We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (15 page)

A student-led protest at St. Louis University led to a weeklong encampment by a group called Occupy SLU, resulting in a negotiated resolution called the Clock Tower Accords that committed the campus to more discussions about race, funding for Black student recruitment and retention, African American studies, a community center and community board committed to addressing inequality in the area, and a sculpture, designed by a Black artist, commemorating the encampment. Student organizer Romona Taylor Williams said, “We felt SLU needed to address some things related to inclusion. But this is not only about SLU. We need to occupy all of the institutions where there is systemic racism.”
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Artists organized protests as well. On October 4, Elizabeth Vega, Sarah Griesbach, Derek Laney, and fifty other “Artivists” interrupted a St. Louis Symphony performance of Brahms’s
Requiem
, standing throughout the Powell Hall to sing a version of “Which Side Are You On?”
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The original song, written by Florence Reece for the bitterly fought 1930s Appalachian coal strike, included the words “They say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there.” The Artivists changed the lyrics to “Justice for Mike Brown is justice for us all,” and unfurled fifteen-foot-high banners painted by Jelani Brown that read “Rise Up and Join the Movement,” “Racism Lives Here,” and “Requiem for Mike Brown 1996–2014.” Some in the overwhelmingly white crowd applauded, others could be heard retorting, “He’s a thug.” Most remained silent.

On one of the evenings, the Artivists carried a funeral casket to the front of the police line on South Florissant. The casket was covered in cracked, mirrored glass. The idea had come to artist De Andrea Nichols in a nightmare that she had one night after kneeling on West Florissant facing the tanks and the police with her hands in the air. At the head of the line, where protesters had been trying to break the police officers’ impassive glares with questions and taunts, the sight of the coffin shook some of them. “Look into the mirror,” one of the protesters told the police. “We are human too. You are not the only people who get to be human.”
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As the St. Louis area girded for Prosecutor Bob McCulloch’s announcement of the grand jury decision, Michael Brown’s parents traveled to Geneva with a delegation of seventy Ferguson activists and human rights leaders. They testified before the United Nations Committee Against Torture. Back home, on a rainy Sunday, Tribe X, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, and members of the Artivists staged a “die-in,” lying down in the street to shut down traffic as other demonstrators chalked their bodies.
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In the months to come, this form of protest became synonymous with the Black Lives Matter movement. Die-ins were staged in major shopping malls, transportation hubs like New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, seventy medical schools, and on major arterial highways.

The next day, November 17, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon declared another state of emergency. Public schools in Ferguson and Jennings canceled classes. Police restocked tear gas, flex cuffs, and “less-lethal” munitions. The National Guard was placed on alert. Stores throughout the city and county boarded up their windows as if tornadoes were on the way. The grand jury announcement was still a week away, and already it felt like the worst hidden secret in Missouri was a coming non-indictment. Nixon had sent the message that riots were not just feared, they were expected.

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In the tense days before McCulloch’s announcement, local organizers and activists were assembling an infrastructure to support peaceful demonstrations and securing churches and community centers to serve as community sanctuaries and safe spaces. Damon Davis of the Artivists noticed that many of his friends were showing signs of stress and trauma. He wanted to create a work that would raise their morale, and lift up their message against the violence of the state and the media’s anticipation of tear gas and fire. The result was a project he called
All Hands On Deck
.

Davis had been a hip-hop artist, graphic designer, and arts teacher. In 2014, he had won a public-art commission for a work that called attention to the Delmar Divide, the border between Black and white St. Louis, an enduring marker of the city’s legacy of segregation. In the area north of Delmar Boulevard, residents were 99 percent Black, to the south they were 70 percent white. North of the Divide, the median home value was $70,000; south of it, $310,000.
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Davis proposed building a wall akin to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, where visitors folded written prayers into its cracks. In St. Louis, he said, people tended to speak bluntly about most things. “But Black and white people can’t talk to each other here [about race],” he said. “The silence is even more deafening.” He and his collaborator, Kevin McDermott, built a black wall that included slots for people to insert their notes and prayers.

