News Analysis: The arc of the moral universe veers away from justice 10 years after Ferguson

By William H. Freivogel

Ten years after the Ferguson uprising, five years after “The 1619 Project” and four years after the murder of George Floyd, the racial reckoning that seemed at hand has largely dissipated amidst  a political and legal backlash — laws outlawing “DEI,” attacks on a “DEI vice president” and bans on books in public libraries and schools.

The arc of the moral universe that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Barack Obama talked about bending toward justice has veered the other direction.  

This special edition of GJR surveys the progress and the backsliding since that Saturday afternoon in August 2014 when Michael Brown’s body lay on Canfield Drive for four hours. Where the progress has been greatest – reform of municipal courts – poor people entrapped by the municipal court system still face a downward spiral that can cost them their livelihood. Forward Through Ferguson, the organization encharged with pursuing the 189 recommendations of the Ferguson Commission acknowledges frankly that progress is “at best, unsatisfying, and at worst, damning.”

An awakening

For many of us, the killing of Brown and the social media revolution that beamed the story to the world inspired a racial awakening. The first tweet came two minutes after Brown crashed to the pavement that August 9th. 5.4 million tweets followed that first week. 35 million during the weeks that followed.

Before Ferguson, many Americans had taken it for granted that the hard work of the civil rights fight was mostly complete. Brown v. Board, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 had finally put an end to the poison of legal discrimination against a people enslaved for centuries by the nation that proclaimed to the world that  “all men are created equal.”

But the uprising that flowed out of those millions of cell phone videos from Ferguson opened the eyes of many Americans to the unfinished business of race. It also inspired the retelling of previously lost and untold stories about the Black experience. The stories told of long-forgotten Black settlements such as Locust Grove, Il., Illinois towns still haunted by the century-old  ghosts of the KKK burning a 30-foot cross and the advice journalist Rachel Jones remembers from her childhood about climbing in an iron bathtub to shield herself from bullets in Cairo, Il.

Ferguson turned Black Lives Matters into a national movement with lawn signs of support sprouting up across American cities and suburbs. The 1619 Project educated Americans to an origin story most knew almost nothing about and many didn’t want to hear.

How many Americans knew the significance of the year 1619 before the New York Times made the case for the centrality of slavery, segregation and discrimination to the American story?

How many knew the National Park Service wanted to sanitize the Supreme Court’s racist language in the Dred Scott decision on a plaque at the Old Courthouse where the Scotts sought their freedom? 

How many knew that the words democracy and equality didn’t appear in the 1787 Constitution even though the three-fifths compromise, fugitive slave provisions and the slave trade did?

How many knew that J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO dirty tricks program not only tried to get King to kill himself but also spread rumors to wreck the families of St. Louis civil rights leaders such as Percy Green – who climbed the Arch, unmasked the Veiled Prophet and was arrested for a sit-in that was part of the 1963 protest against discriminatory Jefferson Bank?

Reforms

After Ferguson President Barack Obama named a presidential commission on policing that returned recommendations for reforms. Brittany Packnett, one of the leaders of the Ferguson uprising was on the Obama commission and also the local Ferguson Commission that returned 189 recommendations for reforms.

Confederate monuments fell across the South including St. Louis. In Charlottesville, Va., statues of Robert E. Lee aboard his horse Traveller and Stonewall Jackson were pulled to the ground despite a deadly white supremacist rally to save them. The Pentagon renamed military bases that for more than a century had been known by the names of Confederate generals who had tried to overthrow the United States government.

In St. Louis, Packnettt was one of a new generation of leaders who emerged. Kim Gardner and Wesley Bell won election as progressive prosecutors. Cori Bush won a seat in Congress.

Cultural institutions in St. Louis and elsewhere addressed structural biases embedded in their institutions. Opera Theatre started its Bold Voices campaign commissioning operas such as “Champion” and “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.”  

Reforms transformed the municipal courts in Ferguson and beyond.  ArchCity Defenders had a report sitting on its desk the day Brown died that showed how municipal police departments and courts wrecked people’s lives in order to fill municipal coffers. Traffic tickets, bench warrants, bail requirements, board fees and the like cost people jobs, housing and family security.

Maureen Hanlon, now a lawyer for ArchCity, describes her first encounter with the reality of municipal court a year before Brown was killed. In 2013, before becoming a lawyer, she tried to help a young student take care of a minor night court matter but discovered upon arriving that the line on this wintery night was 100 long and no resolution was at hand. 

