‘Witness To History’: Ferguson Uprising Leader Tory Russell On Black People’s Power

Officers said to be “watching” protestors on West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson 9 days after Michael Brown  Source: Michael B. Thomas / Getty

This episode of Witness to History is the first of two in which Tory Russell, who has served as our host and co-producer for this season’s look back at Ferguson a decade after the uprising, answers questions instead of asking them.

Speaking with his friend, Travis Harris, Ph.D., who helmed NewOne’s discussion with Mike Brown, Sr. this Aug. 9, exactly 10 years after the son who bore his name–and who was unarmed with his hands in the air–was shot and killed by a white man, Darren Wilson, then a Ferguson cop. He was never held accountable for putting six bullets, including one into the head, of the college-bound Black teenager.

Mike Brown Sr. Source: Aaron P. Bernstein / Getty

Harris—who uses the moniker “Hood Scholar ” to amplify his commitment to always being of the community, even as he works in the academy—met Tory in the fall of 2014. He’d responded to the leader’s call to the nation: Tory asked people to come to Ferguson in October to support the people of a city literally under siege.

Source: Tory Russell / Tory Russell

Even now, Tory can close his eyes and see the tanks rolling into Ferguson–and all the soldiers who rolled in with them. But even now he can also feel the determination that drove the 400-day civil disobedience. It was longer than even the Montgomery Bus Boycott and powerful enough to spark five years of steady resistance against anti-Black police terrorism across the U.S. and the world.

Tory still feels the collective and immeasurable strength of the people who joined the uprising. It was everywhere, every day, all at once.

The people who were part of that uprising were the people whose blood, bones and sinew held the memory of ancestors who’d been forced to chart their lives by the occurrences of state-sanctioned violence they suffered.

Police killing Black people in the area was so widespread and common that one would be hard-pressed to find a family that hadn’t been touched by it. The protest Tory led had been building for more than a century-and-a-half.

On Aug. 9, 2014, he helped call it to order, and here, Tory shares the story of the build-up to that day, the wisdom he got the hard way–and what we’re called to do now in an America where police killing Black people remains three times higher than the rate of white people. Erasing that statistic is within our reach. Here, leader Tory Russell arrives to help show us just how.

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