NEW YORK — There have been moments before, times of heartbreak and grief that led to anger and calls for justice. Sometimes, they never make it past a few sparks. Sometimes, they smolder for a little bit before dying out. And sometimes, in certain conditions, they light a fire.
In August 2014, that was the case when a white police officer shot and killed Black 18-year-old Michael Brown on the streets of Ferguson, Mo.
Coming just weeks after the July 2014 chokehold death of Eric Garner at the hands of New York City police, in a country where the nascent push of Black Lives Matter was still reeling after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the 2012 fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, the protests over Brown’s death and the heavily armed law enforcement response to them erupted in the nation’s consciousness.
It set off a new chapter in the United States’ fraught civil rights history, bringing a spotlight to longstanding issues of race and police use of force. And in doing so, it created space for ripple effects to fan out in the years after – not just in conversations about race and policing, but about race and, well, everything; about protest and what it should or shouldn’t look like and who is allowed to engage in it, about equality and fairness in all kinds of directions.
This story is part of an AP series exploring the impact, legacy and ripple effects of what is widely called the Ferguson uprising.
Social movements break through the everyday
Having a ripple effect is part of what social movements do. They break through the cycle of day-to-day life to get people to think and act differently in any number of ways.
“What really emerges in the most effective social movements is that they’re trying to not just make visible change in the world on policy, on structure and things like that,” said Hahrie Han, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. “But they’re also trying to change the kind of assumptions that people carry around in their head about how the world works.”
She pointed to the 1960s’ Civil Right Movement, which was about racial equality. By the end of that decade, though, other movements had started as well, like the women’s movement and the environmental movement.
“Was it true that the early 1960s agitated a conversation about structural inequality and rights that was new in American politics? I think so,” she said. “And then did that then kind of relate to and lead to the kind of conversation around rights for all these other groups that emerged in the late 1960s? I would say, arguably, absolutely those are related.”
Ferguson did more than call attention to police brutality
In regards to Ferguson, think about some of the things that have happened since 2014, or things we talk about regularly that we didn’t a decade ago: professional athletes engaging in protest online and on the fields of play, setting off a furor about athletes and activism that has turned into its own conversation; diversity and representation on camera and behind the scenes in the world of entertainment after April Reign created the viral #OscarsSoWhite hashtag; the speed and furor of protests after the 2020 death of George Floyd, as Black Lives Matter took to the streets; and of course, the backlash to all of it, the views from some quarters that those on the left have gone too far.
The Ferguson protests didn’t directly make those things happen, of course; but by breaking through the everyday to raise issues of justice and equity, it helped create an atmosphere in the months and years after, when people were paying attention in different ways and those things COULD happen.
When Reign sent out her initial tweet in January 2015, after the unveiling of a slate of Academy Award nominees that featured no people of color, her one-liner of “#OscarsSoWhite they asked to touch my hair” quickly went viral.
It wasn’t that no one had brought up the lack of representation on screen before, but she was able to take advantage of the social media landscape of the time to create a perfectly encapsulated hashtag that others were able to get in on. And coming mere months after Brown’s death in Ferguson, her tweet reached audiences at a moment when equality and justice issues were being talked about in a different way than in years prior.
Her catalyst tweet “was as successful as it was because people were open to having the conversation about what it means to be a person of color in this country, whether under the jackboot of state-sanctioned violence or on TV or in film,” Reign said.
Protest solidarity jumped from streets to sports fields, halls of Congress
Some of those people were professional athletes. They had already started to speak out in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012, with high-profile online posts. That activism went into a higher gear after Ferguson, in moments including a November 2014 NFL game during which five members of the St. Louis Rams came onto the field with their hands raised in a pose that had become synonymous with the protests; athletes referencing the names of those who had been killed on the clothing they wore at games; and, in at least one case, athletes joining a protest, like New York Knicks basketball player Carmelo Anthony did in 2015.
Then came 2016, when San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began his protest, declining to stand for the national anthem, at first by remaining seated and then by kneeling. It set off a furor as some others, in football and in other sports leagues like women’s soccer player Megan Rapinoe, followed. The furor wasn’t over what they were protesting, the police abuse of power, but about whether it was OK for athletes to protest at all.
Since then, athletes have continued to make their voices heard, like when WNBA players got involved in the 2020 race for U.S. Senate for Georgia.
Douglas Hartmann, a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota who has written about sports and society, said the activism of athletes and sports has been “dramatically different in the last decade” than it had been in the decades before when people didn’t look to, or really want, athletes as political actors or activists.
“It’s radically new historically that all of a sudden we now kind of allow and accept athletes to be figures like many others,” he said. “I think it’s great in some ways for athletes, but it’s really different.”
He also pointed out that when looking at the impact of a social movement, one has to take into consideration the backlash to it. In the current climate, he highlighted the conservative backlash against the diversity, equity and inclusion efforts of recent years, as well as protections for members of LGBTQ+ communities.
‘Very different visions of America that are being fought over’
Social movements and the pushback that comes are “intimately connected in terms of being very different visions of America that are being fought over,” he said.
That the last decade has seen pushes for equality in LGBTQ+ issues as well as in the treatment of women, most famously in the #MeToo movement against sexual misconduct, is not a surprise, said Tarana Burke, a longtime activist who has worked on issues including voting rights and gender equity and is best-known in the public as the overall founder of #MeToo.
“It’s all really under one big umbrella. We are ultimately fighting for a type of liberation that is across the board,” she said.
“When you start seeing this domino effect, that’s not unintentional,” she said. “That is because one thing emboldens another.”
