7

ONTOLOGIES OF RESISTANCE

So it’s confusing if you don’t know the history of how this movement unfolded in Ferguson. Years from now when we’re retelling the story of what’s come to be called BLM, I want people to say, “And then on August 9th, 2014, people came out of their houses in St. Louis and unyieldingly stood in the streets of Ferguson, and they did not back down to the violence directed at them. And then more people came, and more people came, and it turned into a nationwide movement.” You don’t want to read, “August 9th came and then after that, the organizers of Black Lives Matter started a movement.” You know?

—Brittany Ferrell, as stated to Angel Carter

As the summer of 2014 turned to fall in St. Louis, Ferguson protesters maintained steady pressure on the region. The reasons for coming out that were articulated by protesters included pressuring the grand jury to indict Darren Wilson on murder charges, but many were also focused on bringing national and global attention to larger issues of Black vulnerability and shining a light on predatory policing in North St. Louis County. A constant protest presence could be found in the parking lot across the street from the Ferguson police station, where in almost nightly clashes, lines of officers in riot gear taunted protesters and dared them to set foot in the street, while protesters chanted back. Shared food and other expressions of community also occurred nightly. On a weekly basis, protesters shut down local highways and major streets across the region. Cultural and sports events in St. Louis, as well as county and municipal meetings, were targeted by flash mobs. The St. Louis Cardinals baseball games and Rams football games frequently included clashes between protesters and counterprotesters. On October 6, a multiracial protest interrupted the St. Louis Symphony when over fifty people who had purchased tickets and entered as members of the audience gradually began singing “Which side are you on?” during the performance, with many musicians joining in. Additionally, people from across the United States and world traveled to St. Louis to show solidarity with local resistance, congregating at the makeshift memorial on Canfield Drive and in the parking lot across from the police station. Counterprotesters, often with signs reading “Blue Lives Matter,” also frequented the area. Throughout the fall, tension and planning on both sides continued in anticipation of the grand jury’s decision regarding whether or not to indict Darren Wilson on charges of wrongfully killing Michael Brown, with growing signs that Wilson would not be charged.

A community that came to be called “the protest family” emerged from the sustained resistance and the shared trauma brought by events. Following the initial days of resistance and the militarized response by law enforcement, protesters stated that they spent their time almost exclusively with branches of the protest family, both inside and outside protest. A weekly meal was shared by the collective family in the parking lot adjacent to the police station and organized by Cathy Daniels, a respected elder and professional chef known to most as Mama Cat. The protest family meant different things to different people, but the experience of struggle did much to create bonds that held together in spite of vast disagreements and differing perspectives. As Angel recalled more than two years after the death of Michael Brown, “I have a community now. The respect and the love and support that people show—I am literally surrounded by people who would die for me.” The bond of respect and love in the face of brutal disrespect and violence were and are an important dimension within this movement. In this way, Ferguson resistance represents a larger community that not only demands a better world but also provides a better way to survive in the one that currently exists.

Jonathan

The movement family is essentially like food in your stomach from people you don’t necessarily know but can trust. Like Mama Cat. Early on she was out there providing meals and snacks for people who were exhausted and without nutrition. And the social time around meals that she provided was really important because those spaces were a rare thing. It was a space away from the trauma.

“Haiku Unsung”

There were people that fell out with their actual family because they didn’t agree on either the message or the kinds of actions or both. But to be standing there side by side with somebody who’s going to link arms with you and keep you from getting arrested or come and make sure that you’re not sprayed or shot, that takes a tremendous amount of trust and love.

Brittany

We’re able to laugh together, we’re able to cry together, we fight together. And we see each other on the street and be like, “What’s up?” You know if I got a dollar and you ain’t got shit, we got fifty cents between us. Because there’s not a lot of support doing this work. It’s not honorable work to most folks, the ones willing to take the scraps they’re given. So it’s important to have the [protest] family there to support you and check you.

Ivy (pseudonym)

The Ferguson family to me is a sisterhood. The relationships I’ve created over these months are the best I’ve ever had. The people that are still around have a certain character. I don’t know. It’s just some dope ass people that I’m really glad to know. They will hold you to your word. They truly want to see the best for you. And you can just be honest with them no matter what.

Alexis

The family are the people that I met on the front lines in the very first days. I got gassed with them. I got shot at with them. I got arrested with them. I’ve set up organizational spaces with them. People I actually fucking like. We built it from there. We’ve just, you know, we have a bond and they are the people I ain’t never got to ask if they’re riding.

Kristina (pseudonym)

The movement family is like these people that some of them you can’t stand but you still don’t want the police to fuck them up. It’s like when you don’t really like all the people in your actual family but you still deal with them, and you don’t want anybody else messing with them. That’s exactly what it is. There are so many people I love and adore and there’s people you don’t speak to but you’ll sit outside the jail and make sure the police don’t kill them.

Mary (pseudonym)

I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in something so enormously significant. There is definitely a profound love. I mean, when you’re in extraordinary situations, emergency situations, and there are people standing next to you that have your back. There is an enormous emotional support for one another, a depth of love and endurance. . . . It’s a family. But it’s a family built on the violence enacted in this society. It’s a community of choice and I need to be here right now.

