We are headed into those dark winter months when our nation officially celebrates African Americans, beginning with the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday in mid-January and continuing through Black History Month, scheduled annually for February (the shortest month of the year, as a young Chris Rock comically reminded us). It will be fascinating to see this annual ritual of celebration played out against the backdrop of an aggressive national protest movement, led mostly by younger African Americans, which originated in St. Louis.
Though Dr. King has not been disrespected by Ferguson protestors, as latter-day elder civil rights leaders Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton have been at times, this is not a group of young leaders who are looking to the past for their leadership models. Their sharpest backward glance, in fact, is toward Assata Shakur, who currently is considered a fugitive felon by the United States government that officially celebrates MLK and Black History. Shakur – whose conviction was based on police evidence – has become a fitting model for a movement with so little confidence in the credibility of police evidence against African Americans.
A Black History Month seen through Ferguson protestor eyes should be interesting. We have already seen from this movement an action where lynchings were simulated in downtown St. Louis within view of the Gateway Arch and the Old Courthouse. We should expect an increasingly extensive historical timeline of African Americans who were killed by American law enforcement. Such an intense focus on morbid facts is unsettling for many people, we understand, but protest leaders would say that means more people are being forced to live with the dread that so many black people, and especially young black people, feel every day and night in a world where armed law enforcement is a necessary reality.
So we should not expect your grandfather’s MLK or Black History Month celebrations in St. Louis or America this year. Police work has been put on the national stage and agenda by mostly young people who don’t think there is anything to celebrate about empathy for blacks in police work, so it is a continuing season of review and reform, not of celebration. However, we do celebrate the emergence of a new group of aggressive young leaders who demand that the reality of their experience – historic and current – be addressed and the value of their black lives – their full and equal humanity – be acknowledged.
This week we are making the extremely unusual statement of leading our news coverage of the Ferguson movement with a news story reported and first published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, because we think Post reporters Koran Addo and Elise Crouch expressed something we know intimately, but have not yet said so clearly: that this is not a leaderless movement, in the sense that it lacks leadership, but rather it is leaderless only in the sense that it has not coalesced around one single leader. Its leadership is decentralized, unpredictable and evolving. Ferguson protestors have been more successful in protesting and forcing a conversation about their grievances than most of us will ever succeed at anything we do, and we understand why so many people around the world have been captivated by their courage and daring. We expect to see that daring leadership continue to evolve from episodic protests into a movement that drives meaningful, substantive reforms of public policy that impacts black lives. The Black History Months of the future may one day teach what they accomplish tomorrow.
