Only a prophet could have foreseen, when we adopted and localized TIME Magazine’s annual Person of the Year feature a few years ago, that a time would come when TIME and we would nearly make the same selection. After all, TIME has its pick from literally every person on Earth for its Person of the Year, whereas we limit our candidates to African Americans in St. Louis. And only a prophet could have foreseen that an African American in St. Louis – or a collective of mostly young, mostly black people here – would soon compete seriously for the most important newsmaker of the year on Earth. But that is, amazingly, what happened in 2014.
TIME ultimately gave the nod to the medical professionals who risked their lives to fight a potentially disastrous Ebola outbreak for its Person of the Year. But the magazine’s first-listed runner up was Ferguson protestors, the relentless activists who turned the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson on August 9 into a national – and, indeed, global – struggle to reform police work and hold police officers accountable when they shoot and kill unarmed black people.
“They are poets and paralegals, college students and working professionals, some affluent, some unemployed, white as well as black,” TIME described Ferguson protestors. “They launched crowdfunding campaigns, organized council meetings and held a mock trial for St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch at the courthouse where Dred Scott once sued for his freedom. They continue to preach morning and night on Twitter, the revolutionary’s pocket pulpit.”
Their Twitter-fueled activism brought activists, celebrities and ordinary people from all over the country and the world to Ferguson. Together they helped define a national crisis – and exported the movement to other cities and countries, to fields of athletic play and political power. “They clogged freeways in Miami and Chicago, carried coffins across the Brooklyn Bridge, clashed with cops in Berkeley, Calif., flooded streets in London and toted signs around Tokyo,” TIME noted. “At colleges from Boston to Baton Rouge, students staged ‘die-ins’ to dramatize the social value of black life. Players for the St. Louis Rams took the field with their hands raised in solidarity – a gesture repeated on the floor of Congress.”
Ferguson protestors captured the world’s attention. What they are going to do with it now remains to be seen. The largely leaderless character of the movement has made it impossible to extinguish – but also extremely difficult to focus. President Obama and his chief law enforcement official, Attorney General Eric Holder, have initiated police reforms in Ferguson and nationwide that bear watching. But locally, other than Brown’s killer Darren Wilson – who resigned from the Ferguson Police Department after the grand jury returned no indictment – everyone responsible for the Ferguson crisis remains in power. Recent protest actions have veered from one dramatic location – St. Louis City Hall, the airport, the Gateway Arch – to another, without clear purpose or direction. It does not appear to be a promising strategy to continue to inconvenience the public without a coherent, achievable set of demands and consistent attempts to negotiate solutions.
But this is a young movement, not yet five months old, consisting of mostly younger people with little or no previous leadership or policy experience. As one protestor noted on Twitter, the movement taught them that they can do anything they want to do, so long as they do it together. That is an amazing sense of unity and purpose that, frankly, many of us feared was absent from these younger generations we thought we had lost to the clubs and the streets. But, in fact, they saved themselves, and each other – together. What they are creating together has the makings, as TIME noted, of “a new civil rights movement – a battle to reshape the relationship between the police and the people they are paid to protect. What started in a Missouri suburb may end with change that can be measured in lives saved.” As Holder rightly told TIME, “What happened in Ferguson could be one of those seminal moments that transform the nation.”