Many of those interviewed described the movement as leaderless and leaderful simultaneously. “People, especially the women, will step up when it really counts,” one woman in her twenties said, “but at the end of the day, nobody is more important than anybody else in this movement.” People also observed that nobody was beyond reproach. “The minute someone thinks they’re all that, there’s someone else lett’n ’em know they need to check themself,” Gloria shared. While struggles for hierarchy clearly occurred, protesters often spoke about the organic nature of actions in contrast to formal organizational structures that emphasize planning, define strict parameters of execution, and identify consistent people in charge. Leaders emerged in and through actions; however, to many, protest was an act of everyday life. These actions often seemed to “just happen” in the heat of protest, without planning, and witnesses described how the performative and improvisational qualities of actions would organically emerge in particular ways at particular moments.

One such organic action took place on October 8, 2014. People who had been protesting the killing of Michael Brown were immediately outraged when an off-duty police officer working as a security guard in the City of St. Louis fired seventeen times on VonDerrit Myers, killing the Black teenager as he ran away. For several nights protesters shut down the major thoroughfare of Grand Avenue in South St. Louis city. A few days later, they marched across, and shut down, Interstate 44 and proceeded to enter the campus of nearby St. Louis University (SLU). There, they were joined by hundreds of university students. Coinciding with the Occupy movement, over a thousand people set up tents and occupied the campus for six days under the banner of Occupy SLU. SLU ultimately conceded to thirteen demands made by the Black Student Alliance, Tribe X—a newly formed organization of Ferguson protesters—and the established nongovernmental organization Metro St. Louis Coalition for Inclusion and Equity. In exchange, students disbanded and protesters agreed to leave the campus. Like many of the actions that characterize the Ferguson protest movement, Occupy SLU was not planned but unfolded minute by minute as a few individuals stepped up and were able to lead large crowds and determine strategy “on the fly.” In fact, like Occupy SLU, the actions that were later viewed as having the most impact by protesters and people in the region alike were not planned but occurred in direct response to conditions on the ground. Alisha, a Ferguson protester and one of the coleaders of Occupy SLU (and a SLU student herself) described those days.

Alisha

Occupy SLU itself was never planned. We were planning to go to SLU, but we were never planning to stay at SLU, so none of the occupation, none of the demands, none of the accords were pre-planned. We literally just marched. I think it was a crowd of about two thousand people that started in Shaw. We had them as two separate groups, walking down Grand and, right by the Starbucks, we got met by a line of military police, geared up and blocking us.

And we stood there, in two lines, and I remember we had certain people who were supposed to talk to the police. Eventually, they had to move, because we made sure to keep everybody on the sidewalk, and legally, you can’t block people from walking on the sidewalk. So they had to move out of our way. [The] DPS officers were trying to negotiate with us, because, we, myself, and some other school students were in the front, and they recognized us. And they were like, “Oh, don’t do this, this is mid-terms week. These kids need to study, like, don’t do this, this isn’t the time for this. Then Jonathan pulled out his ID and then the DPS officer was like, “Well the school students can come in, but y’all can’t, nobody else can come with y’all.” So Jonathan said, “These are all my guests.” And then, just like that, everybody just marched in, and went into the campus and chanted as we walked. And all the school students were holding up their IDs, and then we walked to the clock tower, and we stood out there.

And so a lot of people don’t know that VonDerrit Myers’s dad works at SLU, which is another reason why we felt like that should happen there. He worked at SLU so we felt SLU shouldn’t get to be silent. First of all, you’re St. Louis University, so these things are happening in your community. But, an employee is involved in this, and previous to that, I had gotten emails that were like, “Oh, don’t worry, we’re going to keep you safe,” and I’m just like, “What does that mean, you’re going to keep me safe? Because I’m a SLU student and I’m going to Ferguson every night.”

And when we got there to the clock tower at SLU, the parents of VonDerrit Myers talked about their son, their loss, how they were feeling, how grateful they were, how they had never felt like this before, that they had any support from St. Louis University community. They kind of felt like nobody cared. And then there were different community members who came up and talked and spoke, so we must have been there for like a good thirty minutes before we posed the question, Do we want to keep marching or do we want to keep going?

I remember somebody saying, “Nah, we’ve been marching for like sixty days. We want to do something different. We don’t want to just keep marching.” So, to us, doing something different meant, okay, we’re going to stay here. And that was the beginning of Occupy SLU and the encampment. We were there for six days. During those days, students brought food down and blankets, and other people came down to the campus and brought food and blankets. There were news cameras. And in the end, SLU’s president had to sign a concession to our demands.

