The New York Times International - 13.08.2019

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6 | T UESDAY, AUGUST 13, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

world

David Morrison carries the scars of the

upheaval in Ferguson, Mo. A veteran

protester, he has fled gunshots and tear

gas, marched, waved signs and played

dead on the asphalt in years of activism

that unspooled after a white police offi-

cer killed an unarmed black teenager

named Michael Brown. “I’m so angry!”

he shouts.

He is 7 years old.

This is the inheritance of Ferguson’s

children. Five years after they lay in bed

listening to sirens or tiptoed outside in

their pajamas to see police officers in

riot gear battling protesters, a genera-

tion of largely African-American chil-

dren in Ferguson has been molded by

the unrest of 2014 and a messy epilogue

of halting progress and a still-raw racial

divide.

“They’re not just kids,” said Raychel

Proudie, a Missouri state legislator who

represents Ferguson and interviewed

students for a dissertation project.

“They’re kids from Ferguson.”

Ferguson has become their shared

birthmark, a source of pride and stigma.

They write college-entrance essays

about growing up here. At out-of-town

debate tournaments or school theater

festivals, some defiantly announce their

hometown. Others just say “St. Louis” to

avoid the inevitable looks and follow-up

questions about growing up in a city of

21,000 that is now synonymous with

America’s racial chasm and pent-up an-

ger over policing tactics in black com-

munities.

Ferguson has made some visible

changes to its government and criminal

justice system in the wake of a federal

review that found rampant racial bias

and constitutional violations against its

majority-black population.

More than half of Ferguson’s City

Council members and police officers are

African-Americans — a significant shift

from the nearly all-white leadership and

police force in 2014. The aggressive tick-

eting and municipal prosecutions the

city used to pad its budget, largely on

the backs of black residents, have de-

creased by as much as 80 percent.

But some residents say Ferguson is

not moving quickly or aggressively

enough to undo long-running racial in-

equities. They say city leaders are still

not addressing crime, poverty and a

lack of opportunity in largely black

neighborhoods, where even public

parks are scarce.

Many of Ferguson’s young residents

threw themselves into new currents of

student activism. Khaliah Booker, 18,

went to countless meetings and organ-

izing sessions as a leader with the Fer-

guson Youth Initiative, an effort that

predated the tumult. She said an array

of new programs seemed to come and go

without connecting with classmates

who were preoccupied with everyday

life.

“We’re living our lives to survive,”

said Ms. Booker, an incoming freshman

at Fontbonne University, near St. Louis.

“It’s hard to be concerned about the

craziness of politics and local govern-

ment when you’re trying to make sure

your little brother takes a bath every

night and your mom gets up for work in

time every morning. Those things cloud

your mind.”

Others pulled away from the rising

movement, resentful of how much time

their parents spent protesting.

Children watched their friends

stream away from Ferguson after build-

ings were looted and burned. In a place

that is younger on average than the rest

of the United States, student numbers

have dropped by 12 percent since 2014,

and schools are closing.

“HE WAS TOO YOUNG”

One gray July morning, David sat si-

lently in a therapist’s waiting room,

watching rain bead down the window.

His mother, Aminah Ali, 30, filled out

forms explaining why they had come.

She worried about the anger that some-

times boils up in the son she is raising on

her own. Anger over not seeing his fa-

ther, over dead family and friends — in-

cluding David’s favorite uncle, and an

activist, Darren Seals, whose body was

found in his burning car in 2016.

David’s mother got involved in a citi-

zen-journalism project after the shoot-

ing of Mr. Brown and took David along to

protests when he was a preschooler. But

one night, after she had to scoop David

into her arms and race to her car when

gunfire erupted, she began to notice the

toll. He jolts awake from nightmares on

the living-room couch where he often

sleeps, and then cracks open her bed-

room door to reassure himself she is still

there.

“I overexposed him,” she said. “I just

felt like, my son needs to be out here. He

needs to be exposed to what the police

are doing to us. But he was too young.”

Therapists in Ferguson say they see

trauma’s fingerprints on young pa-

tients.

One student who was outside on the

steamy afternoon when the body of Mr.

Brown, 18, was left for four hours in the

middle of a Ferguson street told Ms.

