What Killed Michael Brown?

The optic was just terrible.

A black boy dead in the street.

Shot by a white policeman.

It was four and a half hours

before they finally removed the body.

It pointed to a terrible America,

in which, on a given August afternoon,

a young black American male

could be shot dead,

as he no more than walked down the street.

Why? Why did they do it?

Settle down?

That motherfucker shot my baby, they did!

Settle down?

You don't do a dog like that.

Man, you know how hard it was for me

to get him to stay in school and graduate?

You know how many black men graduate?

- -

This was an execution!

This was an assassination!

- -

What are we fighting for?

I don't want you all killing my child

because she walked out the door

cuz you were having a bad day. Walk away motherfucker.

I don't know fully what happened nor do you.

Our hearts are out there--

Police brutality against African-Americans is rising.

We can't have people fearful--

We can't have police officers killing people!

Fuck them!

I don't look like I'm,

putting my thumb on the scales, one way or the other.

Missouri is the new Mississippi.

Move! Move!

We have determined that there is cause

for the Justice Department to open an investigation.

Fight back!

Everybody want me to be calm

but you know how them bullets hit my son.

No probable cause exists

to file any charge against Officer Wilson.

Burn this motherfucker down! Burn this bitch down!

But what was more remarkable

than the tragedy itself

was the explosion of controversy

that surrounded it.

Black militants of every stripe, national black leaders,

politicians,

mainstream media, cable news,

even the President

and the Attorney General of the United States

all became players in the Ferguson story.

Yet in Chicago, my hometown,

in the year 2016...

seven hundred and sixty two young blacks

were shot and killed.

Three thousand were wounded,

largely by gunfire from other young blacks.

All this killing,

all this loss of life,

did not garner as much attention

as the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

I have studied and thought about race all my life.

I was born on the south side of Chicago

to parents who met and married

in the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1940's.

One of my earliest memories

is of my parents leading a year-long boycott

of my segregated school in the 1950's.

The first such boycott, north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Civil rights activism

was my family's mission.

This background positioned me to know one overriding truth...

that we human beings never use race

except as a means to power.

Race is never an end, it is always a means

and it has no role in human affairs

except as a corruption.

Whenever racial issues break into the news,

I am usually overcome by what I call "racial fatigue".

So on that August evening when the shooting of Michael Brown

hit the news,

it was as if America was staging a play I had already seen.

I wanted to ignore it

but I couldn't.

It threatened to show me out as one of those confused,

self-hating Uncle Toms

that kidded themselves into believing that racial oppression

was effectively over with.

This was heresy.

And I had become identified with it.

Yet here was Michael Brown,

an unarmed black teenager shot dead by a white cop.

Hard to argue in the face of this,

that blacks have at last achieved the freedom

to live as individuals.

And yet,

this is what I argue.

Was it really racism that killed Michael Brown?

In many ways, my life as an American

has been a journey through various racial landscapes.

That journey continues.

When I first heard of East St. Louis,

it was said to be the poorest black city in America.

There was almost a braggadocio in this

that lent excitement to the name.

I was proud to work here for three years in the late 60's

as a warrior in President Johnson's War on Poverty.

I wanted to stop here on my visit to Ferguson,

just to look around.

I was a black militant back then.

This was the era of...

Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton,

Stokely Carmichael

and I was a part of that. I identified with that.

My fellow poverty workers and I

had come here in a mood of wild hopefulness.

America had essentially confessed

the evil of its racist past.

The government that had oppressed us,

only yesterday, would now engineer our uplift.

I felt that justice in America was finally unfolding before me

and that my work in these programs

was the actual execution of justice.

But in my first year of teaching,

two of my brightest students were shot and killed.

The trigger fingers were black.

Life went on.

Back then I had no cynicism about justice.

It was the word that animated the civil rights movement

more than any other.

But after three years in East St. Louis,

I no longer trusted the world.

It hid more than it revealed.

And left too much room for corruption.

The colleague I shared an office with

met his literature class only once a month,

claiming his students learned more in the streets...

than in books.

Yet we had just won a 20,000 dollar federal grant,

in 1960's money,

to start a library for our students.

Black development was not the focus of justice.

Taking advantage of white guilt was the focus.

Everyone knew everyone.

And, um...

it had a Mayberry feeling about it.

Ferguson is just a continuation

of a disenfranchised African American community.

This was not what I expected,

given the media's treatment of Ferguson.

I thought it would look like an extension of East St. Louis.

But this was charming.

Even bucolic.

I just don't want to hear that we're racist.

We've been living with black people for--

-Were not part of White Flight. -No.

What I didn't realize is that over a mile away,

on a parallel street, was another Ferguson.

The Ferguson where the shooting took place.

Ferguson is a microcosm of this country.

For some, it is a friendly, integrated suburb of St. Louis.

For others, after the death of Michael Brown

it is the new capital of American racism.

- -I am, Mike Brown!

Mike Brown, I am!

Mike Brown Jr. was a soul.

But someone decided, named Darren Wilson,

that his life wasn't worth it.

Today is the fourth anniversary

of Michael Brown's death.

People don't understand

the pain that we go through.

I deal with a lot of demons that hurt.

My life it upside down.

I walk around, I try to smile.

I try not show nobody I got so much hate and anger in my soul

because I don't want nobody to think

that I'm just this angry man walking this earth.

But as the day went on, it became more of a protest.

They protested the Ferguson Market

where Brown fought with the owner

just before his death.

The store agreed to virtually all the demands...

but the protesters then changed their minds.

I cannot walk

without you being in my motherfucking face!

At the Ferguson City Council meeting,

they demanded that the market be shut down

or given over to them altogether.

I'm going to stand out there until that store is over.

And If you're not going to do your job man,

we going to do it for you.

Not a threat, a promise.

Yeah, that's right.

But there was something unconvincing

about all these protests.

The anger seemed ritualized.