The Weekend of Resistance in Ferguson

by LENORA HANSON

Along with the incredible physical endurance of protestors, one of the other persistent resistances in Ferguson has been to attempts at representing what has happened there. Countless newsreels and interviews have now circulated in which people refuse rather than acquiesce to media engagement, which in turn fuels an almost neurotic media desire to make Ferguson into a product white America feels comfortable consuming. Although this excess of representation has been put to work by multiple sources in order to give comprehensible shape to this struggle—through the identity politics peddled by local officials, attempted interventions by national organizations, and media narratives that focus on the individual rather than the collective nature of politics—what we have seen over and over again in clips and footage from Ferguson is an active resistance on the part of people there to being represented.

In lieu of that line of work, perhaps the only “true” thing that can be said here by one outsider who participated in the Weekend of Resistance is the same thing that can be said any other day of the week since August 9, 2014: Ferguson community members face off with heavily armed riot police on a nightly basis. They engage in direct actions and non-violent antagonisms against a police force that has shown sadistic and inhumane violence against black people. Their response has changed Ferguson into a training ground for militant, organized action that is unmatched by any event in recent years in the United States. Theirs is a power that is immense but not inexhaustible.

This last reason is perhaps why the Weekend of Resistance was organized in the first place, as an attempt by two of the local black organizations to give their own narrative of what they have called “a movement, not a moment.” But contradictions abounded throughout the actions of that weekend, pointing to the vital differences in tactics, strategies, and goals that have put Ferguson at the forefront of militant struggle in the U.S.

Largely messaged as a peaceful Weekend of Action, the events of October 10-13 often showed that every space in Ferguson has been transformed into a site of struggle in which the semantics of peace appear empty. In Ferguson and surrounding cities, the same sidewalks that Darren Wilson told Mike Brown to get the fuck back on before shooting him have now become walkways declared illegal for pedestrian protestors by the police; these are concrete spaces in which “non-violence” is emptied of meaning, given that walking can lead to direct confrontations with a police force defined by acts of violence. Most important to highlight about the Weekend, then, is not the attempt to marshal a national movement in agreement about ideological principles, but the diversity of tactics and on the ground organizing that is being used to reveal that everyday spaces are sites of explosive struggles. It was, however, under the veil of a more homogenous and coherent political message that more heterogeneous activities were accomplished.

The main event of the weekend was a large rally, which culminated in speeches that focused on the power of a people’s movement. The call for the rally was publicized through national networks and brought a number of religious, political, and other organizations together: the Service Employees International Union, AFL-CIO, International Socialist Organization, Socialist Alternative, Revolutionary Communist Party, Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, Not 1 More Deportation, and numerous others. Against mass media characterizations of protestors as out of control and even animalistic, the tone of the rally was meant to emphasize non-violent direct action as a legitimate means for bringing Darren Wilson to justice. The crowd, which peaked at around 3,000 people in the afternoon, was a mix drawn from far beyond St. Louis, and the vast majority of people were not from Ferguson. Speakers were carefully selected from local youth activists and religious leaders who have participated in the protests, which is to say terrorized by police violence of course, and most provided a positive message about the importance of unity for a national movement for racial justice and structural change. Perhaps not surprisingly, media coverage of the event was positive, emphasizing the peaceful nature of the demonstration. National media’s response was the same, in that sense, as that expressed by a Highway Patrol Officer on Saturday: “My hope is that everything is peaceful, everybody gets to express their First Amendment rights in a peaceful manner.” Indeed, even the St. Louis police chief, Sam Dotson tweeted about the rally, “A safe day! The "Justice for Us All" March has safely ended and the after rally has started at Kiener Plaza. A good day for downtown #STL.”

But this larger action, billed as family friendly on the #FergusonOctober website and meant to represent Ferguson as a political space that everyone could enter, soon gave way to a host of other actions that revealed less consensus about the demands that can be met by such peaceful politics. A number of pre-planned but also fairly autonomous actions unfurled from there on out over the next two days.

From the safe and unifying space of a rally permitted by the city and represented as peaceful, the first unpermitted action of the weekend was a march that carried a handmade casket, fitted out by shattered mirrors on all sides and carried to the St. Louis police department.

