Jelani Brown was nervous on the morning of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. He’d flown into Seattle at midnight, bypassed breakfast and, as he traversed the steps of Garfield High School (GHS), clutched some rolled-up sheets of paper in one hand and an energy bar in the other. Within a couple hours, he would deliver the keynote address during the annual rally.
For someone who claimed in the first few moments of his address, “I’m not a public speaker; I’m just a regular guy,” the 26-year-old has exhibited enough passion and persistence in his social justice work to make speech-giving seem an easy feat. A graphic designer from Elmwood Park, Mo., less than 20 miles from Ferguson, Jelani has been active in the on-the-ground response to the shooting death of black 18-year-old Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson.
Jelani witnessed firsthand what most only saw on TV. When protesters stood up at the intermission of a St. Louis Symphony performance to sing “Requiem for Mike Brown,” it was his design on the banners that unfurled from the balcony. When news of the grand jury decision not to indict Wilson broke in November, Jelani experienced what he calls “a war zone.” And when protesters donned Guy Fawkes masks for the Ferguson “Million Mask March,” he was one of several arrested.
But he was also there for what most didn’t see on the news. Issues of police brutality and systems of oppression are not new concepts to Jelani. As a youth organizer for the American Friends Service Committee and a volunteer for the Organization for Black Struggle, he has worked as an activist and organizer for years. After attending a recent training offered by the People’s Institute called “Undoing Racism,” Jelani hopes to bring the type of education to St. Louis that, as he says, will “build a common analysis of systems that oppress and a common language that we can collectively move forward with to organize against these issues.”
As he sat on a rolled-up mat on an empty side of the GHS gymnasium, he pushed his nerves aside for almost an hour to discuss recent events. He spoke with poetic rhythm and realism about his experiences in Ferguson, what he sees as the next steps in a movement toward equality and that which binds us all: That we are one race — “the human race.”
I wanted to start with something I read in your bio. A few days after Michael Brown was shot, you were marching down West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, and you felt engulfed by this love that you hadn’t seen before, especially between young black men.
So usually, when you see cats in the city, it’s mean mugs and shoulder shrugs. It’s, why are you staring at me? Do you have a problem with me? Do we need to resolve this issue — not by talking it out, but by shooting and fighting? And so when I went down on West Florissant that day, I’m looking at cats: cats sagging their pants, cats with their red flags and their blue flags, gang members, street cats. [But] they’re putting up power fists and saying, “Yeah, we all hurt, we’re all together,” and it was just the total opposite of what you’re used to. That’s what really motivated me to get up and get out and do something about it, because I had [already] heard about what happened to Mike Brown.
I was at an annual picnic that my little neighborhood has every year and somebody’s like, “Yeah, a dude just got shot and killed by the police,” and it was like, what’s new? It wasn’t a reason to get up; this [is] stuff we’ve been fighting against for years.
You said it wasn’t really evident to you before this that people your age cared.
A lot of the time, people act the way they act out of necessity, right? That’s all they know. You grow up in a certain neighborhood [and] that’s what you’re born into and you don’t know any better. Then a lot of folks are just soaked into this hip-hop culture, which perpetuates all of that. It turns into, ‘This is what’s cool: It’s not cool to be concerned with social issues, but it’s cool to have on some Nikes or get a lot of girls or learn all these raps songs.’ I’ve been volunteering a long time, so I always try to just put a little plug in there and kick some knowledge to them every once in a while. “This is what’s happening, this is what we need to be doing.” But folks ain’t trying to hear that. So then, to go down there that day and see them out there like they do care? That really moved me.
What did you start doing after that?
I’ve done different things, you know, making banners and artwork, organizing different actions and demonstrations, but the bulk of the work has just been building relationships and building community, ’cause I believe that’s what it’s all about. The work is not downtown, it’s not at the police station, yelling and screaming at cops or getting this legislation, bill or initiative passed. This is a community: How you gonna fight if you ain’t got no troops? To really take that power from the state and put it into the hands of the people, you have to have a good number behind you who are working and collected together.