The organic action and seeming success of Occupy SLU coincided with a series of planned actions and resistance activities called Ferguson October, which were organized by several groups, some of which were established organizations in the region and others that had formed as part of Ferguson resistance. Advertised nationally on social media and attended by hundreds from outside the region throughout the month, the planning and execution of Ferguson October revealed many existing fissures between those who had been on the front lines since August 9 and those who were perceived to be riding a wave of local and national attention, especially with regard to how the resources that were pouring in from around the country would be collected and allocated. While those on the front lines perceived newly involved people as Johnny-come-latelies, those who considered themselves long-time radicals in the region were frustrated by young activists’ reluctance to join well-established organizations and recognize the work of civil rights–era activists who had been organizing in St. Louis for decades. Many young protesters were frustrated with being dismissed by “old heads” as simply “street protesters,” especially women, queer, and trans individuals who consistently criticized what they saw as histories of heteropatriarchy and respectability politics, and they pointed to what they considered as a lack of sustained progress in the region and the country. Protesters were particularly critical of nationally recognized activists who, to them, represented the respectability politics of municipal leaders and others they were struggling against and who they believed were exploiting the grief of Brown’s family. This included the Reverend Al Sharpton who spoke at Brown’s funeral, stating,

Can you imagine [Michael Brown’s parents] are heartbroken? Their son taken, discarded and marginalized. And they have to stop mourning to get you to control your anger, like you’re more angry than they are? . . . And now we get to the 21st century, we get to where we got some positions of power. And you decide it ain’t Black no more to be successful. Now you want to be a nigga and call your woman a ho. You’ve lost where you’ve come from. We’ve got to clean up our community so we can clean up the United States of America.1

In response to criticisms that they were in engaging in angry, nonpeaceful protests, people like Mary responded this way: “They say this isn’t peaceful because there are drums, and there’s shouting, and things are getting interrupted. Because to them peaceful means quiet, and silence, while other people endure violence. It’s like yeah, here’s the thing, ‘I’m not choking you right now. I’m not physically hurting you.’ So this is peaceful.”

There were particularly heightened tensions between protesters and the Organization for Black Struggle (OBS) and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE). OBS was founded in 1980 “to address, through a number of organizing strategies, quality of life issues affecting the black community.”2 The founding group was made up of seasoned Black activists, including Jamala Rogers and Percy Green III, who had a long history of putting their bodies on the line and targeting specific racist policies in St. Louis as members of the St. Louis chapter of the Congress of Racial Equity and Action Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes—which was later renamed as Action Committee to Improve Opportunities Now. The latter “used militant, nonviolent direct action to fight for more and better black employment at the city’s major firms,” as well as addressing police brutality and the connections between race and class during the 1960s and 1970s.3 In fact, the ways in which Ferguson protesters used spectacle and made people in the region uncomfortably confront pain and privilege continued a long tradition of similar methods utilized by those struggling against a “culture of opposition” in St. Louis.4 MORE, which was originally the St. Louis chapter of the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now, focuses on community organizing around inequalities affecting low- and moderate-income people and has had a predominantly white leadership.

The connection of OBS with 1960s- and 1970s-era Black militant tactics and MORE’s history as a predominately white liberal organization exposed one example of how generation and race played out when it came to organizing, supporting, and funding more recent protest efforts. Ferguson protesters’ generation and knowledge, or as some argued, lack thereof, regarding the legacies of Black struggle in St. Louis became apparent in relation to interactions between emerging resistance efforts and the work of OBS and MORE. If, as Clarence Lang argues, “Civil Rights and Black Power were neither dichotomous nor seamless, but rather discernible phases in an ongoing Black Freedom Movement”5 in St. Louis, then the Ferguson protesters could be understood as yet another “discernable phase,” following a long history of embodied resistance. Yet many Ferguson protesters were frustrated with the correlation to OBS and what they interpreted as an attempted coopting by older activists who had, as many put it, “already had their moment.” MORE, on the other hand, was viewed by many in Ferguson resistance as the classic predominantly white liberal organization capitalizing on Black struggle.6

Darwin (pseudonym)

So there were only two organizations that were already organized when Ferguson started. We didn’t initially think about officially organizing ourselves because I guess we thought we’d only be out there two or three days. Once it got into weeks and then months, we realized really fast that was a huge mistake we made entrusting the financial and organizational stuff to OBS and MORE.

Brittany

You got the organization MORE, that is predominantly white teaming up with OBS, a predominantly Black organization that hasn’t had any status in like twenty years. No one’s heard of them except those directly involved in community organizing. MORE, because it’s white, has the resources, so there was a benefit for OBS to team up with them. Any money that came into Ferguson was funneled through MORE to get to where the money was needed. The problem was white folks go home at the end of the day, and they’re not directly affected. They didn’t know where the money was needed because they weren’t out there. And OBS had to agree to a lot of stuff because people thought MORE was more legitimate. So there you have it, a white organization controlling and profiting from Black work.

Diamond

So in late August I was scouted by OBS because they wanted people from the front lines. But they didn’t have the funds so I got traded to MORE with some other protesters. We started working for MORE and we were supposed to come up with proposals of what people actually wanted to see happen in the community. When we did, it was all, “No, no, no, we can’t do that.” And I was like, “I thought you guys were about doing stuff out here with all the resources you collected. You pulled us away from active protest to help you, and now you’re saying no to everything that we’re bringing you from the community.”

