Anthony Shahid is a feared man in St. Louis in part because there is no way of knowing what will come out of his mouth next. For decades he has earned the reputation of someone willing to speak truth to power – right to power’s face, possibly while wearing a Ku Klux Klan costume, and often using language you can’t print in a newspaper.
But at the end of a long interview with The American about his role in recent protests, Shahid said perhaps the most unbelievable thing yet: “I don’t like to protest.”
That’s right. St. Louis’ most visible and notorious protestor does not like to protest.
“I just look at it like that’s my son lying in the street,” he said of the police killings of civilians that have driven him to protest again and again. “That’s your son. You’ve got to get out in the streets and protest that.”
Protest is a duty, not a pleasure.
Protest in the St. Louis region garnered national and international attention during the Ferguson unrest, where mostly young people new to protest were caught in the spotlight. It was a Twitter-driven movement, and young protestors who used Twitter the most became best known. But the role of veteran protestors, in particular Shahid, was essential in galvanizing the movement – and possibly in saving the lives of some of the younger protestors by cooling them down at key moments when they were willing to risk a more violent confrontation with police than simply protesting them.
Shahid was an early responder to Canfield Green Apartments in Ferguson on August 9, 2014, called to the scene by David Royal. Shahid was among the first people on the scene to counsel Dorian Johnson, who had just seen his friend Michael Brown killed by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. And while the circumstances of this killing and its aftermath – the terrible reputation of the Ferguson Police Department, their leaving Brown’s lifeless body on the pavement for hours, the deployment of dogs on grieving people – were such that a protest movement may have been galvanized without Shahid’s help, he worked very deliberately from the beginning to spark a movement.
“This will not be business as usual,” he told the young people on the streets of Canfield Green. He told them this would not be another one-day protest that dwindles into hopelessness and resignation.
The next day, when angry and grieving people began to congregate at the Ferguson Police Department, Shahid came upon a woman lost in prayer. He waited for her to finish praying, then said, “That’s enough praying for now.” He then pumped his arms in the air and chanted, “No justice! No peace!” Bradley J. Rayford captured this moment on film. It looked in retrospect like the defining moment of moving from grief to protest. Shahid came upon hurt people praying, and transformed them into protestors chanting in unison.
In that same footage, Shahid declared that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder would come to Ferguson. Given that 11 days later Holder would do just that – yet there was no way possible to know that the day after Brown’s killing – the moment had the force of prophecy.
Ironically, Shahid had a meeting on the books with Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson scheduled several days after Brown was killed. Shahid works an inside as well as an outside game, meeting personally with police officials as well as protesting them in the streets. That meeting was no longer possible as Ferguson devolved into chaos, but Shahid and Jackson did have an unforgettable moment together in the early days of protest. The rumor was circulating among protestors that police had killed Dorian Johnson in a Ferguson alley, and Shahid called Jackson out of the police station, stood him up on the short wall in front of the station, and prodded Jackson to tell the steaming group of protestors that Johnson was unharmed.
It was a quintessentially Ferguson moment – protestors commanding a police chief. It also was one of countless times that Shahid defused a potentially violent moment on the streets of Ferguson.
Ferguson was legitimately a mass movement with no leader, or many leaders, but the next sustained protest in St. Louis without question started with Shahid. It was Shahid who – working, again, with inside police sources, along with Rev. Phillip Duvall – filed the Freedom of Information Act request that busted open the Jason Stockley case, leading to the former St. Louis police officer being tried and acquitted of murder, and the resulting protests. Make no mistake – no Anthony Shahid and no Stockley trial, no Stockley verdict, no Stockley protests.
Shahid’s police sources on Stockley’s killing of Anthony Lamar Smith – five black cops; four men and one woman – told him they thought the case had been covered up. Shahid continues to believe that the decisions of then-Mayor Francis G. Slay and then-Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce not to seek reelection stem from their roles in the alleged cover-up, knowing that the case would come to light. Both deny that accusation.
Despite his essential role in the Stockley affair, Shahid was again overshadowed by other protest leaders as the movement progressed. The Riverfront Times did run a detailed story about Shahid’s role in breaking the case, but his role was mostly eclipsed by front-line protest leaders.
Shahid has come to accept this. After all, he doesn’t protest because he likes to protest. He protests because that’s his son lying on the street. That’s your son. It’s a duty.
