In 2014, protests around Michael Brown’s death broke through the everyday, a catalyst for change

NEW YORK — There have been moments before, moments of heartache and sorrow that have led to anger and cries for justice. Sometimes they are no more than a few sparks. Sometimes they smolder a little before fading. And sometimes, under certain circumstances, they light a fire.

Ten years ago, in August 2014, that was the case when a white police officer shot and killed 18-year-old black Michael Brown on the street in Ferguson, Missouri.

Just a few weeks after the July 2014 chokehold death of Eric Garner At the hands of the New York City police, in a country where the emerging Black Lives Matter movement was still in full swing following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the 2012 shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, protests over Brown’s death and the heavily armed police response exploded into the nation’s consciousness.

It opened a new chapter in the fraught history of civil rights in the United States, shining a spotlight on the longstanding issues of race and police brutality. And in doing so, it created space for ripple effects that could ripple out for years to come—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 gets to participate in it, about equality and fairness in all sorts of directions.

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This story is part of an AP series examining the impact, legacy and ripple effects of the so-called Ferguson uprising.

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Creating a ripple effect is part of what social movements do. They break the cycle of everyday life to make people think differently in all sorts of ways and hopefully act differently.

“What really comes out in the most effective social movements is that they’re not just trying to make visible changes in the world in terms of policy and structure and things like that,” said Hahrie Han, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. “But they’re also trying to change the kinds of assumptions that people have in their heads about how the world works.”

She pointed to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, which was about racial equality, as an example. By the end of the decade, however, other movements had emerged, such as the women’s movement and the environmental movement.

“Was it true that the early ’60s opened up a conversation about structural inequality and rights that was new in American politics? I think so,” she said. “And did that then relate to and lead into the kind of conversation about rights for all these other groups that emerged in the late ’60s? I would say, and that’s absolutely related.”

When it comes to Ferguson, think about things that have happened since 2014, or things we talk about regularly that we didn’t a decade ago: professional athletes protesting online and on the field, creating a row about athletes and activism that has become its own conversation piece; diversity and representation on camera and behind the scenes in entertainment after April Reign created the viral hashtag #OscarsSoWhite; the speed and rowdiness of protests after the death of George Floyd in 2020, when Black Lives Matter took to the streets and of course the backlash to it all; the perceptions in some quarters that people on the left have gone too far.

Of course, the protests in Ferguson didn’t directly accomplish these things. But by breaking through the mundane and raising issues of justice and equality, they helped create an atmosphere in which people paid attention in different ways in the months and years that followed, and in which these things COULD happen.

When Reign sent out her first tweet in January 2015, following the revelation of a list of Academy Awards nominees that did not include a single person of color, she said in her one-liner: “ #OscarsZoWit “They asked if they could touch my hair” quickly went viral.

It wasn’t that no one had previously raised the issue of the lack of representation on screen, but she took advantage of the social media landscape of the time to create a perfectly encapsulated hashtag that others could latch onto. And just months after Brown’s death in Ferguson, her tweet reached the public at a time when equality and justice were being talked about in a different way than in years before.

Her catalyst tweet “was so successful because people were open to the conversation about what it means to be a person of color in this country, whether that’s under the boot of state-sanctioned violence, or on TV or in movies,” Reign said.

Some of those people were professional athletes. They had already begun speaking out after Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012, with eye-catching online posts. That activism went up a notch after Ferguson, with moments like an NFL game in November 2014, when five members of the St. Louis Rams took the field with their hands up in a pose that has become synonymous with the protests; athletes who recited the names of those killed on the jerseys they wore to games; and in at least one case, participating in 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, refusing to stand for the national anthem, first by sitting and then by kneeling. It caused an uproar, as did others, in football and other sports leagues like women’s soccer star Megan Rapinoe. An uproar not only over what they were protesting, the abuse of power by the police, but over whether it was okay for them to protest at all, athletes as activists.

Since then, athletes have continued to make their voices heard, such as when the WNBA players entered the 2020 race for U.S. Senate for Georgia.

Douglas Hartmann, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota who has written about sports and society, said that athlete and sports activism in the past decade has been “drastically different” than in decades before that, when people didn’t really see athletes as political actors or activists.

“It’s a radically new thing historically that we’re now suddenly allowing and accepting athletes to be figures like many others,” he said. “I think in some ways it’s great for athletes, but it’s really different.”

He also pointed out that when you look at the impact of a social movement, you also have to consider the backlash against it. In the current climate, he highlighted the conservative backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in recent years, as well as protections for members of LGBTQ+ communities.

Social movements and the backlash they generate are “closely linked in the sense that they are fighting over very different visions of America,” he said.

The push for equality on LGBTQ+ issues and the treatment of women over the past decade, particularly in the #MeToo movement against sexual misconduct, comes as no surprise, says Tarana Burke, a longtime activist who has championed issues like voting rights and gender equality and is best known to the general public as the overall founder of #MeToo.

“It all comes under one big umbrella. We are ultimately fighting for a kind of liberation that applies across the board,” she said.

“When you start to see this domino effect, it’s not unintentional,” she said. “It’s because one thing encourages another.”