They actually told us we couldn’t protest while working for them. Then they said doing things like working on neighborhood restoration, creating safe spaces, helping kids—that’s not what they’re about. So we felt like we got tricked. And we were promised money for housing and things like that in return, and then they said, “Yeah, no. Never mind. We actually don’t have it for you.”

Jonathan

So a lot of the frustration has been with MORE and OBS. And “Cut the Check” will always be symbolic of that issue. Tribe X has had issues with not just them but other organizations that haven’t stepped up or made themselves accountable. Better Family Life, Urban League, United Way, all these organizations are using Ferguson to fund their service work but they’re not being held accountable to the people that brought the attention and funding to them.

Ultimately, the tensions that arose between young protesters, who were accustomed to spontaneously responding to conditions in front of them, and older organizers with decades of strategic planning experience and established institutionalized structures, resulted in failed collaboration on multiple levels. While some examples of coming together were seen, what transpired during Ferguson October revealed that established and revered organizations and donors were reluctant to relinquish substantial control and resources to the more organic forms of resistance, and young leaders placed little trust in institutional and organizational structures.

This schism, as well as what occurs when voices demand to be heard, was particularly evident at the Ferguson October interfaith event for clergy and activists on October 12, called “Mass Meeting on Ferguson,” which was attended by more than a thousand people. Organized by local clergy, established organizations, and selected protesters—most of whom were men—the event began with a march of clergy ending at the Chaifetz Arena on the SLU campus. Speakers were to include local and national clergy such as Cornel West and Jim Wallis. About an hour into the event, young people in the audience began to speak out during the speech of Cornell William Brooks, the president of the NAACP. Several stood up and began chanting, “Let them speak,” referring to activists in the audience. The speakers seated on the podium joined in and several young activists approached the stage. After a few minutes, Traci Blackmon, a local pastor who was moderating the event, came to the podium and announced, “The next voice we will hear will be a word from the streets.” Representing somewhat divergent lines of the protest family, Tef Poe and Ashley Yates were allowed to speak at that point on behalf of activists. Poe, an outspoken St. Louis rap artist who helped lead a Ferguson delegation to the United Nations, called out academics, clergy, and other artists for not showing up in the initial and sustained days of protest, stating, among other things, “This ain’t your grandparents’ civil rights movement.”7 Yates, challenging notions of peaceful protest, focused much of what she said on righteous anger and the links between affective rage and expressions of humanity. She passionately drew parallels between the association of blackness with risk and inhuman practices that place property above life, stating,

I sat in a closed-council meeting with some Ferguson representatives. There were a lot of business owners there. One of the things they talked about was the fear of riots. They talked about the fear of property values decreasing and customers decreasing and what their home value would look like after “Ferguson” was said and done. I looked each and every one of them in the eyes and I asked them what the value of their house was and what it had been. Each of them was able to tell me a number. Then I looked them in the eyes and I said, “What’s the value of a life that was born in 1996?”

What was very apparent was that the “Mass Meeting on Ferguson” had suddenly shifted from a planned event to a spontaneous and organic expression that is the essence of Ferguson resistance.8

As protesters entered their third month of actions, the differences between protest leaders like Poe and Yates and the people each represented at the “Mass Meeting” continued to emerge in the space of protest. The women who had been leading protests since mid-August continued to be alienated by the attention and resources given to male activists, especially local celebrities and music artists who claimed to speak for the movement as a whole but who many felt were promoting their careers through activist activities. While women made up the majority of consistent protesters, both men and women observed that the media regularly interviewed and had cameras on men, either because they sought men out or because men were inserting themselves in those spaces. They also observed that money and resources that eventually made it to the so-called street protesters were funneled to, and distributed by, organizations and institutions largely led by men, including Black churches. Some protesters also expressed frustration with older Black women, who they felt did not hold Black men accountable and granted them special privileges, revealing more generational and respectability politics. Protesters identified class and educational distinctions regarding who got to speak on behalf of the movement and who was recognized nationally as a leader. On the other hand, people and organizations that to many represented male patriarchy, such as Louis Farrakhan and the Million Man March, were using iconography and images associated with Black women leaders to promote causes without their permission.

Brittany

Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam are promoting their march on October 10th using my image, and I was so upset because I’m a proud gay woman and I’ve had to carve out my own space being a Black gay woman in a Black liberation movement. Because oftentimes people don’t really know how to accept the fact that if you’re fighting for Black liberation you’re fighting for all people not just straight cisgendered Black folks. And I was like, “No, you’re not about to use me to promote your march because I’m not comin’ to your march because I don’t feel safe at your march.” I don’t think it is okay to be openly against gay people and then have an openly gay person on your flier just to promote your event. I’m going to be consistent with my message. I’m not going to be used. I’m not going to be anybody’s Black women’s face. I’m not doing that.9

Nell (pseudonym)

During Ferguson October, the people coming in from outside to organize wanted to deal with the orgs and groups headed by men. I’m not saying all those guys didn’t mean well most of the time, but they became the focus of attention when things were more mainstream.