Proudie, who was a school counselor at

the time, that he felt sick whenever he

walked into his middle school cafeteria.

There was something about the smell.

David and his mother were driving on

a summer afternoon when the conversa-

tion turned — as it often does in Fergu-

son — to race and injustice.

David piped up from the back seat: “I

can fight the police.”

“No, you can’t.”

“Yes, I will.”

“David!” his mother said. “You’re go-

ing to end up dead if you do that. Quit

using your imagination. It’s time to use

reality.”

David, who loves splashing into

swimming pools and is scared of spiders

in the basement, went quiet and turned

back to watching a Pink Panther video.

“THE POLICE CAN HEAR YOU”

In August 2014, Ryann Louris was 20

years old, barely older than the teenager

whose death set off protests outside her

front door. Her home was so close to the

chaos of the marches and the tear gas,

she could hear the police even with her

windows shut. When she pushed her

tiny daughter, Journey, in her stroller,

she could see enormous military-style

vehicles that looked like tanks, things

that she thought belonged in Iraq, not

with local law enforcement forces pre-

paring for protesters in the parking lot

of a Target department store in subur-

ban St. Louis.

Now she lives with her two daughters

— Journey, 6, and Joi, 4, in a two-bed-

room house a few miles away from the

protests, near a small park with a play-

ground and a tennis court. Her block is

usually quiet, except for the comforting

chatter from her neighbors on their

front porch across the street.

Sometimes it seems too quiet. Down

the block, houses are empty, boarded up,

weeds sprouting where neat lawns used

to be. Blight and abandoned houses

have become a problem in Ferguson.

Many people who have the means to

move are simply leaving, and homes

that go on the market often sit for long

stretches; who wants to buy a house in

Ferguson?

Ella Jones, a City Council member,

said more than 600 houses stand empty,

according to 2017 data. In apartments

along Canfield Drive, a winding road

dotted with low-slung rental buildings

where Mr. Brown was killed, former res-

idents said nearly everyone they knew

had moved away.

Ms. Louris, who works in a coffee ma-

chine factory, said she was still haunted

by Mr. Brown’s death, rooted in a new

physical place but unable to put aside

images of those weeks in 2014.

Mr. Brown was killed on a hot Satur-

day in August, and she was watching on-

line as people posted live videos of the

scene of his death.

“I kept looking at my Facebook,” she

recalled, which was filled with videos

and photos from Canfield Drive, where

Mr. Brown’s body lay on the pavement.

“I kept thinking, ‘He’s still there, he’s

still there, why is he still there?’ I’ve

never seen people treat the dead so ill.”

Months later, a St. Louis prosecutor

announced that a grand jury had not in-

dicted Darren Wilson, the officer who

killed Mr. Brown, setting off a new round

of protest.

A detailed federal review also cleared

Officer Wilson — who later left the de-

partment — of any civil-rights violations

and largely supported the officer’s ver-

sion of the shooting. Investigators con-

cluded that he had confronted Mr.

Brown in connection with a theft at a

nearby convenience store. Then, the re-

port found, Mr. Brown attacked Officer

Wilson while the officer was seated in

his S.U.V., and struggled for control of

his gun. After a brief chase on Canfield

Drive, the report said, Mr. Brown was

moving toward Officer Wilson on the

street when he was fatally shot.

After the shooting, Ferguson officials

entered into a contentious agreement

with the Justice Department, promising

to overhaul its court process, make new

guidelines for stops and searches, give

police officers more training and require

them to wear body cameras. But

progress has been agonizingly slow.

This year, the lawyer appointed to

monitor the process, Natashia Tidwell,

appeared impatient, telling a judge at

the most recent status hearing in early

July that the city had worked to collect

data on officers’ use of force and devel-

oped policies to improve community po-

licing, but had failed to carry them out.

There is an “absence of forward think-

ing and planning,” the monitor found.

Ms. Louris wants her children to have

a kinder relationship with the police

than her generation does. If they walk

past officers on the street, she urges

Journey to give them a high five or

wave.

But she is still wary of risks, Mr.

