The August 2014 murder of Michael Brown and subsequent uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, drew national attention to the city of St. Louis, the militarization and impunity of police departments nationwide, and the ongoing economic and legal war against Black people in the United States. It was one more death slotted into a seemingly endless column, extending back to the foundation of the United States and forward into the future among: Eleanor Bumpurs, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Philando Castile, George Floyd, Sonya Massey, and on and on and on.
And yet, for a moment, it seemed like an opening into the possibility of another history. Beginning in the days after the murder, protesters in Ferguson gathered outside the city’s police station to insist that Darren Wilson (the officer who had shot Brown) and the city government be held accountable. Their organized and persistent protest drew attention to the militarization of U.S. police departments and the terrible frequency with which they were killing unarmed citizens. As the protest stretched on through the fall, the daily practices of racialized policing—arbitrary stops and searches, punitive municipal regulations, wildly excessive sentences for those who could not pay their fines or missed court appearance—came into greater focus. So did their economic underpinnings—“for-profit policing” that supported municipal governments, which in turn seemed to exist primarily as hosts for the very police departments that kept them afloat.
In Ferguson and elsewhere in St. Louis County, salaries paid to white police officers and municipal court officers (who frequently lived in white-enclave suburbs to the south and west of Ferguson) were being extracted from Black people who lived in and commuted through Ferguson and other similar communities in what is called “North County” (the area of St. Louis County north of the St. Louis city line). On November 24, 2014, St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch announced that no charges would be filed against Officer Wilson.
Here, three of the activists of the “Michael Brown Generation” in St. Louis—Tef Poe, Derecka Purnell, and Blake Strode—reflect on what has happened both in the city and beyond in the ten years since the uprising and the murder of the young man that began it.
—Walter Johnson
Walter Johnson: We’re ten years out from the murder of Michael Brown. Ten years out from the uprising. I’m interested in hearing where you all are right now, and where you think the energy, the politics, the insight, the outrage, and the solidarity have gone. Where have things intensified? And where do you think things that once seemed possible have been foreclosed?
Tef Poe: I live in North County. I grew up out here, my parents still live out here. From my early twenties into my thirties, the whole goal was to get the fuck out of here—to get as far away from North County as possible. The uprising gave me a different connection to the land. I realized that we were basically first-generation working poor people. I started to understand that as a form of heritage. Outside of the politics, this is just where my lineage is. I got nephews and nieces growing up in the neighborhood, and it feels like they’re having the same exact conversations we were having when I was growing up. The problems that I grew up with are still here in a way I didn’t think they was going to still be here when I was younger.
Blake Strode: I came back to St. Louis in the fall of 2015. I grew up here, but at that point, I hadn’t lived full time here for about ten years. When I came back, you could feel the change in the air. You could sense that something had shaken the region to its foundations. In public conversations, there was a kind of reflexive preempting of the critiques that had been brought to the surface. White people seemed a bit on guard. The tension was palpable. People were demanding justice. You still also had pockets of some of the energy of the uprising that would emerge in moments of direct actions and protests; there might be a turnup at the Galleria one day, or on the highway if there was a police incident.
From the series
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But in the nine years that I’ve been back in St. Louis, the further removed that we’ve gotten from that original flashpoint of the taking of Mike Brown’s life, that energy has waned. I feel conflicted when I start talking about this, because I see some ways in which that energy has been honed in helpful, productive ways. I think about some of the coalitions that have been built, some of the institutions that have been built, and a lot of the learning and relationship building that has happened here. But also, it’s been kind of a slow backslide in a lot of ways, particularly when I think about the institutions of power in St. Louis. Corporate America and government institutions have very much reinstituted a sort of status quo. That’s been difficult to stomach at moments.
Derecka Purnell: When I think about the ten years that have passed, I think about coming back for the one-year anniversary and working with a bunch of people to do all the commemorative events. There was energy in the streets and a sense of promise that the world was going to be different.
I remember right before I left for law school, I was like, I don’t think I can go. Justin Hansford (the legal scholar who founded Howard University’s Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center) was like, No, you gotta go, because sadly, this won’t be the last time the police killed somebody. At that point, we didn’t know yet that the police kill about three people a day. For me, police killings felt like flashpoints. That it happened in St. Louis was so shocking to me.