“Unsung Haiku”

There was this one night at the PD when some rapper pulled up in one of his vans that had his name and all his social media stuff on the side. He parked it so media cameras had it in the background. I was like, “Man, you going to have to move this truck or we’re flipping it.” There were a lot of artists who came out there for the sake of getting footage. They’d put revolutionary lyrics in their songs but I know, as an artist who was actually out there every day, they were only out there to show face. No chanting, no sign, no nothing. Just taking lots of selfies.

Kristina (pseudonym)

And you’re not supposed to tell them [hetero men] anything either. Within the movement we were being suppressed as Black women, and if we tried to do anything nice for ourselves, watch out. A select few [hetero men] were benefitting from the movement. Getting money from orgs and stuff while we could barely eat. And they were the ones telling us to love and support each other but not helping anybody out. Or telling us to go clean somebody’s house for money while they’re just getting checks for showing up. Why would I go scream at the police but then remain silent about y’all’s stuff. They just really starting to resemble my oppressor, and I’ve liberated myself from that shit.

Mary (pseudonym)

It’s also about generation because a lot of the older Black women still hold up the men, and support them. They don’t think Black men should be challenged in public. And I find that really interesting. I think, “Are you really gonna put up with that?” Because there was a time when I would have too, but I’ve been changed by these young women leaders. Like some of the older women think men should not have to do work like mopping, sweeping, and cooking. There’s also not nearly as many men in the movement as women. When the men are there they will try to take charge and when they’re not, things will get done. There are few men who respect the work and do important stuff, but I can count them on one hand.

Brittany

Lately I’ve been holding men to the same expectation that I hold white people. I refuse to do the work for them. You know, I will be damned if in fifty years from now Tef Poe is painted as the pinnacle leader of the movement, you know. Or if any cisgendered man is because he fits the narrative people want to tell. We need to get this history right.

Darwin (pseudonym)

The one thing I would say is that if a real problem comes up at an action, people go get a man before they go get a female. That has happened a whole lot. And I’ve been one of those chosen people. Like just the presence of a man settles things down. And I would say that even though this is a women’s led movement, they have the control but none of the power in the form of money or resources. So they can’t actually steer the larger movement and get the results they want because the money gets given to the men. Either directly or to their organizations that they lead.

Every time we need a space, the women have to go talk to a man. Like, “Hey, can we meet at your church?” Then we get there, and the women lead. But they don’t get money or anything else. And that’s the truth. The donors look at organizations, and every time they give to the one that’s led by a man. The media, the politicians, the officials, they always go to the men first. The access to money and the distribution of funds have really been glossed over when people talk about this movement. I’m sorry, it just has.

Alisha

You have so many people profiting from Ferguson. Building their careers and their platforms on Ferguson, but they’ve never even gone to an action. It happens all the time. So many people are supposed to be more qualified to talk about this than the people on the streets. People who never put their bodies on the line are getting on planes that other people paid for. Staying in hotels that other people paid for. And the people in the streets are the people at the bottom, a lot of them. Like I’m just trying to get groceries for next week.

Similar conflicts rooted in patriarchy and heteronormativity arose around issues of intersectional oppressions. While many of those interviewed repeatedly stated their appreciation for intersectional conversations and the way difficult discussions shaped the movement, some people, mostly men, expressed dislike for these conversations and were frustrated by the issues women and queer protesters relentlessly brought up. Several protesters who identified as straight Black men complained at length that discussions among protesters veered too far away from a focus on Mike Brown and police brutality specifically against young Black men. These interviews highlighted many of the issues and contradictions brought up by women regarding oppressive attitudes and practices within the movement and foregrounded how multiple processes of identity formation and experience are always at work within groups that are historically and politically misrecognized and portrayed as a single unified group. These differences and tensions—which can be viewed as inherent within, and productive to, the spaces of struggle—consistently came up.

E. J.

So the LGBT and the rest of whatever letter they keep adding, community, they definitely did their part in the beginning. Because, you know, they’re Black. In the beginning, it was like, as long as you’re Black, that’s all that matters because this is about Black liberation. But once you’re like trying to make this more than a Black thing, like where are you going with that? Like we’re all just doing the work. I was never down on no LGBT, or whatever those letters are, that was actually doing work. You’re doing this because you’re Black. Like you could get killed because you’re Black. All these other identities and shit ain’t gonna get you any more killed.