After August 9, there had been a surge of letters. One read, “For Michael Brown and all the kids in Normandy and Ferg-Flor [Ferguson-Florrisant], I am so scared and so sad. I hope that those North of Delmar can get all the tools needed to talk to all those South of Delmar and West of St. Louis.” Another read, “I am from the north of St. Louis. I am 17 years old. I feel like we live just like you just different neighborhoods.”
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But then the responses trailed off. “I think nobody likes being uncomfortable, and I think real revolution takes everybody to be uncomfortable—the people up at the top, the people at the bottom.” He added, “Most of this fight is mental, and I think the biggest weapon we have is the art that we produce.”

Earlier in the fall, he had made black plywood arms and planted a field of them in a public park near McCulloch’s house—symbols of the Hands Up movement rising from the grassroots. Now with the support of Global Grind’s Michael Skolnik and the Artivists, Davis created fifty-one-inch-high posters of the hands of local Black and white organizers and activists—including Reverend Sekou, Tef Poe, Hands Up United’s Tara Thompson and Abby Bobé, MoKaBe’s Reeny Costello, an unidentified hacker from Anonymous, and Tory Russell’s son, Lucas.

Davis had photographed their hands on white tables or against the snow. “Hands are what you do work with,” he explained, “and this is what time it is: it’s time for you to get up and help work on this if you want it to be any better.” He then printed the hands in black ink on a blank white background. They seemed to attack the bland paternalism of Oliviero Toscani’s 1990 Benetton ad featuring a black baby’s hand in the palm of a white adult. But Davis had never seen Toscani’s work. He simply favored the directness and simplicity of street art. “I really like stark contrast,” he said. “And quite frankly, it is a very black-and-white issue.”

Two days after Nixon’s declaration, Davis, Skolnick, and a team of other artists-activists took the posters to the West Florissant businesses below the railroad tracks, whose windows had been covered with plywood as if in preparation for a hurricane. There they spoke to store owners and got permission to wheat-paste the broadsides on the boards. The state was preparing for a violent clampdown, an animus that would be confirmed by McCulloch’s decision to announce the grand jury decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson after dark, during the mid-evening hours when the August street clashes had usually begun.

But
All Hands On Deck
seemed instead to tap desires coursing across time and place—the 9,000-year-old black, red, white, yellow, and brown cave-art hand stencils at Patagonia’s Cueva de las Manos that shouted,
We are here
; John Heartfield’s street poster,
Five Fingers Has the Hand
, taunting the Nazi party from Berlin walls during the 1928 Weimar election season; even the gloved hands that John Carlos and Tommie Smith thrust into the air on the medal stand at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, their fingers closed into fists.

There were affirmation, defiance, and power here, but something else too—a radical vision of community. At the root of the preriot frenzy was the same kind of fear that had left Mike Brown dead in the street, that had driven a century of segregation and resegregation in the city and county. But these posters transformed the plywood from enclosing shields of fear into open walls that revealed the breadth of community—a child, a preacher, a barista, an activist, and others—in Black-and-white.

Their concert of raised hands suggested that on West Florissant, the young renegades, the small-business owners, and community members—perhaps even the police—were all linked together. Authority demanded submission. But when people raised their hands together, they might be demanding recognition, defying injustice, or even reveling in collective joy. Hands Up was the sharing of connection and communion, a possible ritual for de-escalation.

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On November 24, St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch announced the grand jury’s refusal to indict Officer Darren Wilson. In the long hours after the decision, the state and the media got exactly the clashes they wanted. Televisions ran hi-def split-screen images of President Barack Obama—once the embodiment of cultural desegregation and racial reconciliation—urging calm in the streets as police teargassed Black Lives Matter protesters on West and South Florissant.