When I went back to St. Louis after law school to work for the Advancement Project, I had all this young, bustling energy. I was like, I’m an abolitionist, I’m a lawyer, and we’re about to do all this stuff. As soon as I started working with the organizations that were based in Ferguson, I learned that the judge over this case wasn’t really interested in what happened, she just wanted the narrative of a success story. And these DOJ lawyers, they didn’t care about the transformative change happening in Ferguson, or in St. Louis County, or in the city. What they wanted was for the organizations there, like the Ferguson Collaborative, to view them as benevolent interveners without them actually having to give up any power. The city of Ferguson hired a Black lawyer who works at a law firm downtown to represent them, to get in front of the court and say, basically: Of course Ferguson has changed. Look, they hired me, and I’m a Black man.
Still, I saw so many residents in Ferguson try, with all of their time and talents, volunteering their energy to make change through the Ferguson Neighborhood Policing Steering Committee, or the Ferguson Collaborative, or to go to all these town hall meetings. I was just like, wow, look at this. Look at the Ferguson Collaborative: it’s multiracial, multigenerational. You got these older white leftist organizers and these young revolutionaries, all these people trying to figure out how to make something together. I thought that was such a special moment. And then, watching their time and their energy slowly get sucked away through this institutional process made me very angry, especially as a lawyer who was involved in that process with them for some time. It made me question what was possible coming out of this.
And then, on the fifth anniversary, what happened? There was a meet-and-greet on West Florissant with cops and all these nonprofits. And I thought: How did we get to a cop meet-and-greet on the fifth anniversary of Michael Brown’s killing? All these factors that weaken and cheapen and attempt to undermine the revolutionary spirit of the movement were put on display at the five-year. I realized that this was going to happen every year as we move further away from the moment, and that’s been really heartbreaking for me.
The other thing that has happened, though, is that I’ve experienced lots of people shift. One time I was having lunch with Blake in St. Louis when I went back to the city to pick up my kids, who spend their summers there every year. My mom called me and said, These motherfuckers just shot a kid outside my house. Blake and I rushed to my mom’s house and she was panicking. A cop had shot a fourteen-year-old. She couldn’t believe that it had happened so close to home. In that moment my mom was like, I think I understand what’s happening here. I remember being there with Blake and my mom on the Northside, watching her political evolution. Then you have my kids’ paternal grandmother calling me a few months ago and being like, I didn’t completely understand what you were talking about all this time about abolition, but now I get it. I heard Blake Strode speak about it last week, he said you were his sister and law school classmate! This is someone who’s been in prison ministry as a somewhat conservative evangelical for over thirty years who is now realizing this whole system is wrong; she just hadn’t had the language for it. So there are those anecdotal examples, and then there is the broader, incredible work by organizations such as ArchCity Defenders, and Action St. Louis, and Black Men Build. I have a lot of envy for not living there right now, because there’s just all this exciting work in partnerships that’s being done.
Johnson: It’s two different stories, it seems like. One of those is the story of how all that energy and creativity and insight got contained. And one of the stories is, like Derecka was talking about, a level of general politicization and revolutionary consciousness that has grown among ordinary people.
Poe: I think that’s a part of it. St. Louis is what I call a trench city. I sit at the fringes of a lot of “progressive” tables; I’ve been a part of a few organizations at this point in my life, and most of them have done good work and do good work. But out of Ferguson, what I realized is that growing up in St. Louis, this emerging proletariat type of person was always around me. They weren’t necessarily what they themselves would deem as Black radicals, but a portion of their message was radical. They would usually be Christian, or sometimes radical Muslims. They were the people that was the initial conduit for the Crips and the Bloods coming into the city. People like my family, that was straight up in a wild discourse against the war on drugs. A lot of people forget that St. Louis was really ground zero for that type of repression during Reagan, and also later on during Clinton. We got our asses kicked by the American experience in so many different ways, and we had these people who were kind of career activists, at least in the sense of what they were giving to the community: educating people, organizing in their own right. Sometimes they might be gang leaders. Sometimes they might just be an older dude who was a Five Percenter. But that pro-Black consciousness in St. Louis was always a factor.