The interviews with men who identified as straight and cisgendered were consistently twice as long (at least) as all other interviews conducted with protesters, although the same questions were asked. In several of these interviews the men spent much of the time making a case that their work was underappreciated. The same men insisted that tensions between men and women, or between straight and queer people, “were just never an issue.” These interviews, however, are full of contradictions similar to the contradictions that queer theory aims to reveal. The vulnerability of Black bodies was a central theme in all the interviews, but it was approached from completely different vantage points for people identifying as straight men versus queer women. The assumed availability and therefore vulnerability of the women’s bodies, for instance, was consistently challenged by young women protesters and was a consistent theme of frustration in interviews with women. Queer Black women stated over and over that straight men were constantly offended by the “unavailability” of queer feminized bodies, which they said provoked hostility toward them. Many straight men, however, claimed to respect all women, straight or otherwise, yet also indicated that women were supposed to act in a certain way in order for respect to be earned. Men complained that queer women did not appreciate the hypervulnerability of young Black straight men’s bodies, like that of Michael Brown, and that, by expanding the focus beyond young Black men targeted by the police, women were putting the most vulnerable lives—those of young Black men—at even more risk. The ways by which protesters across the spectrums of age, gender, and sexuality experienced vulnerability, risk, and attachment (of and to their own bodies and the bodies of others) ultimately determined how they imagined the world and the work of resistance. These factors also shaped how they viewed their own participation in the spaces of protests.

Darwin (pseudonym)

I don’t think queer people added anything to the conversations. You know, that was just never part of it. Why should I care who you sleep with? We don’t need to talk about that. But I guess they brought more leadership because, you know, that community is already organized. They’ve been protesting for years. I guess because their leadership has been the most stable, they’re important in that way.

But there’s never been any dynamics between the queer people and the straight people. You know, I think I have the best perspective on this because I’m one of the few males that been out there the whole time. I mean, in the beginning there were a bunch of males out there. Now there’s a limited amount. And I’m here to tell you that being involved in it together with women was never an issue. Not one time did someone come up to me and say, “Man, I ain’t doing this because a woman said it.” It just never came up.

The only time a problem arose was when a woman thought she was being disrespected but they weren’t actually. Not one guy ever complained about taking orders from a woman. Sometimes they thought the women were a little mean about the way they said things. But never about their ability to lead. Like I’m the first one who ever said this is a woman-led movement. No one said it before I did. No one. I was telling the media when they were constantly interviewing me on camera, I said, “Well, the women are smarter, they’re stronger, and they’re sober.” And that’s the truth.

And then people come down here and they see us fighting and they see girls holding hands and they see guys at meetings talkin’ bout their boyfriends. They like, “What’s going on here? I thought people were out here protesting for Black folks.” You gotta think about that.

Mitchell

Some people think gays get treated differently where honestly I don’t think they do at all. Before all this shit happened I had never even talked to a gay person. I’d never even met one I knew was gay. So when I would see gay people they would think I had a problem with them because I didn’t talk to them. I just don’t have anything to say to them. I don’t have a problem with them.

Like Charles Wade and DeRay McKessen, they’re openly gay and I’ve talked to them plenty. I went to eat with them even. But that doesn’t make me gay. I don’t have no problem sharing that I’m not gay. I don’t see why people bring all that extra shit in because that’s when you start confusing people. We’re gonna confuse the kids. They ain’t gonna turn this into “Gay Lives Matter.” What the hell. Now you’re putting something on them they didn’t even come here for. For you to do that to a kid? That’s fucked up because you’re taking advantage of them. You’re confusing them. We should be leading kids in the direction we want them to go. And that’s not the direction.

My mom did it right. But I have a gay cousin so I’m like more open to this stuff. Like I’ll talk to gay people. I’ve got friends that won’t even talk to them. I was kind of like exposed to it comin’ up so I feel more comfortable talking to them. But you still got people that’s not going to be as open as I am. You’re not going to see no straight guy go talk to a lesbian. That’s just not going to happen. They’re not going to go up to a lesbian and be like, “Hey how ’bout that Royals game last night?” We’ve got bigger issues than gay rights. We’ve got young Black men dyin’ for no reason.

E. J.

But then they started talkin’ bout all this intersectionality and whatever shit. Like there’s different kinds of oppression. Like what happened with the Civil Rights Movement when people started forgetting what it’s actually about. Like the energy started shifting over to like the LGBT shit. And the feminists and all, they started sayin’ like we got to recognize all this other stuff. I thought I was out here for Mike Brown. Who is paying you all to say that? Because they gotta be paying you. Because you weren’t saying that shit in the beginning. Okay, you are what you are, but don’t derail the movement trying to shift this to some other shit that it’s not actually about. I am fully against that. I don’t need to listen to this feminist shit. Did you know feminism was started by white women? And white women and Asian women ain’t got no respect for Black women. Black women have a way different struggle so don’t be usin’ all this feminist talk.

I’m still learnin’ how to not to say “bitch” or “ho” too much when I talk ’bout a woman because you’re not supposed to say that nowadays. They get offended. This is a new world. Nobody really taught us how to work together. I definitely have had numerous conversations with many feminists that say, “Hey, don’t call us bitch, don’t say female. Call us women.” But when they’re doin’ wrong and I call ’em on it, I say, “Woman, get your ass back over here.” And they’re like, see, that’s misogyny. I’m like, “No it isn’t.” Or like a female decides she wants to be promiscuous. If she’s a feminist, I can’t call her a ho. As long as she claims feminism, she can do whatever she wants. What’s that about? That’s why I can’t go along with the feminist thing. They just make shit up as they go along. That’s what the police do too. That’s what the government does. They act like the government.

