Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – Protests Planned in St. Louis re: 2014 Killing of Michael Brown
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Introduction To This Series:
This post is one installment in an ongoing news series: a “living history” of the current national and international uprising for justice.
Today’s movement descends directly from the many earlier civil rights struggles against repeated injustices and race-based violence, including the killing of unarmed Black people. The posts in this series serve as a timeline of the uprising that began on May 26, 2020, the day after a Minneapolis police officer killed an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, by kneeling on his neck. The viral video of Floyd’s torturous suffocation brought unprecedented national awareness to the ongoing demand to truly make Black Lives Matter in this country.
The posts in this series focus on stories of the particular killings that have spurred the current uprising and on the protests taking place around the USA and across the globe. Sadly, thousands of people have lost their lives to systemic racial, gender, sexuality, judicial, and economic injustice. The few whose names are listed here represent the countless others lost before and since. Likewise, we can report but a few of the countless demonstrations for justice now taking place in our major cities, small towns, and suburbs.
To view the entire series of Rising Up for Justice! posts, insert “rising up” in the search bar above.
Protests Planned in St. Louis, Mo. After New Prosecutor Says He Won’t Make Criminal Charges in Police Killing of Michael Brown
By Ishena Robinson, theRoot.comAug, 2020
August 1, 2020
Protests are scheduled to happen in St. Louis, Missouri this Sunday in response to Prosecuting Attorney for the County, Wesley Bell’s recent announcement that he will not file criminal charges against former Police Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown.
Two weeks of riots and unrest took place on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri in the summer of 2014, after Wilson shot and killed the 18-year-old and claimed self-defense.
Demonstrators raise their arms and chant, “Hands up, Don’t Shoot”, as police clear them from the street as they protest the shooting death of Michael Brown on August 17, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri.
Photo: Joe Raedle (Getty Images)
Despite being elected in 2018 on a campaign of criminal justice reform in the wake of Brown’s death, Bell said on Thursday that his office could not charge Wilson under the law.
According to the St. Louis American, protestors are planning to gather in Clayton, St. Louis on Sunday afternoon to demonstrate against the decision, which Brown’s mother Lezly McSpadden says has left her son without due process….
A lawyer for McSpadden says the prosecutor should take the case to trial and let the people of St. Louis decide.
But in an interview with the Associated Press on Friday, Bell pointed to legislation that offers police officers more protections from prosecution than civilians as the real barrier to trying a case against Wilson.
“We see those types of laws throughout the country, and it is something that handcuffs prosecutors in numerous ways when you are going about prosecuting officers who have committed unlawful use of force or police shootings,” he said.
Read the full article here.
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