Sometimes, despite the might of those moments coming out of the eighties and nineties, we feel obligated to declare Ferguson to be the grand culmination of those moments. I think that’s a part of the story, but I also think that the proletariat class really don’t give a shit about most of the daily conversation surrounding these issues, but they give a fuck enough to know that we are under attack and they got to survive. I have not seen those people embraced by the general Black movement, and I don’t really see portals for those people to come into the movement. They have a political mind that doesn’t really intellectualize about politics in a way that fits into mainstream politics. You go to the strip club, you’re gonna see that dude who was on the front lines at Ferguson who then kind of assimilated back into regular life. But if you know what you’re looking at, you can see they’re still in go mode—they’re still prepared to do something. Sometimes, when we contextualize the uprising, we get real hung up on the people who did not start the uprising. A lot of the people who actually got out there and fought the police got they asses busted and went to jail. They don’t have the analysis that even a person like myself would have, being somewhat street-adjacent but not really in the streets no more. There is a brewing street contingent in St. Louis that just goes drastically unaddressed, and that shapes a lot of the political discourse in the town.
Strode: What resonates with me from your description, Tef, is that to the extent that there was an awakening or shifting of consciousness as a result of the Ferguson uprising, it was not among the Black masses. The Black masses were activated in a particular way, but Black folks—who had already been overpoliced and targeted and harassed and segregated in decrepit housing and schools—they knew that already. Ferguson didn’t introduce them to that. The shift in consciousness was actually much more among the middle class and professional class in St. Louis. It was among these groups in St. Louis—which had, frankly, insisted on perpetuating a racist social order for a long time—where there actually began to be a bit of a shift in the prevailing politics of the region. Like Tef said, many of us sit at these various progressive tables, but no one would have said, pre-2014, that the prevailing politics in St. Louis were progressive politics. You had these proudly moderate, center-right Democrats running the show. Now, how much of an improvement is the center-left “progressive” ideology? Arguably not that much, but there has been a shift. People in the professional class have had to accept on some level that the prevailing social order has become politically unsustainable. This is a question I wrestle with all the time: How can we use that opportunity to create some kind of concrete, material benefit for precisely those poor Black communities that have been under the boot of the ruling class?
Johnson: Tef, I hear you describing the people you know and live and work with, and pointing out that they have their own political analysis yet have not been invited to the political table. And then, Blake, you’re saying a major shift, post-Ferguson, was that Ferguson stripped away the deniability about how much those folks had been excluded from any path toward political power or the good life. White people in particular could no longer tell the story that things were alright in St. Louis. But much of the response has seemingly come in the form of the election of people like Kim Gardner (who served as a Missouri state representative and then as St. Louis circuit attorney), Wesley Bell (the St. Louis County prosecutor running for Congress), and Tishaura Jones (the current mayor of St. Louis). “Progressive” prosecutors and political figures who have not always lived up to the hopes of working-class, working-poor, and just plain poor Black people whose support was crucial to their election. How do you sort through that?
Purnell: Well, as has been said, there are palpable ways that the city has changed. The police know not to do a certain thing anymore because it will result in an uprising. But we know police still pull people over. We know that cops still kill people. But in terms of the street change, it reminds me a lot of Elizabeth Hinton’s book America on Fire. In it, she says that you can look at the strength of a movement by seeing how it’s expressed electorally, but we also could just measure how many times Black projects get into shootouts with cops. And we should. We should also measure how many times Black people in neighborhoods like Cabrini-Green have de-arrested one of their homeboys. We should look at the history of the Black Liberation Army, who at one point killed cops in retaliation for killing Black people.
We know that that history exists, but we’re not in those times anymore. One of the reasons we’re not in those times is because those forms of resistance have been repressed, and the people who were part of those movements have been killed, exiled, and imprisoned. I don’t think we’ve seen any organized movement get into a shootout with the cops in at least the last decade of organizing. That street contingent Tef mentioned, I don’t think it’s organized into any formation that’s going to give it long-term power, even though I do think it will result in contemporary survival for some people. The question for me is, how do we use our survival mechanisms and translate those into a vehicle to overthrow capitalism? If we just are romanticizing what people are doing in the streets, and condemning what people are trying to do electorally, and none of that is actually a part of a strategy to undermine and overthrow capitalism, we’re not gonna win. Organizations like the BLA and the Black Panther Party, or even MOVE, in addition to criticizing the capitalist order, were doing political education, mutual aid, and trying to build a mass membership. When I see organizations trying to do that, I tend to extend them a lot of grace. Because it’s very hard work to do base-building organization with people who are the most exploited and dispossessed.
