“We are looking for people who have been tear-gassed,” state Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal said, looking up from a laptop.
Lordell Rush, 27, was someone she was looking for.
“I was tear-gassed,” Rush said. “I also had a sniper rifle pointed at me.”
It turns out she was also looking for people who had sniper rifles pointed at them.
An African-American Democrat from University City, Chappelle-Nadal was collecting eyewitnesses who were personally impacted by the militarized police response to the protest movement sparked by the police shooting of Michael Brown. She planned to read their testimony on the floor of the Missouri Senate on Wednesday when it convened for a veto session.
“The veto session starts at noon,” she said. “I’ll call a special point of order and get up and talk about what my constituents and myself went through.”
Chappelle-Nadal certainly went through it, repeatedly on live television. A legislator known for her passion, fearlessness, sometimes recklessness, she dropped everything to support the young protestors who rose up after Brown, an unarmed black teen, was shot at least six times and killed on August 9 by a Ferguson police officer.
But Rush is not her constituent, according to the division of Missouri into Senate districts. A black man from the near south side of St. Louis city, his state senator is Jamilah Nasheed – another passionate, fearless, sometimes reckless African-American Democrat who supports the protest movement.
Indeed, Nasheed called the HealSTL office on West Florissant in Ferguson, where Chappelle-Nadal was working, while her constituent was contributing to future Senate testimony about police tactics.
“Don’t curse at me, senator,” Chappelle-Nadal said politely to Nasheed. “I have to vote my district. What’s-his-name put that language in there – it has a negative impact on my district.”
“What’s-his-name” was state Sen. Kurt Schaefer, a Republican from Boone County, who added to a noise violation bill a totally unconnected liability clause concerning a landfill in Bridgeton where radioactive waste has been burbling since the Manhattan Project of World War II. Chappelle-Nadal politely described her objection to that liability clause and the danger of radioactive waste festering in a pit near residential neighborhoods.
That conversation attracted a volunteer from the voter registration table, Jessie Geahlen. “Do you need a cancer researcher?” Geahlen asked.
Chappelle-Nadal nodded that she did not.
“I’d be happy to help,” Geahlen said. “That’s actually what I am most qualified to do.” A white woman who lives in the city of St. Louis, she has a PhD in cancer research from Washington University. “I’m just between jobs,” she said, explaining her presence in Ferguson, “and I wanted to help.”
HealSTL is the brain child of Antonio French, the St. Louis alderman, citizen journalist (who could go pro, if he chose) and now world-famous broadcast and social media commentator. An African American who was pursuing an MBA at Washington University when Ferguson exploded, French was huddled in a back office, door closed, though visible through a Plexiglas window. He’s still on schedule to graduate in December, in spite of losing a month now to constant organizing and reporting in Ferguson.
On this Friday afternoon, first French was huddled with Glenn Burleigh, a white progressive political organizer from the city, and then with an intent, professional-looking white couple who had the appearance of a possible funding source.
When Burleigh left the conference to rejoin the volunteers, he said he was accepting a modest wage to help professionalize the voter registration operation that French and colleagues are building in Ferguson. “I’m helping to make things more systematic,” Burleigh said, “for when we do go bigger.”
Voter education starts the moment one steps inside the HealSTL office, located in a strip mall next to the now-iconic McDonalds, whose golden arches loom like a beacon in war-zone photographs of the protests’ most violent nights. The demographics of Ferguson are hand-printed in black Sharpie on a placard right inside the door: 14,297 African Americans and 6,206 whites (more than a two-to-one margin) – plus 103 Asians and 597 “others” – in a city with a white mayor, white majority on the city council, and white police chief – all of whom spectacularly botched their response to a protest movement that put their inadequacy before the entire world.
Burleigh thinks like an organizer, not a protestor – he is bringing the needed method to the movement. “Once the rage is gone, how do we keep the energy focused and moving toward systemic change?” he asked. Informing the community and empowering it to vote its strength is one place to start, French and others decided, but that involves a complex process guided and restrained by law.
“Voter registration is a legally complicated matter,” Burleigh said. “You need somebody who did it before. You don’t want to mess up in a way that puts you or your volunteers in trouble.”
How can you get in trouble just by registering people to enjoy a constitutionally provided liberty like voting? By doing so in black communities.
“Any time you register people to vote in minority communities, for whatever reason, you put a target on your back,” Burleigh said. “I want to make sure when they pull the trigger, they don’t hit anything.”
“They” could be the Republican Party in Missouri, which loses ground whenever more African Americans vote. Missouri Republican leaders said it was “disgusting” that protestors were using the death of Michael Brown to register voters. “They” could also be white Democrats, who would face tougher primary opposition if more blacks voted. But French was also sniped at on Twitter by a fellow African-American Democrat, Patricia Bynes, an elected Democratic committeewoman in Ferguson. She accused French of “political looting.”
However, it’s difficult to see how French could “loot” voters, since he represents the 21st Ward in the city of St. Louis and HealSTL is registering voters in St. Louis County – where French has no intention of relocating. Nor is French an advocate of the city merging with the county to pool voters – especially now that he has seen first-hand what a mess county government and police can be. French has pledged for HealSTL to work with elected officials in the county, including Bynes, County Councilwoman Hazel Erby and state Rep. Courtney Curtis.
“And you can see that Maria is working out of the office,” Burleigh said, “and she is a county elected.”
Perhaps it’s just that anyone who is managing to get elected the way things stand now could be intimidated by an upstart political shop like HealSTL, where change is in the air and on the white boards and getting into young people’s heads.
“We discovered that people don’t know the political process,” Chappelle-Nadal said. “They don’t know that their elected leaders are supposed to be experiencing the same things as the people they represent.”
And then she was out the HealSTL door, looking for more people who had been tear-gassed or had sniper rifles pointed at them, just like their state senator.
HealSTL is on Twitter @HealSTL. Chappelle-Nadal also hopes to organize all Ferguson protest efforts under the rubric @EyesonFerguson.