How did your experience on the ground compare to what you saw in the media?
It’s funny. These college students came down from Notre Dame, and they were telling me that all they saw on TV was people burning stuff. Looting stores. And that happened. Sometimes I was right there when it was happening. But for one, people got valid reasons to be angry like that. We have to learn to check our emotions: Don’t get mad, get even. But I mean, shit: [Cops] killing your brother or cousin for no reason, unarmed, maybe it’s your friend, you know, you’re gonna be angry. And it’s not just that one thing: It’s many incidents that happen to people on a regular-day basis. They face some systemic racism: Getting turned down for this or that, can’t get this job, get looked at crazy by this person, pre-judged by this person. And then a lot of those folks don’t care. They are just trying to get something free, and that’s real, too.
But what they don’t tell you is that the police are just as violent. They hype all this burning, and they minimize the peaceful aspect. You never see a peaceful protest on TV, although they’re happening every night. When Michael Brown got killed, folks burned some stuff down, started looting. When the no-indictment decision came up, folks got mad, broke some stuff, burned some stuff. But in all the time in between and afterward, everything’s been peaceful. You don’t hear about that.
You said the police were violent. Did you ever have any encounters?
So we are on a street called South Grand [Avenue] in St. Louis. There was an infrastructure put in place [after] the non-indictment, these safe spaces set up for people to go seek refuge from the craziness that was going on outside. ... We were placed in different hot spots where people had been protesting. The crowd didn’t want to go home, police ended up tear-gassing everybody. So we’re with some friends, we’re sitting in the back of the alley behind this safe space. We are trying to account for everybody, figure out what our next move is going to be, how are folks getting home, you know, is everybody safe? So we’re sitting back there, and this white van pulls up — I can’t remember if it had St. Louis Police, Metropolitan PD on it, or if it was unmarked — doors open, and you’ve got six or seven police crouched down with their guns drawn. We looked at them. We’re not doing nothin’, we’re just standing around, we’re looking at them, they’re looking at us for about 30 seconds, and then they just start firing rubber bullets on us. Just a straight-up drive-by. We get to running.
We’re not gonna stand around and get hit. That’s the mentality. It’s them against us.
That same night, this other group was out on West Florissant, and stuff is burning, tear gas everywhere, [police] throwing stun grenades. Some lady is having a heart attack — there’s just so much going on out there, and she just couldn’t take it.
Some of my friends go and try to pick her up and take her to safety, and the police fire a tear gas canister right at them and they drop the lady and run, and she’s just, like, sitting there having a heart attack in this cloud of tear gas.
Nobody knows what happened to her, if she’s all right or what. That’s the kind of stuff that you won’t hear on the news. You won’t hear about the peaceful demonstrations, and you won’t hear about the violence of the police.
Looking at the response to the protests, you have people saying things like “Those [protesters] should go get jobs.” What do you want people to know about what you were doing, and why it was important?
We did an action at a symphony; we dropped these banners and interrupted the symphony and sang these songs. This guy, he saw the video on YouTube and made a comment, and he was like “That was really inspiring. I’m gonna have to get out here and join the movement now.” Up until then, I didn’t believe in protests. I didn’t see any value.
When you protest, you really have to do it in the right way. Protesting is for pulling people in. For really making people understand why you’re out there in the first place and bringing them into your movement. When you’re out there blocking traffic, that’s not something I necessarily agree with, ’cause that’s getting on people’s nerves. They might agree with what you’re doing or why you’re doing it, but now you’re making their life harder ’cause they can’t get to where they got to go. You want folks to know why you’re out there doing what you’re doing, but you have to really be creative with your actions and your demonstrations. Chanting and just being out there screaming and yelling is not gonna cut it. I want people to know that we’re out there dealing with systematic racism. Systems like education, health care, criminal justice, all these systems that serve white people but disserve black people. Systems that inhibit all people of color from achieving that American Dream — from reaching their actual, full potential.
After you were arrested, you tweeted, “released from my chains at the Buzz Westfall Justice Center and put back in the chains that I wear every day as a person of color in America.”
