In just a few months, Michael Brown Sr. has felt able to laugh again. Not out loud, of course, but rather with some laughter that sometimes shakes the long beard of this 47-year-old father. This is the sign, according to him, that the “emotional chaos” finally calms down, just over ten years after the death of his son, Michael Brown Jr. On the afternoon of August 9, 2014, this 18-year-old black man, suspected of a trivial robbery, was shot and killed by Darren Wilson , a white police officer from Ferguson, a disadvantaged town in the northern suburbs of Saint-Louis, Missouri, in the central United States. His lifeless body remained on the burning asphalt for four and a half hours, two of which he was uncovered, exposed to the sun and visible to passersby.
That same afternoon, in this small, anonymous American city, thousands of people were going to mobilize against police violence in what the American media, depending on their political orientation, would describe as “unrest” or a “lifting” unpublished. For more than four hundred days, hundreds of heavily armed police officers, supported by helicopters, faced Molotov cocktails, store looting, and silent, peaceful marches. Since then, every August, tributes across the United States have taken up the songs of these nights of protest, “We are young, we are strong, we march all night” (“we are young, we are strong, we walk all night”), or “hands up, don’t shoot” (“Hands up, don’t shoot”).
During the summer of 2024, thanks to the foundation Chosen for change (“chosen for change”), led by Michael Brown Sr and Cal Brown, his wife, mother-in-law of “Mike Jr.” Fourteen days of commemorations were organized: a charity gala, conferences on “police terror”, a march in tribute to the young man… These two weeks of excitement contrast with the usual pessimism of the city of twenty thousand inhabitants, built in the 19th century.my century around the railway line going west.
Two wide avenues lined with abandoned buildings run through the city center, where pedestrians are few, day and night. This October 9, on the small street lined with social housing where their son was killed, the couple inspects the state of the new monument improvised in recent months, where three orange plots topped with flowers frame the mottos “Black lives matter” (“black lives matter”) and “All roads lead to Ferguson” (“All Roads Lead to Ferguson”), painted on the ground.
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