Five minutes after walking to the podium to begin moderating a panel discussion of a forum titled “Ferguson: Reporting in Chaos, Finding Context,” I collapsed. Then I threw up. Someone called EMS, and I was carted off to Saint Louis University Hospital in an ambulance.
Before heading to the podium on September 29, I had sat among about 100 area high school students watching a St. Louis Post-Dispatch video about the newspaper’s coverage of the killing of Michael Brown Jr., an 18-year-old unarmed black man, by then-Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, who is white. A bad cold and some serious meds probably contributed to my aborted moderating duties, but I credit the Post-Dispatch video as the primary cause of my takedown.
I haven’t been right since Trayvon Martin. The killing of Michael Brown Jr. pushed me further toward the brink. I followed the case with the zeal of a prosecuting attorney – a real prosecutor, not St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch, who seemed to function as a defense attorney. I consumed every morsel of information, down to the reading and re-reading of the Department of Justice report. I wrote an op ed for the Post-Dispatch on the first anniversary of Michael’s death titled “The DOJ Got it Wrong: Why I Still Believe in Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.”
In between, I sparred with the Post-Dispatch over its coverage, like the time a story quoted, unchallenged, a forensic scientist who said that Michael tried to take Wilson’s gun; no forensic evidence proved any such thing.
More than two years after the fact, the Post-Dispatch video slammed me back into the fight. The 22-minute video was developed by the Post-Dispatch to showcase its extensive coverage, which garnered the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize for photography. It is technically beautiful, but frustratingly flawed.
The video heavily favored the view of police and local leaders: McCulloch, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar, then-Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson and former Ferguson Mayor Brian Fletcher. With a hefty chunk of screen time, Jackson laid out the police version of the events of August 9, 2014.
“We were just trying to maintain order,” Jackson declared. “They (the protesters) were really mad. What happened is a story was being broadcast that was not true. The ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ narrative was absurd.”
As Jackson spoke, a murmured strain of astonishment and disagreement rippled through the students.
Two of the three “everyday” people the video chose to highlight strongly identified with the police’s stance.
One was an African-American hair salon owner, who shared her impatience with the continuing inconvenience of the protests. Another was a young black father, flashing a gold tooth, who expressed his dismay that his son believed police could ever be a clear and present danger to him. Most voices of dissent were mere cameos, like that of the person who asked plaintively, “Why they shooting at us?”
The only sustained countervailing opinion was that of a Ferguson resident, a young black man who eloquently expressed an understanding of the unrest and questioned some of the official storyline. Not a word was included from black civic leaders, civil rights activists, elected officials or academicians – the African-American community’s counterpoints to McCulloch, Belmar, Jackson and Fletcher.
There were poignant flashes of pain and protest – stills and video – but the most dominant scenes were ones of violence and chaos – fires and looting – live and in living color. The causes of the unrest got less attention: that Michael Brown lay on Canfield Drive in the summer sun for four and a half hours; that numerous witnesses said he ran for his life before raising his hands in surrender; that it took a week for police to release Officer Wilson’s name – and they released it as if it were an afterthought during a news conference announcing a purported strong-arm robbery by Brown; that the “justice” system didn’t seem all that just. The few voices that spoke for Michael Brown and a community in pain were severely muted.
Showing this “law and order” video continues to perpetuate the racial divide, a chasm that’s unlikely to be bridged anytime soon if this video is any indication.
But my health is fine. “These things happen,” said my doctor at SLUH. Not to me. I’m going to take a sabbatical from all things Ferguson.
Gloria S. Ross is a freelance journalist and obituary writer in St. Louis.