Yeah, that’s real. I felt good to be out of jail. I felt good to be free. But then it’s like, ‘Dude, you’re not free, you’re right back here in this wall-less cell.’
What can Seattle learn from what happened in Ferguson?
That it can happen here. Your police stations got the same equipment that we got, and if y’all get too out of hand, like they thought we did, they’re gonna do it here, too. They’re gonna shut y’all down. And also that when they do, y’all still got the power to resist and fight through it and be resilient and overcome, like we’re doing in St. Louis, ’cause we’re still going strong despite all of that.
A lot of the dialogue around these issues is based in fear, ignorance or anger, and it’s not productive. You get Rudy Giuliani saying that the real problem is black-on-black violence.
And we need more white cops.
Right. More white cops. What do you see as steps to get past that and elevate the dialogue to something productive?
The main points of this [Undoing Racism] training [are]: It identifies, first of all, oppression in poor communities. That’s what white privilege is, right? You’ve got all these systems that work for you, don’t work for other people, service for you, disservice for everybody else.
So understanding those systems. But even further than that, understanding that we all come from the same place. We all come from Africa, and we [are] migrating out. To have those kinds of conversations and to realize that race is really an illusion.
MLK talked about the triple evils of poverty, racism and militarism, and we’re still talking about the exact same things. Is it hard to maintain the belief that things can change?
Sometimes, I lose faith a little bit. I feel like, “Dang, man, how can we reach all these folks?” So many people are just oblivious to how things really are and just completely ignorant to the reality of the world. But you know what? I feel like the people are the majority. So in the end, it’s the people who are gonna determine in which direction this world goes — if it goes in a positive one or a negative one. So as long as I know that, I can keep the faith because I know that we have the power to change the world.
As far as other folks who may not believe that, it just comes back to that community building. You don’t need to be out there trying to educate nobody, at least not at first. First, I got to get the relationship with them, I’m talking about just basketball tournaments, just a space for folks to get together, have fun, so they can consistently come and get to know each other. Once people feel like they belong to something, I think they naturally want to try to take care of it. And then when those nonbelievers, those naysayers, see what we got going on, they see all these people striving for this one goal, working together, having fun, caring about each other, they’ll want to jump in, too.
Where do we go from here?
As organizers we go back into our communities that we say we fight for, and we give them a space to build relationships with one another. We hold different events that we bring life and love to. After we build that base, then we can start to organize around these issues. Then we can start to say, “Okay, police are killing our kids, what can we do about it?” Then you start to cultivate leadership from within that base. You find people from the community who you organize, and you run them for city council, you run them for school board, and then that entire group supports them and holds them accountable and they run on platforms that the entire group came up with collectively.
What else do you want to share?
We’ve got to end racism. It’s so silly, man. There’s one race. We’re on this little, bitty, tiny-ass planet in, like, this never-ending, infinite universe, you know? And we sit here, and we fight with each other, when there’s all this other stuff out here that we have no clue about. It’s so much bigger than just us, and we just think so small. You got this country fighting with this country over here for these resources, when some meteor or alien race could just come and wipe us all out.
Even if there was nothing out there to wipe us out, we should be doing much better things than we’re doing now, because there’s so much to be explored and done. Humans can achieve the impossible if they work together.
Ferguson Timeline
Aug. 9, 2014: Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, is shot and killed by a white police officer, in Ferguson,
Aug. 10: A candlelight vigil for Brown turns violent, and police arrest at least 30. Protests continue for several days and nights.
Aug. 15: Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson names Darren Wilson as the police officer who shot Brown.
Aug. 16: Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon declares a state of emergency and implements a curfew.
Aug. 18: Nixon calls in the National Guard.
Aug. 20: A St. Louis grand jury, made up of nine white jurors and three black jurors, begins hearing evidence in the case.
Nov. 24: St. Louis County prosecutor announces that a grand jury has decided not to indict Wilson, igniting more protests.
Jan. 22: NY Times reported U.S. Justice Department unlikely to file civil charges against Wilson in shooting death of Brown.