Continuing their rolling “Monday Mourning” demonstrations, protestors knocked on Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III’s door this morning (Mon., March 16) at 7 a.m. with only one demand – to resign.
“He answered the door unlike others we have visited,” said Elizabeth Vega, leader of the Artivists who initiated the demonstration. However, she said that the “carpet guy” showed up at the same time, so that might have been the reason he opened the door.
So far, the protest group has visited the homes of St. Louis City Mayor Francis G. Slay and St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger in the early morning hours. At each, they lay on their doorsteps fake coffins, lists of demands and Black Lives Matter goodie bags with coffee and bags of seeds.
This morning, however, the group did something a little different. Through a megaphone, they blasted a 10-minute audio recording of Knowles’ interviews with NPR and Anderson Cooper, where he talked about the Department of Justice’s damning report of the City of Ferguson’s municipal court and police department. The audio track interspersed Knowles saying that the majority of people in Ferguson don’t believe there’s a racial divide with residents talking about their experiences being disenfranchised.
Knowles asked them to turn it off so they could talk, but the protestors refused.
“We’ve been talking for eight months, and he clearly doesn’t get it,”
Vega said. “It was more of a time for him to listen. We wanted him to listen to his words contrasted against the words of the people.”
In Knowles’ interviews, Vega pointed out that he described the DOJ as hostile. She said she spoke with the mother of the boy who was bitten by a police dog and had to go through two surgeries. During an interview with the boy, a DOJ representative had to leave the room because she got too emotional hearing his story, Vega said.
“The level of disconnect to where he can review something like that and say the DOJ is just being hostile,” she said, “that shows he’s not the one to move the city forward.”
Knowles passed out business cards to the group of about 15 – which included the activist group Tribe X, but he was visibly agitated, she said.
Normally, the group leaves cardboard fist signs in the yard with the names of those who have been killed at the hands of police officers. But Knowles asked them not to.
“He told us to put our fists in the trash and not litter his lawn because, ‘We like to keep a clean neighborhood here,’” she said.
Rather than see their artistic work go in the trash, they took it with them, she said. Now there is a fist and a sign that reads, “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds” at the Michael Brown Jr. memorial site.
Among the things that they dropped off was a letter asking for his resignation. It stated, “Your disregard of the DOJ report, denial of racial strife, and inability to unify Ferguson are all indicative of the need for change…The citizens do not want a long drawn recall process. If you love Ferguson as you say you do, you would prove it by stepping aside.”
Follow this reporter on Twitter @Rebeccarivas.
