Michael Brown

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…

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…