From there, Brown and Johnson take off running down the street. Wilson gets out of his car with his gun drawn and fires a second shot at Brown, striking him. Then the teenager turns around with his hands up, saying that he’s unarmed and to stop shooting. Wilson fires several more shots at Brown, striking him four times. The teenager falls to the ground and dies, his body left in the street for four and a half hours.
In places like Staten Island and Ferguson, the deaths of Garner and Brown exacerbated long-standing strife between law enforcement and the black community. In both cities, there was a feeling that the police weren’t there to protect them. And because the officers assigned to their neighborhoods weren’t really from there, they didn’t have a connection with the city or understand its dynamics. Most cities deploy white cops to patrol black neighborhoods, and it’s largely white cops who claim fear after they shoot and kill an unarmed black person. This is the essence of white privilege: when you’re used to having your way, it’s easy to feel threatened when you’re devoid of power. Because white supremacy dictates reverence to white skin, and because the police thrive on terror, they can’t fathom those who won’t genuflect. They can’t deal when you don’t act scared, so they fire handguns to reclaim authority over the people they look down upon. Garner had the audacity to say no. Brown had the gall to fight back. Those actions disrupt the systemic racism and classism that keeps America running. If people of color realized they weren’t beholden to police, they’d upset the ecosystem of state-sanctioned violence that’s been in place since slavery. In Ferguson, some black residents make it a point to stay home after a certain hour, knowing that they could be stopped by the police for no reason at all. Like in 2009, when Ferguson police arrested Henry Davis by mistake, and instead of letting him go, they assaulted Davis in a jail cell and charged him with property damage for bleeding on an officer’s uniform. Five years later, Darren Wilson said he feared for his life when asked why he killed Brown. “It was like a five-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan,” the officer said about the size difference between him and Brown. Pantaleo never claimed he was afraid of Garner; in his incident, he and his colleagues assaulted a man who’d clearly had enough aggravation from the cops.
The wounds are still fresh for Mike Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr. He’s incredibly measured when talking about his son’s death, but he cuts the anecdote short to dull the pain of that day. “I got a call that he was dead in the middle of the street,” Brown Sr. tells me. “I get in the car and I can’t even tell you about the ride.” Once he got to the scene, he saw his son’s flip-flops in the road, his red baseball hat resting on its crown. “By the time I got there, Mike was covered up” with a white sheet, he recalls. “He was on the ground for four and a half hours, deteriorating.” The image was unsettling, to say the least. For a while, Brown’s body was not covered up, which allowed neighbors to take pictures with their cell phones for social media. That Brown’s corpse was left to rot in the summer heat only amplified local tensions.
With each hour, Ferguson residents seethed. “The delay helped fuel the outrage,” Patricia Bynes, a former committeewoman in Ferguson, told the New York Times in 2014. “It was very disrespectful to the community and the people who live there. It also sent the message from law enforcement that ‘we can do this to you any day, any time, in broad daylight, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ ” Riots ensued following a candlelight vigil near the shooting scene two days after Brown was killed. Stores were broken into or set on fire. Police cruisers had windows smashed with bricks. It was akin to the riots in Kendrick’s backyard—in 1965 Watts and 1992 South Central. Americans didn’t know about Ferguson prior to Mike Brown’s death, but they would very soon; it would be the epicenter of unrest in the United States. The black people of Ferguson had had enough; the years of unprocessed fury finally bubbled to the surface and exploded over the next two weeks. Coupled with the still-potent pain of Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012 and Eric Garner’s demise in July 2014, Ferguson, and Black America, was in the midst of a cultural revolution. Protesters marched down the street with their hands raised, chanting, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” referring to the way Brown was gunned down despite having his arms raised.
Meanwhile, in New York City, there was a similar fight underway. In late August, an estimated 2,500 people—led by the Reverend Al Sharpton and Eric Garner’s widow, Esaw—marched through Staten Island to peacefully protest Eric Garner’s homicide. Unlike the Ferguson protesters, some of whom expressed their frustration through looting stores and vandalizing property, Sharpton and Esaw preached nonviolence. “We are not against police,” Sharpton reportedly told the crowd. “Most police do their jobs. But those that break the law must be held accountable just like anybody else.” As they marched across the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn, they carried signs that read “RIP Eric Garner” and “Police the NYPD.” And they had a chant of their own—“I can’t breathe!”—echoing Garner’s last words. It later became a slogan for the movement, not only for protesters in New York City, but for a world of black people who demonstrated in their own cities. It made its way into sports and pop culture later that year, emblazoned on T-shirts worn by professional