Roderick Ferguson points out that scholars also perpetuate tropes of Black gendered deviance. He argues that this is done by using a feminist frame to identify the detachment of (white) women from a male head as agency while framing Black single mothers and gender-nonconforming individuals as dependent, deviant, and/or pathological. Citing William Julius Wilson specifically, Ferguson argues that Wilson’s book The Truly Disadvantaged “implies that black women function to consummate black men as liberal subjects, arguing for the universalization of black men through access to black women’s bodies.”10 Certainly the viewpoints shared by women and men concerning Black women’s bodies and the universalization of Black men, as expressed in excerpts above, support Ferguson’s observations. The use of the words female and the females as nouns was a particularly common practice of the men interviewed. Many of the women cited this usage as further evidence of how Black men were using feminism as an additional way to objectify women’s bodies and minds. For these men, feminism only applied to females who claimed a sexual identity apart from men and, by calling them “the females,” hetero men shifted the focus from claimed identities to conferred subjectivities attached to specific anatomies.

People across gender identification, age, and sexual orientation who made up Ferguson resistance did coalesce around a commonly stated frustration—that their efforts were consistently conflated with, or dismissed as, just another manifestation of the Black Lives Matter movement. To many people who are unfamiliar with the specific events and people that came to make up the Ferguson Protest Movement, Ferguson is synonymous with what is today understood as the Black Lives Matter movement, or evolving iterations such as the Movement for Black Lives. Most Ferguson protesters, however, reported exasperation regarding this perception. Many, in fact, went as far as to say that Black Lives Matter, which is an organization founded by queer Black women following the death of Trayvon Martin, unrightfully capitalized on and conveniently coopted the work of Ferguson resistance. While some leaders did specifically identify with the Black Lives Matter organization, as cohesively working in a similar direction as Ferguson protesters, many felt that the Black Lives Matter organization had exploited the sacrifices of Ferguson protesters and the visibility of events that had traumatized people in the St. Louis region. This frustration regarding important distinctions between the Ferguson Protest Movement and Black Lives Matter (the organization and the subsequent movement) transcended many of the differences between the multiple identities represented across Ferguson resistance.

Brittany

I did not know about the Black Lives Matter organization until they came here last August. They made their first bus ride here. That’s when I was introduced [to the founders]. It’s confusing to people because there is this organization called Black Lives Matter that is said to have started the slogan and then you have this movement that would not have happened had it not been for the people in St. Louis and Ferguson standing up. . . .

I feel like it takes away from the effort folks in this city put into this movement. The whole movement is now credited to an organization somewhere else rather than the people that stood up here. And folks at the organization are not willing to clarify that the movement and the organization are two separate things. They’ve claimed that recognition.

E. J.

The Ferguson situation after Mike Brown was like a storm at sea. And Black Lives Matter was like a surfer that was able to ride that wave, to make it look like they were at the center of it. Most people did not know that the Black Lives Matter organization existed until after Mike Brown got killed. Most people don’t even know it’s an organization now. It’s a trendy little chant and hashtag that ties together the work of a lot of people in a lot of places, but Ferguson put it on the map.

Cassandra (pseudonym)

I think the most troubling organization to me is Black Lives Matter. I think about this a lot and I’m going to think about it until somebody actually says something. I remember when we first took to the streets in August. And I remember when I first met Alicia and Patrisse and Diana weeks later at Starsky’s church and they wanted to interview us for an article Alicia was writing about the Bay Area. And at the time I didn’t know what Black Lives Matter was. Nobody did.

I didn’t know what was unfolding. I thought everyone that came on their freedom bus just wanted to help. I didn’t know they were coming to build a brand and capitalize on the backs of people that sacrificed and continue to sacrifice their lives. Like just yesterday someone on Facebook was commenting, “Alicia Garza was invited to the State of the Union and she deserves to be there because she started this movement.” And I was like, “No, she was the founder of an organization.” And he was like, “What’s the difference, it’s just semantics.” There’s actually a big difference. They refuse to denounce that narrative. This is erasure. It’s revisionist history. It’s queer Black women erasing queer Black women.

Alexis

Black Lives Matter was not a movement before Ferguson, it was solely an organization. If it were not for the Ferguson protesters there would be no Black Lives Matter movement. Period.

Mama Cat

We decided Diamond was going to be the one to articulate [to the founders of the Black Lives Matter organization] how we were feeling. So I was standing there and [one of the founders] looks into Diamond’s eyes and says, “I see you. I hear you. I, I do, I do, I hear you.” And we had a meeting right after that and [another Ferguson protester] said to Diamond, “She’s going to grab you by the shoulders and say, ‘I see you. I hear you.’ And Diamond says, “She already did that.”