I do think an electoral strategy is important. I just don’t think that it is the most important thing. I have a lot of frustration with how we treat electoral politics as the culmination of our social movements. I disagree with that. What I do know is that we have to think about alternative ways to secure power. We can argue about whether that includes violence or not, but then we have to be prepared for the consequences. The kind of fight we have to fight has got to be pluralistic. We have to try many different avenues in order to win. That’s the kind of struggle I’m committed to being a part of.
Strode: It’s easy to fall into a critique that is both true and missing something. I think it is true that some of the insurgent radical energy of the Ferguson uprising was misdirected, manipulated, and ultimately snuffed out by people who had that intention all along. But it’s also true that the political, electoral work in St. Louis since Ferguson has been in pretty close relation with some of that grassroots, radical base-building work. There are mutual aid efforts, there are people building transformative justice interventions and thinking about different housing models, how we can pursue collective ownership and disrupt the commodification of housing. Those efforts and many more are underway in St. Louis, and in many of them you do find seeds of the Ferguson uprising. Some of those same constellations of folks are the same ones you’ll see at the Board of Aldermen, showing up to a hearing and demanding they do something to stop the homeless encampment sweeps, or provide some basic protections for tenants so they don’t get kicked out of their homes, or cut the police budget. I think there’s been some relationship built between those explicitly political, electoral efforts and those that are more grassroots and outside of the system, and that even sort of oppose the very existence of the system. We can ask how sustainable that is, in the long run. People are so disappointed by some of these electoral outcomes, and whether you continue to engage with that sphere or disengage from it is a real question right now. But it hasn’t really been an either/or approach. In my view, it has been a both/and approach.
Johnson: I’m glad you said that, Blake. I must admit, I was feeling a little bit naïve. When I look at the history of St. Louis, I see what you all see. And yet, I also see a history in the last ten years of incredible, fruitful, radical organizing. St. Louis stands out to me as a place where there has actually been a kind of de facto abolitionist agenda that has changed parts of the city. Where you all actually organized and closed a jail. Where you have a coalition that has created and supported the People’s Plan. But it does seem like this upcoming election with Cori Bush represents an inflection point for you all. Is that true?
Poe: Yeah, it is. I’m on the ground working with Cori, and you know I did that Wesley Bell diss record. But I do agree with Blake that this is a both/and thing. It’s more than a both/and. It’s an everything thing. To me, there are different styles of social movements concurrently happening in St. Louis. I didn’t have this analysis before I moved back to the neighborhood. One day I’m at the barbershop, midday, helicopters over that mug, and some kids who had just come down to the BMB office are high-speeding the cops down Chambers. They jump out, start busting at the cops. One of them gets killed, right then and there while we’re watching this whole shit. Now, unfortunately, this type of shit happens around here all the fucking time: It stops the day, but it don’t clog the day up—people pretty much go on with they business after a while.
This city was one of the founding cities of gangsta rap to a small degree. There has always been a class of people who sometimes get written off as criminals. I call it the underclass. There’s a very strong underclass of people in St. Louis, especially Black St. Louis, that are always, at any random moment, willing to take it further than people who have a pinch more access to the upper crust. Some of them are well organized, some of them not. Some of them are organized on a generational level. Some of them just throwing some shit together to have something reactionary to do. Some of them are deeply, subversively woven into the fabric of St. Louis. Sometimes they dodge political accountability because people may or may not know they exist. Sometimes they in bed with the actual mayor in a way that people who know what they looking at go, oh, that’s peculiar.
I think there’s come to be the assumption that all of that underclass’s willingness to act originates in the Ferguson uprising. But that ain’t got shit to do with Ferguson, you know? This is just the front line of a class of people who the police are interacting with, and they got deep revolutionary aspirations, and their own analysis of political power. And what I really saw happening—and what they certainly observed happening—in the aftermath of the uprising was that no political power was accumulated for them.