Later that night, protestors divided time between Ferguson and Shaw, a neighboring city where on Oct. 9 an off-duty police officer working as a security guard killed Vonderrit Myers, after shooting him a total of 17 times. In Ferguson two or three hundred protestors marched from the location of Michael Brown’s murder to the Ferguson Police Department, maintaining an hours-long standoff with rows of riot police who blocked the entrance to the parking lot. Protestors, equipped with a speakers and stereo, set up a mobile sound system and blasted hip-hop and rap music, transforming the street in front of the station into an informal dance party. Others took turns taunting police officers on the front lines, demonstrating incredible skill at antagonizing police to their faces without ever making physical contact. Speakers and hecklers maintained an intense ambiance that seemed always on the verge of breaking into police repression, but that gave an impressive air of control to the protestors rather than police. Around 1:00 AM the bulk of police were removed, at least back the shadows of the station, probably because of the size of the crowd and the media attention focused on that event.

The same cannot be said of events in Shaw that night, where a smaller group of protestors were attacked and pepper sprayed by police around 2:00 AM when a group of local and outside activists attempted to occupy a local Quicktrip Market. Seventeen people were arrested that night in what a local organizer called “true civil disobedience,” perhaps as a critique of the larger sanctioned rally that had taken place hours before. Although media reported that protestors were attacking police and enacting random acts of property destruction, Twitter and FB feeds showed otherwise; ultimately the St. Louis police chief admitted that only one rock had been thrown and no protestors were actually charged with that act.

The next night one of the most media-friendly events of the weekend, a public discussion stacked with liberal spokespeople for organizations including the NAACP, was disrupted by Ferguson locals. About an hour into the event it was reappropriated by those at the frontlines, when a small group of activists demanded their turn to speak and were quickly supported by chants from the audience demanding the same. What followed was a sharp an unforgiving critique of the liberal community of St. Louis, which had failed to show up as one speaker put it. While the largely white St. Louis audience was being treated to this wake up call, hundreds of demonstrators were returning to Shaw in an organized march along Grand Boulevard. Protestors there took the chant “They think it’s a game, they think it’s a joke” into action and blocked streets with soccer and jump-roping matches. Others split off into a group that headed directly to St. Louis University, a largely white and affluent private university, to stage an occupation on that campus calling for students to “Get out of the dorms/Take to the streets.” Although appearing as a spontaneous result of the earlier evening disruption, it was almost certainly not unplanned and seems to have been yet another clandestine action organized for the weekend. The communiqué, “We’ve Discovered White People”, was later released by occupiers on October 16.

Early Monday morning a peaceful, non-violent Moral Monday action, taking its cue from the religiously inspired Moral Monday rallies in North Carolina the previous year, started off with a clergy-led action outside the Ferguson Police Station. Although many clergy and local religious leaders were arrested, including Cornel West, speakers at the action oftentimes reverted to claims about the injustice of Mike Brown’s death on the basis of his life as respectable citizen, son, and friend. Later actions, however, changed the tone from respectability and radiated out into splinter disruptions across St. Louis and Ferguson, attacking sites of law and capitalism. A planned afternoon occupation of the Mayor’s office, organized to deliver OBS’s list of demands to him, was rerouted thanks to a leak of that action, but other successful actions included an illegal banner drop at the City Capital, an attempted shut-down of a local energy corporation, Emerson Electric, that was targeted because its revenues topped $25 billion last year, and the temporary shut-down of three Wal-Mart’s by a roving group of activists demonstrating solidarity with John Crawford, the unarmed black man murdered in a Wal-Mart by police in Ohio recently.

While many of the other planned actions targeted politicians or county officials and oftentimes were organized to demand legal reform, it would be missing the point to reduce these actions to those ends. More important are the material and militant subjectivities under construction in these actions, who are teaching the rest of us that consistent and organized struggles requires a nimble knowledge of antagonizing law enforcement, the reappropriation of the space of political offices and universities, the rejection of outside representation by national organizations and media, and the negation of the power of the law in favor of a constituent power of communities. This is the material, subjective education of Ferguson, which should not be confused with a homogenous or agreed upon directive given by one or more leaders. Along with some of the stated goals of the above actions, the subjective experiences of struggle in Ferguson proved to be resistant to and stronger than any articulated and media-friendly endpoint might suggest. As one white St. Louis activist described to me on Monday, the past weeks of action in Ferguson have demonstrated that white people in St. Louis failed to respond in time to what was going on in Ferguson in August. Now it seems that some white youth are beginning to learn how to do militant politics from their black comrades. And this may be the only real way that the concrete and material knowledge being produced in Ferguson will, over time, translate elsewhere into a legitimate movement. This is the decisive ambivalence of the two-pronged or c/overt approach put into play over the Weekend of Resistance, which reminds us that it a such a movement will depend on the translation of real political knowledge and skills, not about how to Tweet the revolution or to collapse differences into consumable identities, but how to struggle everyday.