Both of these things are true: Lezley McSpadden lost an election to represent the part of Ferguson where her son Michael Brown was killed, sparking an uprising that had national impact.
And the winner to represent Ward 3 on the Ferguson City Council was a young, black mother and activist – Fran Griffin – who was guided into the political process through the uprising.
Griffin’s winning message is directed to McSpadden as well – to anyone whose faith in the political system has been shattered.
“My main message I want to send to my people is to have some hope,” Griffin said. “I know you don’t trust the system. If I can show you that you can trust me, then we can work together. It’s little-by-little trust-building. People have no faith in leadership.”
Griffin went through the Ferguson Uprising with three children in the house, two sons and a daughter, and it left her looking into local politics.
“The uprising happened here, and it affected me and my children,” she said. “It made me curious to understand local politics and government. I like to understand systems, networks, why things happen. I like to know what goes on around me.”
She applied for Ferguson’s parks board and was appointed. She was board president by the time she was elected council member on April 2 and will now resign that post as a citizen.
Griffin will complete her work in the community making a proper park with a playground on a vacant site at the corner of Laurette Avenue and Halpin Drive. Before she was on the parks board, Griffin played an active role in a community effort to create the park on land Ferguson purchased from St. Louis County for $27.
“There was a park down the street but it was dark, not a safe space,” she said.
She worked with the community to pick a design and Parks Board member Phaedra Nelson found grant funding to purchase equipment, which still needs to be installed. The old park that was too dark for children to play, she hoped, can now be remade into a community garden.
If a community park seems like a soft place to start rebuilding Ferguson’s Third Ward, the place where Michael Brown was killed by a police officer, consider that Urban Strategies – a national leader in community development based in St. Louis – identified lack of green space as a major concern in southeast Ferguson. It contributed to the feeling of hopelessness that boiled over on August 9, 2014 – and has never died.
Griffin also serves as vice president of the Southeast Fergusson Community Association, which includes Canfield Green Apartments and the other high-density residential developments that lack green space. The association works to develop the community, but in its own way.
“We are trying to figure out how development is impacting the area and trying to make sure the community’s voices are heard,” she said.
For example, the City of Ferguson has entered into a partnership with Rise Community Development to revise the city’s comprehensive plan. “The existing plan talks about development made prior to 2014” – a watershed year in Ferguson, to say the least – “without much participation from people who live in the area,” Griffin said.
She does not want to see that mistake repeated. “I want to let people know you can have a voice in the process, and this is how you do it,” Griffin said. “I want to send a message of hope to people that we can do this together in a very real way.”
Even with her work rebuilding parks and shaping development, Griffin has not shied away from the inside work reforming the Ferguson Police Department. She also serves on Ferguson’s Neighborhood Policing Steering Committee, a group mandated by the city’s consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice.
“We are charged with the responsibility of looking over policies and adding recommendations, which the DOJ, Ferguson and the court-appointed monitor all look at and then are submitted to the federal judge,” Griffin said.
Serving on this committee, Griffin could see how more conservative residents of Ferguson were more active than the people most impacted by police and police policies. Many of the most active committee members, she discovered, did not even believe there was a need for a consent decree to reform the police department.
At one meeting, she challenged them: “This group was required by consent decree. So if you don’t see the need for the consent decree, then why are you attending?” Many of them left.
Griffin is determined to get more of the people damaged by the system to get engaged with changing it, like Lezley McSpadden and she are both trying to do on their respective paths.
“Lezley showed exactly what is needed to create change as a black woman,” Griffin said. “She showed her strength.”
McSpadden has congratulated Griffin on her election victory. Griffin said she deeply respects her former election rival and is in awe of the pain she has suffered as a mother who lost a son in such a terrible and public way.
To all of the people in pain and without hope in her community, she said, one of the solutions is to engage with the system.
“Just come to a meeting,” Ferguson’s newest council member encouraged her constituents. “You will get to a point where you will figure out what you can do to address some things, and you will connect with people who want to do something. There is space for everyone.”