Johnson: So Tef is talking about a kind of continuous energy of people who are ready to fight, and are already, in some sense, at war with the police. Earlier, Derecka, you acknowledged that energy, but also said it needs to be combined with a kind of political education program, right?
Purnell: Not just a political education program: an organization. That people have potential is exciting, but potential is stored energy. If we aren’t organized, it’s going to be potential for the rest of our lives. That’s what I’m concerned about. That’s why I try to evoke our ancestors, people who organized the poorest and most dispossessed among us, those who had that energy and said: We need a formation, we need to do revolutionary self-defense, we need to do political education, we need to know the difference between when to say “white” and when to say “capitalist,” we need to learn how to heal each other’s wounds, we need to have hideouts. That kind of organizing is much more present in the Global South than it is here. All that potential could be different if it’s organized.
Over the last ten years, we’ve seen organizations try to do that to various degrees. Hands Up United was doing Books and Breakfast, which combined a community free meals program with a program of political education. Other organizations across the country try to do that and use those programs as an outreach organizing program.
As a community, many of our analyses have gotten sharper around capitalism and imperialism and repression. I’m just not convinced that whatever actually happens is going to be revolutionary unless it’s organized. I think it could be sporadic. I think that it could be rooted in survival. I think all that’s possible. We’ve seen uprisings happen over and over and over again in the last ten years. We saw 28 million people in the street in 2020. But it’s 2024 now, and it’s easier to raise money for a Black politician than it is to help an organization take care of its water bills. I think I’m grieving part of our movement’s inability to deal with what it means to continue to organize, but I’m also appreciating how difficult it is to organize in that way. All of us need a political home that includes multiple strategies toward liberation. We need to do intense work to get clarity around what we mean by revolution and the kind of risk that we’re willing to take in order to do that. We need a revolutionary strategy to get people who are ready to pop off into the movement.
We can look at South Africa, for example, where there’s the African National Congress. Under apartheid, the ANC’s armed wing, the MK, used basic services like laundry in order to organize Black South Africans around a shared vision and political strategy to end white colonial rule. They asked: How do we use laundry—things like access to water and detergent—in order to build relationships, to get people to have input on a freedom charter? It’s a strategy that’s connected to different kinds of tactics. That includes electoralism, self-defense (including armed self-defense), political education, and mutual aid. We need that kind of work happening in a way that’s building toward a broader end instead of having some people do electoralism, some people ready to pop off, some people in the nonprofit space. We need all those people coming together and clarifying what we mean by revolution.
Poe: And I’d say St. Louis is a multicultural hub of that exact style. Me and Blake, we sit at a few tables together, and we align on hella shit, but sometimes he’ll be like, Yeah, I ain’t with you dawg. There’s a whole bunch of tables like that, with BMB, mutual aid, and so on. St. Louis got one of the biggest chapters of the National African American Gun Association. What I’m presenting here is separate to my own political philosophy. I don’t necessarily view that type of behavior as a revolutionary politic or revolutionary stance. I’m not highlighting violence as a priority. Actually, I live in a space where I wish it wasn’t. What I’m saying is there is a contingent of this city that has gone so long unaddressed that it is outside of certain structures of conversation. I think that something that changed coming out of Ferguson was the way that violence became prioritized by some people as their go-to response to policing.
Strode: I would add, though, that even within what you refer to as the Black underclass, Tef, I don’t think there’s a monolithic orientation. I think about our clients at ArchCity Defenders, where we represent lots of folks who are struggling to make ends meet and getting harassed by these little kangaroo courts with tickets and fines and fees. For most of the people we’ve worked with, this kind of theoretical conversation we’re having would not only be foreign to them, but I think they would also be fairly disinterested. What they are actually most concerned with every single day is just trying to make ends meet, trying to keep the lights on and the roof over their heads, keep their kids in school and keep clothes on their backs. They may be pissed off—they are pissed off—but they’re actually not ready to pop off in that particular way. They’re not standing down state forces in that particular way. What they are most interested in is any sort of model that helps them to meet their material needs day to day. It’s a huge deal to many of them when there’s some kind of progress in that area. What I’ve seen many times is that if their material needs can be met, then they become interested in thinking systemically about how to make that the case for other people. But the only thing that they’re actually concerned with day-to-day is survival. So I think there is some part of the Black underclass that is ready for agitation and conflict. But there’s also some part that really is not, because they’ve been so restricted of the means of survival that that’s actually the only thing that they have room for every day.
