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In Ferguson, Resistance Is Messy — And More Important Than Ever
Everything and nothing has changed since the death of Michael Brown one year ago.
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Resistance is messy. As my T-shirt, shorts, and once all-white sneakers can attest, I mean that literally.
I was sprinting through the dirt-turned-mud that separated the sidewalk from West Florissant Avenue, away from the advancing police, slowing only to make sure my phone was still in my pocket. I had thought the torrential downpour a few hours earlier meant the anniversary of Michael Brown’s death would be a relatively quiet night in Ferguson, Missouri. Then the police shot Tyrone Harris Jr.
The roots of resistance are often as messy as resistance itself. The chatter that led me to West Florissant was that the police had killed another young black man, not too far from where Darren Wilson shot and killed Brown. The police blocked cars from driving toward the scene of the shooting, and there were rumors that it was a little girl who had been shot. Nearby, a couple hundred people were out, surrounded by police officers in riot gear, some holding batons, others M16s, with several military-grade Humvees behind them.
At the time, it wasn’t clear whether Harris had a gun, or whether he was shooting at police, or if a police car had been shot multiple times, as the police said. At the time, none of that really mattered to the folks gathered in the street. One year to the day an 18-year-old black boy was shot and killed by police on the streets of Ferguson, it seemed to be happening again. For all the weekend was supposed to represent — how far we’d come — things felt eerily, infuriatingly, exactly the same.
[center]
[/center]
Resistance is messy. As my T-shirt, shorts, and once all-white sneakers can attest, I mean that literally.
I was sprinting through the dirt-turned-mud that separated the sidewalk from West Florissant Avenue, away from the advancing police, slowing only to make sure my phone was still in my pocket. I had thought the torrential downpour a few hours earlier meant the anniversary of Michael Brown’s death would be a relatively quiet night in Ferguson, Missouri. Then the police shot Tyrone Harris Jr.
The roots of resistance are often as messy as resistance itself. The chatter that led me to West Florissant was that the police had killed another young black man, not too far from where Darren Wilson shot and killed Brown. The police blocked cars from driving toward the scene of the shooting, and there were rumors that it was a little girl who had been shot. Nearby, a couple hundred people were out, surrounded by police officers in riot gear, some holding batons, others M16s, with several military-grade Humvees behind them.
At the time, it wasn’t clear whether Harris had a gun, or whether he was shooting at police, or if a police car had been shot multiple times, as the police said. At the time, none of that really mattered to the folks gathered in the street. One year to the day an 18-year-old black boy was shot and killed by police on the streets of Ferguson, it seemed to be happening again. For all the weekend was supposed to represent — how far we’d come — things felt eerily, infuriatingly, exactly the same.
Read More on Buzzfeed.