That was a year before Brown was killed. In the days after Brown’s death, ArchCity dramatized the injustice of the municipal court system and in the years since has won court settlements against seven municipalities requiring court reforms and collecting $20 million.

The Missouri Legislature passed SB 5 limiting how much money municipalities could raise through traffic tickets. The Missouri Supreme Court imposed reforms. The Justice Department found a pattern and practice of unconstitutional policing in Ferguson that fell most heavily on the poor and Black who bore the brunt of the police stops. A court enforced consent decree followed.

The results have been substantial. Arch City’s “In the Rearview Mirror…” white paper released in July reports that municipal courts in St. Louis City and County that had collected $61.1 million in fines and fees in 2013, collected just $17.8 million in 2023. Yet structural reform through court consolidation could save more for poor people, the report concluded.

Newspapers and other media that had turned a blind eye on race for decades began paying attention.

The Post-Dispatch, which had refused to report on sit-ins at lunch counters and had killed projects on racism in the 1970s and again around 2000, won a Pulitzer Prize for photography for Ferguson coverage. Columnist Tony Messenger later won a Pulitzer  for explaining the human toll of board bills forcing prisoners to pay for their incarceration. Jeremy Kohler uncovered police abuse first at the Post-Dispatch and more recently ProPublica. Richard Weiss, a retired Post-Dispatch editor, founded a news organization to tell the stories of race growing out of Ferguson, the River City Journalism Fund. The Marshall Project, set up shop in St. Louis. St. Louis Public Radio curated the social media chaos of the Ferguson uprising in a liveblog, delved deeply into the legal investigation of Brown’s death and started a podcast, “We Live Here.”

Reform loses steam

But national police reform proposed by the Obama commission didn’t happen, partly because Donald Trump won the presidency after a campaign of denouncing Black Lives Matter and promoting the slogan blue lives matter. Trump and his attorney general, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, refused to use authority Congress had given the president after Rodney King’s beating to pursue investigations into historic patterns and practices of police abuse. It was none of the federal government’s business, they argued.

The physics of reform is often action-reaction. And that’s the way it was with the Black Lives Matter movement that grew out of Ferguson. A backlash set in reminiscent of when Richard Nixon won election in 1968 with his law and order campaign, Southern Strategy and hardhat army, putting an end to the War on Poverty.

In St. Louis Kim Gardner, elected on a wave of support from the Ferguson uprising, disappointed supporters by failing to follow through on campaign promises.

Downtown St. Louis was rocked by protests in 2017 when a judge acquitted Officer Jason Stockley of killing a fleeing suspect. The statistics of the failure of police reform in St. Louis from 2015-2020 were stark. They showed:

• St. Louis-area officers killed 132 people between 2009 and 2019, according to an ArchCity Defenders report. Yet few of the names of the officers involved in the killings were reported in the media or released publicly.
• Three-fourths of the 79 St. Louis-area police officers known to have killed people between 2009 and 2017 were never publicly identified in the media or by police. Almost half remained active as police officers, according to state records.
• The St. Louis Civilian Oversight Board, set up as a post-Ferguson reform, didn’t review any of the 21 police killings in the City of St. Louis from 2016 through 2019; nor did it hear 96% of non-lethal police abuse cases filed by citizens.
• The post-Ferguson creation of the Force Investigation Unit in the St. Louis Police Department  resulted in less, not more, public information about police killings. Officers’ names aren’t released nor are details. And there were no prosecutions.
• Gardner did not issue prosecutorial judgments on the score of police killings on her desk, civil rights lawyers say.
• White officers badly beat a Black undercover colleague at a Black Lives Matter demonstration protesting Stockley’s acquittal in 2017 in downtown St. Louis because they thought he was a protester. The officers sent racist texts to each other before and after the assault expressing their enthusiasm for beating Black people and their racial hatred for Gardner, the Black prosecuting attorney.  
• At the same 2017 protest, white officers “went rogue,” the city admits, and illegally “kettled” 125 Black Lives Matter protesters and downtown residents by closing them into a city block, spraying them with pepper spray and arresting them in what a judge found to be a violation of their rights. When the abused protesters sued to vindicate their civil rights, the City of St. Louis tried to get the suit dismissed based on “qualified immunity” – a legal doctrine that is basically a get out of court free card for official misbehavior.

Percy Green, the veteran of six decades of civil rights activism, says police still get away with killing Black men unless video ensnares them.

