FERGUSON, Mo. – One year after the shooting that cast greater scrutiny on how police interact with black communities, the father of slain 18-year-old Michael Brown led a march in Ferguson, Missouri, on Sunday after a crowd of hundreds observed 4½ minutes of silence.
Advertisement
Events included a moment of silence that lasted 4 1/2 minutes, a reference to the 4 1/2 hours that Brown’s body lay on the street after he was shot by white police officer Darren Wilson on August. 9, 2014.
Pausing along the march route at a permanent memorial for his son, Michael Brown Sr. said, “Miss you”.
Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., above, has urged people to mark his son’s death in peace. Others held “Black Lives Matter” banners and signs calling for justice for those killed by police.
Over the past year, the call to action born in Ferguson sprouted in cities around the world and helped inform actions that followed subsequent police shootings and other deaths of black Americans in custody.
“At the end of the day, I still lost my boy”.
Last year, protesters who took to the streets of Ferguson to demonstrate against Brown’s death were met by waves of police in riot gear backed by military style vehicles.
The U.S. Justice Department and a St. Louis County grand jury cleared Wilson, who resigned in November, of wrongdoing.
The post Ferguson commemorates one year since Michael Brown’s death appeared first on PBS NewsHour.
But the protests this weekend have so far been largely peaceful with police staying behind barricades and allowing demonstrators to vent their feelings.
Several of those families joined Brown Sr. on the march.
But protesters grew more confrontational later, when around 200 people gathered outside the police headquarters chanting: “Hey hey, ho ho, these killer cops have got to go!” He told people if not for them, it would have been “swept under the carpet”. “But I’m trying to make it uncomfortable to people that think this is OK to do this stuff”, Brown said. “Don’t shoot!” which turned a rallying cry in the course of the sometimes-violent protests that adopted the capturing a yr in the past.
Yvette Harris founded the St. Louis-area nonprofit Mothers Against Senseless Killings after her 17-year-old son died in 2001 in a gang-related shooting.
The early uprising in Ferguson “was just the beginning of hyper-focus on a place that would become Ground Zero for a fully intersectional social justice movement focused on the dismantling of white supremacy and its attack dogs, police departments across America.”, writes Kirsten West Savali of The Root.
Advertisement
Ferguson’s city manager, police chief and municipal judge resigned within days of that report. Investigators also recovered racially charged e-mails sent among employees of the police department and the Ferguson Municipal Court, which authorities said contributed to the alleged bias.
