[Peace-discuss] A Friend of mine's live report from Fergusson Mo. yesterday

[David Johnson via Peace-discuss]

Tonight got crazy, but let me start with the beginning.

The mood during the day was as yesterday, except that by the afternoon 
there were even more people out. A rally at a big church was planned, 
first for 3:00 and then it was announced that it wouldn't be until 4:00. 
By 3:30, there were still a hundred or so people at the main gathering 
place, showing no signs of leaving. One person said that she wasn't into 
going to hear all the "big names" (various local politicians, the chief 
of the state police, Al Sharpton, etc.) I decided to go because I wanted 
to see what the rally would be like. When I got there, parking was only 
available about a quarter mile away, there were so many people there. 
There must have been 3 - 4,000 people. Massive. There was no way I was 
getting in, but I listened a bit from the outside.

I should note that this church is right alongside the freeway, several 
miles from the heart of town. Really, nothing else around. The street 
protest is on W. Florissant, about a mile or so down the road from the 
street that leads to and from the freeway. What happens is that the cops 
block off W. Florissant to traffic around 4:00 p.m. So the effect of 
this rally was to discourage people from going to the street protest. I 
am absolutely certain that this was the intent. Those who wanted to, 
myself included, were able to drive around the police block and get near 
the center of things, but it wasn't very easy.

I got back to the street protest around 4:30 or 5:00 and it was like 
yesterday -- a tremendous feeling of solidarity. We have talked about 
how the old traditions have been lost, and a very graphic example is 
this: I got to talking to a woman and her daughter. The symbol here now 
is to raise your hands and chant, "hands up, don't shoot". I always 
raise my fist instead. I asked the daughter - a pre teen - if she'd ever 
seen people put up their fist, if she knew what it meant. It was totally 
new to her.

you can see a leadership being born, but again it's clear that the old 
traditions - both good and bad - are not there. This new leadership is 
being born in the form of young people marching up and down the street 
leading chants. It's totally spontaneous, but the most confident and 
assertive are the ones leading it. Given time and without "outside" 
interference, they would develop into a revolutionary leadership. But 
that's just the point - as the previous church rally showed - there will 
b all sorts of intervention from politicians, preachers, people like Al 
Sharpton, etc.

Some goals are clear: They want the cop charged with murder. They want 
the chief of police fired. Beyong that, though, things get more murky. 
One guy marches around with a sign demanding that the cops live in the 
city where they work. Others have religious signs.

I added to my sign of yesterday. I put:
"Oakland - Ferguson - Gaza
Unite!
"Rely only on our own strength."

Now comes the hairy part: As it started getting dark, a few people 
organized a march up and down W. Florissant. We marched half way up to 
Airport Rd. and then back down the other way. We got maybe a quarter 
mile past the main meeting point. At this time, things were totally 
peaceful. The mood was a combination of angry and festive, if that makes 
any sense. I was about two blocks behind the head of the march, and all 
of a sudden I saw people come running back down the street. I looked up 
ahead, and it looked like fog was rising up from the street, but it 
wasn't fog; it was tear gas. I kind of stopped, but everybody was 
running back so I joined them. A few blocks back, half the crowd (mostly 
the younger people) stopped, regrouped and started marching back. you 
could see the lights from the cop cars strung out all across the street 
as they slowly moved towards us. A layer of the people, mainly youth, 
were saying, "no. fuck that. It ain't even twelve o'clock yet. (by that 
time it was about 9:30 or so. The reference to twelve was that a curfew 
had been declared for that hour. It is interesting that part of the 
outrage was that the cops weren't abiding by the rules that they had set 
up, however arbitrary those rules were.) Back these youth surged. 
Another round of tear gas. This time even more and even closer. 
Everybody ran back. More tear gas. Shouts, Curses. Mass confusion, but 
order in the confusion.

A huge traffic jam, because part of this street protest is car loads of 
young people driving up and down W. Florissant past the main gathering 
point (which is where the QT store was burned to the ground), honking, 
kids hanging out the windows and doors with their hands up, etc. (Ihave 
all that on video.) So there were all these cars in the middle of the 
street, trying to get out, trying to get away from the advancing police 
line.

As for myself, my car was kind of trapped behind the police line, a 
block or so off W. Florissant. I couldn't get back to it. So I had to 
walk maybe a mile or so around to get to it from behind.

I'm planning on going back home Monday afternoon, unless something 
really new pops up before then. When I get back, I'm going to work on 
posting that video. I think it will do a million times more to give an 
idea of the mood and consciousness than anything I could write. But the 
main thing is the youth are out here, way way more than ever came close 
in Occupy Oakland or anything else I've seen since the 1960s. As to why 
that is, I have some ideas, but I'm a little too tired to get into that 
right now.

John Reimann
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