten years after those words were bellowed, 10 years after those long summer nights that became longer, colder early winter nights, in Witness to History: Ferguson 10, Tory and Dr. West call us back to that ground where a teenager’s lifeless body was left to lay for hours by the very people who are paid and duty-bound to protect them.
They call us to remember Big Mike, as he was known by friends, the “silly, funny” kid his father told us about.
They call us so that a light may be shone on the once young, now all the way grown, courageous protestors and organizers of Ferguson, to remember the families of Ferguson, the family of Mike Brown.
They call us so that we never forget that 10 years ago, mostly young and disenfranchised Black people demanded that the world stop, look and listen when they said, They are killing us even when our hands were up, when we saying don’t shoot! Listen when they said, Not on our watch and not one more!
They call us back to a city that was and is part of the Greater St. Louis Metropolitan area, in a state once known as Upper Louisiana, a state founded by slave traders straight out of New Orleans who were determined to bring the most despicable ways of the most despicable domestic and international trade and economic policy to the emerging, more Northern Midwestern region of an emerging empire.
Missouri: here was a state born of a diabolical 19th century compromise: They could join the Union and also be a slaveholding state in 1820, despite the industrializing North very publicly beginning its sloppy halfway divorce from America’s original sin. But to hell with all that. Missouri gave the Union some muscularity on the federal legislative front.
Once all the papers were signed and sealed, St. Louis went in hard. Hard. By 1850, it was the major slave trading center in America. And while some today would have us believe that all that racial stuff is relic of a past best understood as a pothole on an otherwise democratic highway, St. Louis wasn’t buying that foolishness.
Ferguson was a proud sundown state years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, years after Dr. King was assassinated in 1968.
St. Louis was proud of its 1916 city ordinance legalizing segregation, one of the strictest pieces of anti-Black legislation in the entire country! It demonstrated that pride the following year when the Supreme Court struck down pieces of segregation (which effectively just meant you couldn’t call a thing, a thing).
A white supremacist mob of mostly white workers spread hate and fear about the Black men migrating from the Blackbelt South in order to come take their jobs. Between the Court’s decision in May of 1917, the manufacturing of fear and plain old marrow-deep racism, there was an explosion.
History records it as the East St. Louis Massacre and likely there’s no other word for what happened in July of 1917, when white men rode into Black neighborhoods and randomly slaughtered an estimated 150 people who were doing nothing more that living while Black. Size, age, gender–innocence: none of these were reason for pause. People were clubbed to death, shot to death, swung from trees until their necks broke.
So yes, yes it was a massacre, but when that horrific massacre also includes the murder of at least one baby we know of who was killed by being thrown–alive–into a fire, it feels like there should be a whole other word for that.
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In the wake of the 2014 uprising, five Black activists and one Palestinian activist from Ferguson died –all under suspicious circumstances. Arguably, none were more haunting than the eerily similar murders of Deandre Joshua in 2014 and Darren Seals two years later. Both men, very active in the uprising and ongoing organizing in Ferguson, were found two years apart, shot up in their cars, which were both torched after the murders, which remain unsolved.
Dr. West and Tory Russell remember that Ferguson in the opening podcast, which can be viewed below.
But just as urgently, they envisioned together and with all of us, a Ferguson, a St. Louis, a world we can choose to create, one deeply rooted in love that one day children will sit perplexed when they’re told about the ways of the old world.
Tory and Dr. West see that world because nearly 200 years ago, Father Moses Dickson, who was born free in Ohio, saw it in 1846. He traveled to St. Louis and gathered 11 men who became a secret army. They called themselves the Knights of Liberty, and by the time they were done, they’d grown to more than 40,000 Black people across the South during slavery, who freed over 70,000 people through the Underground Railroad.
Dr. West reminds us that here is the city where Charlie Parker invented notes that became language that became a world unto itself. It’s the place that gave us Maya Angelou and Josephine Baker who spoke, wrote, danced, sung and adopted their way into a freedom they flashed to any Black person paying attention.
Here is the place that gave us Dr. George Washington Carver, the original climate change scientist, and Tina Turner, who escaped the chains of domestic violence with 86 cents and a gas credit card and showed a nation of women reclaiming oneself was possible.
For all these reasons and more still behind them, Tory Russell and Cornel West have invited us to meet them in St. Louis, meet them in Ferguson. Meet them in a home of all that jazz and all those blues on the tricky Midwest roads that take us around every bend and into every corner of where their people are killed as much as they’re created, like the way it did with activist, musician and MC, Tef Poe, who stood alongside Russell and Dr. West and made the the world hear him when he said, Tears of tear gas / tears of the Elohim… / God got me, copy? / I ain’t scared of a f****n’ tank Glorious struggle / Shout out my brother Tory Russell… / Black child, ain’t no love in this b***h / Feed your seed and get your chopper like the government did…
SEE MORE:
Ferguson X: Michael Brown Should Be Here, Be 28 And Be Living His Best Life
WATCH:
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