In St. Louis City, organizers and activists were gathered at a bustling café at the edge of Tower Grove Park, not far from where VonDerrit Myers had been killed. Owned and run by a white radical named Mo Costello, MoKaBe’s had long served as a gathering spot for activists from the Occupy, queer rights, and Black Lives Matter movements. White baristas often wore “Race Traitor” T-shirts and joked that it was their café uniform. Two weeks before, Mo had announced on Facebook that she would keep the spot open twenty-four hours a day for the activists. Pro-police activists flooded the cafés phone with calls and its Facebook page with comments, calling the coffee house “a business that supports cop killers.”
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That night, the intersection at Grand and Arsenal in front of MoKaBe’s filled with paramilitary police and armored vehicles. Police issued clearance orders while the crowd mocked them, “This is
not
an unlawful assembly.
You
must disperse.” Protesters backed onto the sidewalk and filled MoKaBe’s. Dozens—including Amnesty International observers, parents, and children—were gathered inside, drinking steaming cups of free hot chocolate.

When windows were broken along Grand, police quickly moved to clear the corner. They fired rubber bullets at people on the sidewalk. Then they fired smoking tear gas canisters directly onto MoKaBe’s patio and through the café’s front door. Gas filled the interior, and dozens of stunned, choking, gagging patrons fled into the basement. As the stricken were treated with eye drops, riot cops marched behind the coffee house to fire more tear gas into the residential neighborhood to prevent patrons from leaving.
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After the smoke cleared, some ventured back out to yell at the police. But again cops gave a dispersal order, and from their armored vehicles dropped more tear gas canisters. St. Louis University professor and civil rights lawyer Brendan Roediger negotiated with the police for a way for the patrons to leave. Finally, they filed out of the café one by one with their hands up, and walked slowly away from the police line down the block to St. John’s Episcopal Church. The next evening, police would return to form riot lines in front of the café.

Reverend Osagyefo Sekou had been at MoKaBe’s on the morning of November 24 to attend an urgent meeting about preparations for the grand jury announcement. The young organizers had received him with a warmth and deference that they showed only a handful of other members of the clergy.

Back in the earliest days of the protests, mainstream clergy positioned themselves as brokers to the white elite. But when it became clear to the protesters that some of those same clergy were negotiating away their rights, they had chanted, “Fuck the clergy!” When the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson came to town, they received the cold shoulder from the street activists. In time, a popular T-shirt worn on West and South Florissant read, “Not Your Respectable Negro.”

In October, at a massive interfaith gathering at St. Louis University’s Chaifetz Arena, those same activists grew tired of the empty talk from church and civil rights leaders. They began chanting to let young people speak. When Tef Poe took the stage, they cheered. “For us this is not an academic issue,” he told the leaders. “Y’all did not show up.” He told them that he trusted the shirtless, bandanna’d boys and the young girls who had gone truant to be at the protests more than the elders. “This ain’t your grandparents’ civil rights movement,” he cried. “Get off your ass and join us!”
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The small group of church leaders who had gained the respect of the protesters included the Reverend Tommie Pierson, who flung open the doors to his Greater St. Mark Family Church, less than a mile from Canfield Green, for demonstrators and community members, despite constant police raids; Renita Lamkin, the white pastor of St. John African Methodist Episcopal Church, who had been shot with a wooden baton round as she stood between advancing police and retreating protesters; Pastor Traci Blackmon of Christ the King United Church of Christ, who in rolling, sonorous, profound tones always seemed to capture exactly the words any crowd in a church or in the street needed to hear; and Reverend Starsky Wilson, who would move from marching in a hoodie to becoming the cochair of the governor’s Ferguson Commission.

The young activists accepted Reverend Sekou as one of their own. He looked and talked like them. He was wiry and short, wore long dreadlocks and kept a rough beard, and he cursed like a hardcore rapper. He had been born in St. Louis, returned for high school north of the Delmar Divide, and had family in Ferguson and Berkeley.