Ferguson

Police Killed Michael Brown 3 Years Ago. Reflections on the Energy and Trauma of the Uprising It Sparked

  • August 14, 2017
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Three years ago today (August 9), a White Ferguson, Missouri, police officer named Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed Black 18-year-old he’d stopped for walking in the street on his way home. Authorities let Brown’s body lay outside for some four hours, stunning and then angering his community. The following day saw both a peaceful vigil and the burning of a QuikTrip gas station among other sites. For 10 days and nights, local then state police met mostly peaceful protesters with tanks, rubber bullets, tear gas and other military-grade equipment. At the height of what some call the…

Ferguson Protestors to Prosecutors: Reopen Michael Brown Investigation

  • March 22, 2017
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Newly released video casts doubt on claim that Brown robbed convenience store before he was killed by a Ferguson Police Department officer.       On Saturday (March 11), filmmaker Jason Pollock debuted “Stranger Fruit,” his documentary about the death of Michael Brown, at South by Southwest. The film included previously unreleased footage that shows that Michael Brown visited Ferguson Market—the store he was accused of robbing—just hours before his August 2014 death and appeared to conduct a friendly transaction with workers there. Darren Wilson, the former Ferguson Police Department officer who killed Brown, claimed that he approached the unarmed…

Policing the Police

  • February 13, 2016
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Could Ferguson Win Its Case Against the Justice Department? February 11, 2016/ by Sarah Childress Senior Digital Reporter, FRONTLINE Enterprise Journalism Group A few weeks ago, it seemed like Ferguson, Mo. might actually enter into an agreement to overhaul its police and city court. City officials had reached a tentative agreement with the Justice Department in January to implement widespread reforms, including retraining police officers, restructuring the city court and removing rules in the city code that police had used almost exclusively to penalize African-Americans. Now, change in the city that helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement following the police shooting…

From Black August to Black Lives Matter

  • August 23, 2015
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A year ago this month, the streets of Ferguson, Missouri exploded in the wake of the murder of eighteen-year-old Black teen, Michael Brown, at the hands of white police officer, Darren Wilson. The world watched closely as military Humvees and the national guard armed with tear gas and rubber bullets transformed an otherwise quiet town in the Midwest into a historic battlefront for the Black Lives Matter movement, the present-day Black liberation struggle born after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman over the murder of the Black seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin. Since the Ferguson riots last August, Black Lives Matter has…

Mumia Abu-Jamal on the meaning of Ferguson

  • August 13, 2015
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In a new collection of over 100 previously unpublished essays, many written in solitary confinement, Mumia Abu-Jamal addresses topics ranging from Rosa Parks to Edward Snowden, from the Trail of Tears to Ferguson. Click here to order Writing on the Wall today! The following excerpt from Writing on the Wall was written on August 31, 2014, by Mumia Abu-Jamal. He spent more than 30 years awaiting execution, before his death sentence – but not his conviction – was vacated in 2011. Abu-Jamal is currently incarcerated and infirm in Mahanoy prison in Pennsylvania. You can contribute online to pay for a…