August 9, 2024, is the tenth anniversary of the police murder of Black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. Of the essays that we receive at Inquest, nearly half of their first drafts make mention of Brown’s death and the uprising that followed. Inasmuch as present-day prison abolition has something like an origin story, it is clear from this fact that its narrative runs through Ferguson.
This should not surprise anyone: The murder of Brown by police officer Darren Wilson ignited a powder keg of revolutionary rage that burns still. First locally and then nationally, protests calling for justice for Brown—and the countless other Black and brown people slain routinely by police—fundamentally changed the public conversation about state violence, racist policing, and the limits of what a democratic society could stomach while still considering itself such.
From the series
Ferguson at Ten
How the police killing of Michael Brown a decade ago propelled the modern decarceral movement.
Ferguson also ended up being something of a John the Baptist for the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Ignited by the May police murder of George Floyd, the collective uprisings would grow to become the largest protest movement in U.S. history, and many of its leaders were people whose activist awakening had taken place during the 2014 Ferguson protests.
Together, these two inflection points in recent U.S. history fundamentally shifted the national conversation about policing and are seen as critical moments in the fight to abolish the carceral state.
However, there was nothing inevitable, or even intuitive, about the fact that the Ferguson protests would become a point of origin for our present-day abolitionist movement. In fact, one may well have anticipated the opposite: Ferguson, after all, began as a protest to demand the prosecution and jailing of Wilson and other so-called killer cops. As such, it initially embodied, more than anything, a spirit of progressive carceralism—with a focus on who typically wields carceral power, and on how those oppressed by it might instead use it to hold those actors to account. To make them see that Black Lives Matter.
In this sense, Ferguson as well as the 2020 uprisings, which began in a similar spirit, dramatize and embody an ongoing tension within the U.S. progressive movement, which we might gloss as the tension between progressive carceralism and abolition, but which perhaps more broadly breaks down to a rift between rights-based and liberationist approaches to freedom.
No less so, Ferguson was a moment of resynchronization with the activist past—along the lines of what in the Renaissance was called ad fontes: a return to the sources. As young activists cast about for roots, they rediscovered a trove of Black Power and civil rights abolitionist writing that preceded and anticipated their own desires for radical change. For example, when prominent Ferguson activist Derecka Purnell enrolled at Harvard Law School soon after the uprising, she and fellow activist students compiled a reading list on the Black Radical Tradition and hosted weekly discussion groups to study from it. (Purnell and her comrades generously permitted the list to be published so it could be of use to everyone.)
And, it must be said, the previous generation of activists, many of them on Purnell’s reading list, reciprocated: Angela Y. Davis and numerous other leaders of twentieth-century anti-racist struggle wrote voluminously about the growing Black Lives Matter movement, enveloping it in care and theory, and even in some cases joined the younger generation on the front lines. As such, if we can call Ferguson a start, it was no less a moment of intergenerational continuity.
This continuity, in turn, connected Ferguson, and later Black Lives Matter as a whole, into a constellation of other progressive movements which themselves are, both spiritually and genealogically, connected to the long U.S. struggle for racial justice. Some of these were domestic, such as Occupy and, further back, the labor rights movement, while others were international, including the fight for Palestinian liberation and, before that, the struggle against African colonialism and South African apartheid.
Roots and rhizomes, in the words of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—or, to use a term from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney popularized by Black Lives Matter, the uncovering of the vast interconnectedness of the undercommons.
As such, Ferguson’s legacy, a decade on, is central to, yes, but also narrower and broader than modern-day abolition, and embodies so many multifaceted dualities that it now stands as a kind of inspiring Rorschach test. For these reasons—its multitudes, its polysemy, and its centrality to the abolitionist imagination—it felt only fitting to do something that we have only done once before: for the remainder of this week, we are tossing out our usual twice-a-week publishing schedule and instead publishing a new article every day.
Ferguson is important to the movement, and the movement is what we do. Each new piece will offer reflections on the tenth anniversary of Ferguson—looking both backward and forward. These will include an activist roundtable with folks who took part in the Ferguson uprising, poetic reflections on police violence, a reevaluation of the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report, a deep reflection on the everyday violence of fines and fees, and a contemplation of how Ferguson impacted the next generation of activists. These entries intentionally do not add up to anything: to attempt some kind of grand statement about Ferguson would be folly. We offer them instead as interconnected points of reflection, and hope readers will join us in thinking through what Ferguson continues to mean to the project of ending mass incarceration.
Image: Joe Brusky/Flickr/Inquest