Today marks six years since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Earlier this month, senior enterprise reporter Ryan J. Reilly reflected on the protests that roiled the St. Louis suburb in 2014 and placed that activism in the context of the current resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement after the police killing of George Floyd was caught on tape in Minneapolis. Reilly talked to several activists, lawmakers and other people entrenched in the fight for racial justice. Must Reads talked to the reporter about what he learned and how he approached the story.
What inspired you to look back at Ferguson and the protests in this moment?
A sense of frustration, honestly. After covering the Ferguson unrest and its fallout, it was really stunning to me to see such a broad, swift shift in culture and public opinion after the George Floyd video. Those issues of systemic racism should have been clear to more white Americans long ago, but they were really evident in Ferguson and greater St. Louis. Beyond the reporting and activism that we saw about systemic racism in greater St. Louis, the federal investigation of the Ferguson Police Department is actually an extremely compelling and highly readable tale of how institutional racism plays out.
So I was curious to see if Ferguson protesters were dismayed that it took so long for more of America to open their eyes to issues around policing and race, and I wanted to explore what made Floyd’s death different. But after talking to a lot of people, the main theme that emerged was just how much of a role Ferguson and the protesters who came out of the movement played in shaping the world that allowed an incident like Floyd’s death to spark broader change. Ultimately I decided to make that the primary focus of the piece: how the men and women who came to the streets of a St. Louis suburb helped bend that arc toward justice.
You recount some of your experiences from your on-the-ground reporting in Ferguson. What is one of the most lasting memories of that trip?
Watching police in riot gear roll up on an entirely peaceful group of demonstrators in broad daylight and seeing officers point sniper rifles from atop a BearCat was pretty memorable. So was being arrested and having a cop slam my head against a McDonald’s door. But I think the memories that had the most lasting impact on my reporting were my experiences in municipal courts in St. Louis County. You’d hear horror stories about police and tickets practices from anyone you spoke to on the streets of Ferguson in the weeks after Brown’s death, but visiting those municipal courts really brought it all together. It felt like stepping into a time machine or into another country. It just really knocked you over the head and made abundantly clear that this was a widespread, systemic issue that required sweeping changes. It erased any lingering thoughts about framing the problem around “bad apples” and really made clear that the entire law enforcement apparatus of greater St. Louis — with a bunch of largely white police departments in tiny municipalities paying their own salaries by slapping primarily Black residents with excessive fines and fees for various mundade ordinance violations — was fundamentally broken and built on a racist history of white flight and segregation.
With the pandemic, you weren’t able to be in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed. But the protests in D.C. and across the country were in some cases just as big and powerful. Is there anything you felt like you missed by not being able to report in Minnesota?
I would have preferred to have been on the ground, but technology shifted a lot even in the past six years, and it was a bit easier to follow things as they unfolded. Twitter obviously played an enormous role in the Ferguson protests. But back in 2014, you couldn’t even tweet a video directly. We were stuck posting brief clips on Vine or waiting for a video to upload and process on YouTube. Periscope and Facebook Live weren’t around until 2015. So there was this constant pattern in Ferguson where protesters and journalists on the scene would say one thing on Twitter, law enforcement officials would put out a false (or, at best, misleading) narrative of what happened, and you could end up with a lot of “both sides” coverage. Wider availability of live video would’ve cleared a lot of that up.
I think if I were able to report from the ground in Minneapolis, I would have tried to find out if there were any unique factors that made policing in the region particularly bad. I would have looked at structural issues about how police departments were set up, and paid particular attention to internal affairs systems, since virtually every single federal investigation of a local police department has identified deep problems in the offices which are theoretically supposed to hold officers accountable for misconduct. In the early chaos of Ferguson, it was tough to find time to vet the stories of police abuse you heard from protesters. So this time around, I would have heavily documented those stories and run them to the ground to help illustrate how difficult it is for residents to get justice when they’re mistreated by the police.
There’s been a lot of change in Ferguson. What would you say are some of the biggest changes that activists and local citizens have helped see through?
Some things are just so baked into systems of government that they’re really difficult to change. It just makes no sense to allow dozens and dozens of municipalities -- many of which have trouble sustaining their budgets -- to run their very own police departments and municipal courts. It’s nearly impossible to raise property taxes in Missouri thanks to an amendment in the state constitution, so it creates an incentive for these strapped municipalities to try to close budget gaps through fines and fees. Those seemingly mundane budgeting decisions have absolutely devastating and life-altering consequences, which primarily fall on Black citizens. Some Missouri Republicans and tea party interests recognized the threat to liberty that those municipal courts presented, and there was legislation to curtail abuses. Some police departments and municipal courts have consolidated. But the general structure of small, troubled police departments and tiny municipalities with their very own courts is still around, and what is still left today is “a system that’s targeting poor Black people.”
On the other hand, Ferguson activists have helped oust many of the politicians and law enforcement officials who were in charge in 2014. Residents elected progressive prosecutors in both the city and in St. Louis County. Ferguson, a majority Black municipality that was previously controlled by a primarily white City Council that oversaw an overwhelmingly white police force, now has a Black mayor, and its police department remains under federal scrutiny.
So while there are undoubtedly bright spots, there’s a lot of work to be done to make St. Louis -- and a lot of parts of the country -- a more fair place to live. I do think that a lot of the activism, journalism and scholarly research that we’ve seen in the last six years have forced more white Americans to confront the reality of how America’s legacy of racism and racist decisions made even in recent, modern history have shaped the current world. (One unexpected outgrowth of Ferguson and my coverage of municipal courts was a newfound interest in housing policy, government-subsidized segregation and suburbanization, and I really can’t recommend the book “The Color of Law” enough.)
Then this week, Cori Bush, an activist in Ferguson, unseated longtime Congressman Lacy Clay. She lost to him in 2018. What was different about this time?
In all honesty, Bush’s win surprised me. From what I’ve heard from an activist she spoke with, it surprised her as well. I thought she’d do better than she did in 2018 and maybe come within a few points of Clay this time around, but her win really is an illustration of the power that grew out of the Ferguson movement. It takes a while to build up the infrastructure to turn activist energy into electoral power, but those campaigns are now up and running and are a force that St. Louis politicians would ignore at their peril.
A lot of Ferguson activists thought Clay was out of touch with the movement. Kayla Reed, a Ferguson protester who now serves as executive director of Action St. Louis, told me she’d never actually sat down with Clay in the nearly six years since Brown’s death. That’s pretty remarkable, that he never met with such a major player in the Ferguson movement and in the St. Louis political scene in 2014. One thing Clay had going for him was his seniority in Congress, and I think he would’ve been a lot tougher to knock down had he maintained more of a connection with the movement. A lot of lessons there for the longest-serving members of Congress.
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