Brown’s death an indelible memory. “I

say, ‘If Mommy gets pulled over, I need

you to be very quiet, very still. Sit back

and be very, very still,’ ” she said. “They

know what to do.”

Journey, sitting on the front steps and

nibbling pistachios, turned and gave her

mother a warning look. “Mommy, the

police can hear you,” she said.

“It’s O.K.,” Ms. Louris said, her voice

going soft. “She thinks that because they

drive down the street sometimes. She

thinks they’re all around.”

“I KNOW IT’S NOT SAFE”

Kameran Toran, 17, spends his days in

the long shadow of Mr. Brown’s death,

beating a path down a wide commercial

street that was gutted by looting and ar-

son in violent demonstrations five years

ago. West Florissant Avenue, his street,

is a jumble of progress and decay.

A new Boys & Girls Clubs facility is

being built, workers in hard hats and

vests scurrying around. There is an Ur-

ban League building where a gas station

had been burned. A couple of miles from

the unrest, but technically within Fergu-

son city limits, a Starbucks. But store-

fronts are still abandoned husks, and

many residents loathe the dominance of

liquor stores and fast-food joints.

Kameran lives in an apartment a few

blocks from where Mr. Brown was

killed. They attended a common high

school, where Kameran says he was

kicked out two years ago after he was

caught smoking marijuana in a bath-

room.

He later got his diploma through an al-

ternative high school program. His

dream job is driving a forklift in a ware-

house. But until he turns 18 and can af-

ford a car, West Florissant marks a bor-

der of his world.

“It was more of a city that was going

down, basically,” said Joshura Davis, the

president of the West Florissant Busi-

ness Association, remembering what it

was like to try to lure new businesses

there after the unrest. “The perception

was that it was an unsafe place, that it

was a place where there weren’t a lot of

thriving businesses.”

Now he can point out small advances.

Mr. Davis is hopeful that an application

for a federal grant will be accepted this

time, allowing for more greenery and

crosswalks on a stretch that has too few

businesses and too much pavement. Vi-

olent crime in Ferguson shot up in 2015,

and then began to decline, but it has not

yet returned to lower, pre-2014 levels.

“Here we are five years later,” he said.

“That there would be such a long tail on

recovery, I wouldn’t have thought that.

That’s what frustrates me.”

One coppery July afternoon, Kam-

eran and a friend passed Sam’s Meat

Market, where a friend from the neigh-

borhood was shot dead in an argument

in the parking lot two days earlier.

Across the street were the decaying

Park Ridge apartments, now sitting

half-occupied, where Kameran lived

with his mother and little sister until

someone broke in and stole their cash,

he said.

“I try to stay away from people I don’t

know,” he said. “They take what they

want.”

They passed the gleaming new Fergu-

son Community Empowerment Center,

run by the Urban League, where Kam-

eran attended a month of job-skills

classes under a program, Save Our

Sons, that taught about 750 people in re-

sponse to overwhelming complaints

about the persistent lack of job opportu-

nities for black men. After five years, it

is a rare new community service center

operating along West Florissant. He re-

cently got a job at the McDonald’s on

West Florissant after an Urban League

worker took him to buy the requisite

pair of black dress pants.

At home, in the basement bedroom

where he has decorated the wall with

the shoe boxes from his favorite sneak-

ers, Kameran writes rap lyrics about

taking flight. Actually leaving is another

thing.

“I know it’s not safe. I know it’s bad,”

he said. “But I’ve adapted. I don’t know

where else to go.”

In Ferguson, the children inherit scars

FERGUSON, MO.

5 years after their town

was upended by a police

shooting, trauma persists

BY JACK HEALY

AND JULIE BOSMAN

Frances Robles contributed reporting

from San Juan, P.R. Jack Begg and Susan

Beachy contributed research.

Above and below right, David Morrison, 7, with his mother, Aminah Ali. When David was a preschooler, she used to take him along to

protests over the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. “I overexposed him,” she said about her son, whom she now takes to therapy for

anger issues. Below left, Kameran Toran, in white shirt, and his friend Hissan Rice in Ferguson, Mo. Left, Kameran with his mother,

Angel. Kameran writes rap lyrics about taking flight from the town. With limited options, actually leaving is another thing.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JARED SOARES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

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