Dismissed as “agitators” and “fools,” they’re actually ordinary young black men, leaderless but united by anger. And some don’t think the old civil rights guard achieved much: “I feel in my heart they failed us.”
Protesters David Benitez, Tyler Sowell, Dontey Carter, and Travis Sowell.
Joel Anderson/BuzzFeed News
FERGUSON, Mo. — The tear gas canister landed near Clarence Bledsoe's feet at about 10 p.m. Sunday night. He hadn't been looking for a fight with officers, he said, but was simply walking home after a long day of work and had little choice but to wade through all the pandemonium to get to his apartment. But when the hissing projectile narrowly missed him, all of the anger of the past week welled up within him.
Bledsoe bent down and picked the canister up, ignoring the searing heat in his right hand.
"I felt like, 'Y'all shooting at me?' I'm just trying to get home," Bledsoe said. "I picked it up and threw it back. I never ever ever pictured myself throwing something at the police."
After officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown, the protests in Ferguson developed a distinct rhythm: They grew younger and testier as the night wore on and as older demonstrators and families went home. Many of the young protesters yelled the now familiar chant, "Hands up! Don't shoot!" But many of them also yelled, "Fuck the police." And they didn't just hurl curses; they also threw empty liquor bottles, rocks and, more than once, live tear gas cannisters that had been shot at them.
Missouri Highway Patrol Capt. Ronald Johnson, who was placed in charge of the police response last week, called them "outside agitators." State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal, whose district includes Ferguson, referred to them as "fools." Gov. Jay Nixon said they were "a dangerous element" who managed to derail the earlier peaceful protests. "We've seen the divide between protesters and … those other forces," Nixon said Thursday.
They've also been blamed for the riots and subsequent looting that prompted the heavy police response and that led to boarded-up storefronts along the once-bustling retail corridor of West Florissant Ave. And, no doubt, some of them did partake in looting, though some also helped guard neighborhood shops.
But mostly they are young black men and some women from Ferguson and the surrounding inner suburbs of St. Louis who see themselves in Brown — not just because he was 18 and black, but also because they have their own tales of being harassed by the police. They're groups of friends, mainly, with no single leader, and organized only by an emotion: anger. So when police officers have told them to get off the street or move out of a parking lot, they have often responded by spitting out, "Fuck you!" or picking up a full water bottle and flinging it at the cops.
Clarence Bledsoe's hand burned by throwing a tear-gas canister back at police.
Joel Anderson/BuzzFeed News
On the morning Brown was killed, Bledsoe and his friend Steve Statom were moving into their new apartment in Canfield Green.
As they unloaded their truck and carried their belongings into the apartment, they heard gunshots. When they came outside, Brown's dead body was lying in the middle of the street that runs through the complex.
Anger at Brown's death surged almost instantaneously. A number of videos — many of them halting and macabre — show people crowding the police tape, gawking at the body, and muttering curses at officers working the scene..
"Mike ain't have no felonies. He ain't have no warrants. He ain't have nothing," Statom said. "If Mike had been white, he would have been tasered," not shot.
With a boost from social media, word-of-mouth, and local hip-hop radio stations, news from Canfield Green reached people throughout the St. Louis area.
By the end of the day, dozens of protesters — most of them young — had already made their way into town. "I've been down here since the first day," said Dontey Carter, a 23-year-old from St. Louis. "We all had the same pain and anger about this. We all came together that day." Carter carried a sign that read, simply, "Civil Rights Movement." And he calls himself a "civil rights leader."
But Carter doesn't look like a traditional civil rights demonstrator. He wore a green-and-white striped du-rag with matching green shorts and shoes. Pulling his black T-shirt over his head revealed a heavily-inked torso featuring tattoos that read "Heaven" across his chest and "Hell" on his stomach. Just over his right eyebrow there's another tattoo: "Mr. Carter."
On West Florissant Ave, Carter blended right into those late-night crowds that were awash in tattoos, gold teeth, shirtless torsos, sagging pants, and red, blue, or black bandanas wrapped around mouths and necks. Many of the people on the streets were high school dropouts. Some had already served time in jail or prison. At least a few were gang members.
Perhaps the icon of their fledgling movement is a dread-locked man identified on Twitter only as @eyeFLOODpanties, who was photographed throwing a tear gas canister while wearing an American flag T-shirt and holding a bag of potato chips. The picture, taken last week by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Robert Cohen, has inspired countless T-shirts and posters. "I didn't realize how big this was!" he tweeted after his identity was revealed and he gained thousands of Twitter followers.
from BuzzFeed - Breaking http://ift.tt/1q5JDi5
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