Many people interviewed also stated that they were frustrated with how they perceived the Black Lives Matter organization and other organizations that claimed to speak for the movement had reduced the struggle to a set of demands. They stated that asking for body cameras and more police training suggested that such things were sufficient to make Black lives nondisposable. Many Ferguson protesters argued, however, that this approach does not address the antiblackness they experienced daily and, by appealing to technologies of the liberal state, it reduces the saliency and potential for radical Black flesh to effectively disrupt systems rooted in white supremacy. The counterargument made by organizers such as those who started Campaign Zero is that a step in the right direction is still a step and that unapologetic protest and policy changes must occur together. Although there were many specific criticisms of Black Lives Matter as an organization, especially in the early days of protest, responses were more mixed regarding whether or not a conflation of Ferguson resistance with variations of Black Lives Matter as a national movement was a good or bad thing from a long-term perspective.

Kristina (pseudonym)

Black Lives Matter has nothing to do with St. Louis. They’ve been here but did they meet with the community? No. They met with people they wanted to meet with. That’s how they entered the community. I’ve spoken to all three of the founding members in person but I’ve never organized with them. They organize with an elite group of hand-selected people. This has got to be confusing to people that don’t actually know the history and what’s been happening. Like if you weren’t in Ferguson you just believe what the media tells you about Black Lives Matter. Why wouldn’t you?

Jonathan

The amount of focus that has been put on Black struggle because of Ferguson is amazing. I never thought there would be such national and international attention put back on that struggle at this time. People credit BLM with doing that, but it was Ferguson that made these conversations possible. I think when you say “Black Lives Matter,” it ends up putting a blanket over the whole character and color of people in Ferguson. I’m fine with it being used as long as you clarify what you’re talking about.

Mr. Moff

Last year [Lost Voices] hosted a Stop the Violence march. It was huge. We reached out to everyone we could think of—priests, pastors, aldermen, and we reached out to Black Lives Matter. Instead of helping us, they decided to hold their own march instead. And theirs was not successful because they were too busy making themselves look good and we had all the people.

Ongoing discussions and disagreements between core leaders continue to pose important questions regarding the relationship between the Ferguson protest family, the Black Lives Matter organization, and Black struggle more generally.11 Many of those who prioritized local issues and continue to focus attention on reform in the St. Louis region are publicly critical of Ferguson leaders who gained a national spotlight and are now indistinguishable from Black Lives Matter platforms.12 The divisions discussed above with regard to those who do not support intersectional politics are fully evident as well. The execution-style murder of protester Darren Seals (aka King D Seals) on September 6, 2016, brought many of these disagreements and hard feelings into public view through social media. While there was shared animosity toward the police and consensus that the investigation of Seals’s death would not be carried out in a just manner, those within Seals’s network of activists redirected much of their anger and grief toward the women and queer of color leaders. Some alluded that protesters at odds with Seals within the movement were indirectly responsible for his death. Those who were not in Seals’s circle of activists attempted to walk a line between acknowledging disagreements with Seals and showing respect for his passion for the movement.

As discussed previously with regard to the gendered oppressions experienced within the movement, the generational and racial conflicts that arose between Ferguson protesters and established organizations such as OBS and MORE, and the misrecognitions concerning relationships to, and between, the Black Lives Matter organization and movement are constitutive of the history and conditions of organizing around shared struggle. These contestations of meaning, belonging, territory, and imagination, as well as concerns regarding who may speak for whom, reveal the multivalent and fluid conditions of Black identity and the shared yet differing experiences of blackness, which include traumas, loss, and displacements as well as magnificent expressions of life and freedom. For Stuart Hall, “imaginative rediscoveries” require the acknowledgment of difference and rupture while remembering that “what we share is precisely the experience of a profound discontinuity.”13 Robin D. G. Kelley describes the imaginative capacity of Black radicalism as “freedom dreams,” recognizing that “things are not what they seem and that the desires, hopes, and intentions of the people who fought [and fight] for change cannot be easily categorized, contained, or explained.”14 It is tempting to try to put each group or individual that appears in this story in a box with a label, and in some ways analysis does exactly that as a means to provide a level of understanding. It is important to at least state, however, that the desires, hopes, and intentions of all the people represented consistently move across boundaries that are themselves in flux.

In contrast to Black respectability politics, which many people associate with the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement (and Black municipal leaders in the St. Louis region), and to the heteropatriarchy embedded within past Black liberation organizations and activities in the 1950s through 1970s,15 resistance that emerged in Ferguson pushes and interrogates the boundaries of Black intelligibility. This is a queer of color intervention in the praxis of protest in the same way queer of color critique intervenes in the historical and theoretical frameworks of liberation theory.16 The bodies and voices of Ferguson protesters call into question the myriad ways previously invisible people fundamentally shaped the history of resistance against racialized violence and oppression. By specifically emphasizing a love of blackness and themselves, an unapologetic and unwavering visibility, and the multiplicity of intersecting identities, Ferguson resistance activates an always-already-present capacity for blackness to imagine freedom in response to violence. The work of Ferguson resistance can be viewed as a continuum of Black feminist praxis that emphasizes the relationship between intersecting oppressions yet recognizes gendered antiblackness as fundamental to structures of oppression. Ula Taylor reminds us, “the ultimate goal of black feminism is to create a political movement that not only struggles against exploitative capitalism . . . but that also seeks to develop institutions to protect what the dominant culture has little respect and value for—black women’s minds and bodies.”17