Floyd murder and aftermath

The 2020 murder of George Floyd and killing of Breonna Taylor after a no-knock raid in Louisville created new momentum for police accountability. The Justice Department issued regulations against choke holds and limiting no knock raids. States passed new laws decertifying officers with a history of mistreating citizens. A bill in Congress named after George Floyd proposed sweeping police reforms.

But the Floyd bill died in Congress because of Republican opposition. Republican state legislatures in conservative states, such as Missouri, passed Officer Bills of Rights protecting police rather than protecting citizens. States around the country closed records of police misconduct.

The U.S. Supreme Court ended the era of affirmative action. At least 22 state legislatures enacted laws prohibiting or modifying policies on DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion at state universities, according to the Chronicle on Higher Education. Another 18 restricted the teaching of race and gender in schools. Under Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, Missouri has led the way on removing books from public library shelves. 

Christina Sneed, an University City English teacher who has taken pride in teaching the 1619 project realized the political climate had changed but decided this year to forge ahead. As she puts it: “The politicization of education threatens teachers’ abilities to prepare students for true college and career readiness. By restricting students’ access to enabling texts, we do not aim to develop agents of change, but rather ‘cogs in a machine.’”

The ideological certainty of some reformers to “defund” or “abolish” the police, fueled the backlash against police reform. Surveys showed that poor people were more interested in funding adequate police protection than defunding the police.

Reformers also grew disenchanted with what they saw as the failure of some of the progressive prosecutors who emerged from Ferguson.

The Prosecutor Organizing Table of liberal groups including ArchCity recently criticized St. Louis County’s Wesley Bell for not making major changes in prosecution policies. Incarceration levels remain too high, they say..

Bell’s decision after his election not to reopen the criminal investigation into Wilson’s killing of Brown, disappointed many in the Ferguson movement who continue to insist Wilson murdered Brown.

It is a fiction that has hung over the Ferguson shooting since it occurred.  

The “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” mantra broadcast to the world by an army of citizen activists was effective because it represented the experience of so many young Black men with white police officers.

But there was no proof to support that narrative. 

An extensive Justice Department investigation found that not a single credible witness saw Brown with his hands up or heard him say “don’t shoot.” Not one.

Rather, the evidence showed that Brown had reached into Wilson’s police car and grabbed his revolver resulting in it firing inside the car. After running from the car, Brown turned around and ran toward Wilson, witnesses said. There was no murder case to be brought against Wilson. 

Yes, Wilson failed to de-escalate his confrontation with Brown. But no prosecutor was going to be able to prove murder without a credible witness. Federal and state prosecutors came to that conclusion and Bell reaffirmed that judgment.

Some, who have seen the workings of St. Louis’ progressive prosecutors first hand say that the prosecutor’s office may not be the most effective position from which to reform the criminal justice system, particularly when politicians like Trump paint the prosecutors as enabling criminals.

Nor, as it turns out, was it realistic to think that the Forward Through Ferguson was going to be able to bring about the extensive reform that 189 recommendations would involve.

The organization helped expand Medicaid in Missouri, but state implementation has been miserly, using qualification requirements to cut children from the rolls. The group contributed to closing the Workhouse, but there are disagreements on how to use space vacated. The Ferguson group envisioned a $25 million equity fund; it was able to create a pilot $1.7 million fund for Black farmers, douhlas and STEM students. It also has won legal representation for tenants facing eviction. 

Still, most of the 189 recommendations have not been fully achieved and most have no significant progress.

The progress that has been made, says spokesperson Jia Lian Yang, is from “grassroots organizers and advocacy organizations” while the “obstacles mostly presented by elected officials and traditional power holders who publicly say one thing, but behind closed doors say, ‘too expensive’ or ‘not yet.’”

She adds: “There is no simple answer that can capture the fragmented, halting, and incomplete nature of progress over the last decade. The systems and structures of the St. Louis region, from housing to education to policing, are marred by segregation and fragmentation.”

Maureen Hanlon, a lawyer with ArchCity Defenders, describes in heart-rending detail the downward dive that poor people still face in municipal courts when they don’t have enough money to pay their tickets and when prosecutors and judges say it’s the fault of the poor for not having done a better job of saving money.

She concludes her description of the reality of municipal courts ends this way: “Anyone grappling on this anniversary of Michael Brown’s death with why there has not been more significant changes in the entrenched poverty and racism in our communities should spend a few days talking to people in line at a municipal court.” 

William H. Freivogel is the publisher of Gateway Journalism Review. This publisher’s column was in the Summer 2024 issue of the magazine.