A decade of racial justice activism changed politics, but landmark reforms remain elusive – Austin Daily Herald

WASHINGTON — Cori Bush went from leading an informal movement for racial justice to winning two terms as a congresswoman from Missouri with an office decorated with photos of families who lost loved ones to police brutality. One belongs to Michael Brown.

Brown’s death 10 years ago in Ferguson, Missouri, was a defining moment for America’s racial justice movement. It shines a global light on long-standing demands for reform to systems that subject millions of people to everything from economic discrimination to murder.

Activists like Bush went from chanting “Black Lives Matter” to running for and winning seats in government offices, city halls, prosecutors’ offices, and Congress. Local laws were passed to do everything from tearing down jails and prisons to reorganizing schools and eliminating hair discrimination.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, at least 30 states and Washington, D.C., have enacted laws aimed at curbing abusive behavior since 2020. More than three dozen activists, elected officials and political operatives told The Associated Press that while racial justice activism has transformed politics over the past decade, landmark reforms remain elusive.

“When we look at the progress we’ve made, it’s been up and down,” said Bush, who was a longtime community organizer and pastor before becoming a Democratic representative. “We are still dealing with militarized policing in communities. “We are still dealing with police attacks.”

Ten years of achievements

Issues of public safety and racial justice have moved to the center of American politics as a new generation of cellphone-wielding Black activists rewrites the national debate over policing. Police body cameras are common. Tactics that included strangulation were declared illegal.

Svante Myrick, who was the youngest mayor of Ithaca, New York, from 2011 to 2021 before becoming president of People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group, said Ferguson led to a shift in how communities address police reform and combat abuses he said.

At least 150 reforms were adopted in localities and states.

“I know that someone’s life was saved, that a police officer was present, that there was an encounter that an officer would have made a different decision if it weren’t for the 400 days of protests during the Ferguson uprising,” Bush said. “Maybe the world was waking up to the fact that this couldn’t just be a strategy from the outside, it had to be a strategy from the inside.”

An example of this is St. Leading St. Louis is Tishaura Jones, the first Black woman who worked to end the city’s “arrest and incarceration” policing model and emphasized social service programs to help neighborhoods with high crime rates.

A new generation of leaders is implementing this model across the country.

“I am someone who entered politics through the Black Lives Matter movement after years of witnessing unjust murders against Black and brown people,” said Chi Ossé, a 26-year-old member of the New York City Council.

He used social media to organize protests after white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed black man George Floyd in 2020, sparking a major new wave of protests. “This has resulted in me having a different leadership style in my community than the previous City Council members who represented this district.”

There’s work to be done

Lawmakers in Washington were at first wary of the Black Lives Matter movement.

In 2015, then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told three Black Lives Matter activists that they should focus on changing laws instead of hearts. A 2016 memo from the House Democratic campaign arm told politicians to limit the number of Black Lives Matter activists at public events or meet privately.

Ferguson marked a new phase. For perhaps the first time, a visible mass protest movement for justice for a single victim arose organically—not assembled by clergy or centered on the church—and often connected by cell phones and fueled by hip-hop.

Brown’s death and the treatment of Black Lives Matter protesters also left many Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in a self-reflection. Organizations and individuals of all ages were encouraged to step aside.

“We’ve had gains,” Bush said. “I wanted to take the movement to the House of Representatives and I feel like I was able to do that.”

A movement meets a national political shift

By 2015, Ferguson activists were welcomed into the White House to work on the Obama administration’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

While Donald Trump has embraced some criminal justice reforms, such as the First Step Act, he has opposed racial justice activists throughout his administration. The move was met with disdain on the right. In 2016, the then-Republican presidential candidate called Black Lives Matter “divisive” and blamed President Barack Obama for worsening race relations across the country.

Trump was president during the racial justice protests that emerged in the summer of 2020 following Floyd’s killing. During the protests, he shared, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” He signed an executive order encouraging better police practices, but it was criticized for failing to acknowledge what some saw as systemic racial bias in policing.

In a 2017 speech in New York, Trump appeared to advocate harsher treatment of people in custody, speaking disdainfully of the police practice of shielding the heads of handcuffed suspects as they are placed in patrol cars.

Trump’s election caused many racial justice activists to shift their focus from individual police departments to how federal policies fund and protect police abuses.

murder of George Floyd

The movement entered politics again after Chauvin killed Floyd in May 2020.

The protests roiled American politics, shocking even many who had spent years defending policies that had suddenly become mainstream (community response teams, restrictions on police tactics, redirecting police funds).

Floyd’s relatives attended the 2020 Democratic National Convention; The following year, Democrats introduced a bill that would enact sweeping reforms.

The George Floyd Fairness in Police Services Act would ban the arrests and no-knock warrants that led to the Louisville police killing of Breonna Taylor in her home. Additionally, a database would be created listing officers disciplined for gross misconduct.

Parliament passed the law in 2021. The Senate could not reach a compromise.

Stand outside or be at the table

Ella Jones couldn’t see herself as a candidate before the Ferguson protests. Jones, a minister and entrepreneur, felt called to protest Brown’s killing but said local Democratic leaders told him to run for mayor of Ferguson. He won his City Council seat and was eventually elected mayor.

“You can stand outside and yell at the system. But you have to be at the table where policy is made,” Jones said. “Some might go into politics. Some people might move toward starting nonprofits, but it’s going to take all of us working together to make that change happen.”

“You should be at the table where politics is made.”

Ferguson’s prosecutor, Wesley Bell, has vowed to fight police misconduct.

Bell said lawmakers in 2020 need to look carefully at laws that give police officers protection from prosecution that ordinary citizens are not afforded.

“This is something that handcuffs prosecutors in a variety of ways when you go to prosecute police officers who use unlawful force or shoot at police,” Bell said.

He defeated Bush in the Democratic primary for the US House of Representatives in August.

Bush said he didn’t know what he would do after leaving Congress.

“But the fight is still going on and my boots are not far from me,” he said. “So people probably had to wonder: Who is more dangerous in Congress or outside Congress?”