I want to make sure we keep on the table that there have been important interventions brought forward over the past decade in meeting people’s material needs in a way that connects to some theory of broader change. I think that has brought more people into political consciousness in a way that is different from being brought into that political consciousness through a particular traumatic event. These are people who have lived their entire lives that way. Direct service is sort of a whole other sphere of work, and I run an organization that sits at this intersection of direct services, advocacy, organizing, and working with folks around building radical movements in St. Louis. I feel some of this conflict in myself, thinking about how to make all of that work.
Johnson: I see the three of you, through this work, having a set of alignments that doesn’t at the same time reduce to a single program—but nonetheless that is moving forward collectively. As you continue to build and organize and navigate the tensions of different groups coming together, how do you stay committed to the work? Who are you doing it for? Who do you hold in mind?
Strode: To me, it does come back to the folks that walk through our doors at ArchCity. That has always been a grounding force in the work, especially when all of the other elements become incredibly frustrating. As a lawyer, having people who we are accountable to, ultimately, is important to me. That’s what has made these concepts and ideas more concrete in the day-to-day.
Purnell: For me, my mom comes up a lot. She’s the person I’ve known the longest, and she was very transparent about how poor we were my entire life. In her, I see all the people who are grieving the lives they could have had, who want the freedom to live the lives that they deserve.
But I think it’s difficult thinking about who I’m doing this for. Part of me is frustrated by the idea some people think justice or freedom or comfort or civility is what white people have, or what rich people have, or what ballers have. That idea is completely understandable, and it’s completely poisonous. I’ve been thinking a lot about possession and dispossession, and whether it’s possible to think about dispossession as a gift to remake a different kind of life and world and society. To chip away at our desire to accumulate and possess each other, or to possess private property. I’ve really been thinking about the world—including all the people who are suffering because our climate is getting too hot.
Another part of me feels very grateful when I’m talking to people from different communities through book talks or different organizations. There are people who are in their sixties, seventies, and eighties who do exactly what my kids’ grandmother did to Blake and say: “I didn’t know that’s what they meant by defund the police. How come they don’t explain it like that?” And I say, You know, that’s intentional. They’re choosing to fund the police instead of helping you with your living. They’re choosing to fund the police while you can’t pay your light bill. I like thinking about our movement as not only a youthful movement, but an energetic movement, where at any point anyone could be new to our movement. That’s exciting to me. So part of me does this for people who are curious, who want to fight, who feel like at any moment they can be pushed to be something great.
Poe: You know, for years, I used to feel kind of guilty about leaning into a regular Black nuclear family structure. I come from a really, really weird family structure, so I really didn’t even know what that was and how to flow into it. Then I came to a point in life where I was like, damn, a lot of my actions genuinely come from the fact that I don’t know certain shit. So I started putting myself in a position to just learn stuff. Really, that’s all I do every day, in a weird way; just kind of soak in information. But I think that experiencing some unwarranted rites of passage as my mother’s oldest male child, then watching my biological father pass and me and him not having a real relationship, and the kind of fleeting presence of other Black males in my life—all that made me an unusual Black man, in a sense. I was willing to learn about things that I traditionally wouldn’t have learned about.
I couldn’t go back home after a certain point, so I had to move into my first girlfriend’s dorm room. She was a straight-up feminist. I didn’t even know what a feminist was at that time. This is not some direct political process teaching me this stuff, this is my life as an actual Black man in St. Louis, trying to figure out what the next move is, what the next play going to be, what the next day going to offer. That cultivation of experiences really just taught me a lot. When I look at the children who are coming up in this environment, I realize it took unusual people to spark me in a particular way. So I just understand an obligation to this place in a particular way. I want to have an influence. I think that it is important for this place, which has been a traditionally Black epicenter in the middle of the country, to continue to find ways to tell those stories and contribute to that history.
Image: Paul Sableman/Flickr/Inquest
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