Witness To History: Ferguson 10 And The Love Of A Mother, Julia Boure

August 28, 2024

Ferguson, Missouri, August 2014 Source: Scott Olson / Getty

Everyone who took to the Ferguson, Missouri, streets beginning on Aug. 9, 2014, called 44-year-old Julia Boure, Momma Julia. “That’s who she was introduced to me as–just Momma Julia,” said Tory Russell, co-producer of this year’s production of the Urban One’s iOne Digital annual, limited-series podcast, Witness to History, which looks back at Ferguson 10 years after Michael Brown was killed by former Ferguson cop, Darren Wilson, and the months-long uprising that followed.

Young people gathered immediately after the noon shooting of the unarmed Black teenager who was walking with a friend on West Florissant when the white then-officer, pulled up on them. Ninety seconds later, Brown who was starting college in two days, was dead.

Listen to the audio podcast here.

“She’s always been Momma Julia,” continued Tory, who architected and led the months-long uprising that began at the Ferguson police station as the sun began its slow, hard, set on the evening of Aug. 9. He didn’t know then that his actions that night would inspire more than half a decade of national and international protests against the domestic terrorism that regularly characterizes encounters between police and Black people. Police who so rarely are held accountable even in “liberal” states, let alone the openly racist Missouri.

What the cop who killed Brown said–and what witnesses said–happened in 90 seconds

Wilson claimed—in sworn testimony—that in a minute-and-a-half, he pulled up on Brown and nicely asked him to walk on the sidewalk instead of on the street, prompting Brown—who, according to cops had just committed a robbery at the nearby Quik Mart—to decide the best course of action was to curse out the cop, start to run away, then choose to instead charge the vehicle despite knowing that he was unarmed and the cop was armed. Quite naturally, if you believe Wilson, Brown approached the vehicle’s driver-side window and started beating him in order to unholster his weapon.

Swear to God this was Wilson’s story—along with how it was then and only then that he was forced to shoot Michael Brown twice, hitting him both times. According to him, two bullets weren’t enough because despite being shot twice, the still teenaged-no-criminal record-having-no-weapon-having-no-history of violence-having Michael Brown rose, demon-like (“demon” being his word), the way monsters do in bad, below B-level horror movies, and, unbothered by the bullets that were fired into him at close range, was able to “charge” Wilson again!

Were it not for that otherworldly act, Wilson implied, he never would have had to shoot Brown four more times, killing him where he stood. All in 90 seconds.

Black witnesses and cellphone evidence from nearby construction workers kept it simple: Wilson pulled over, yelled at Brown who put his hands in the air, surrendering. Wilson shot and killed him anyway, including in the head. It was that horribly familiar act of depravity that sent people into the streets and then, led by Tory, over to the police station, roughly six hours after Michael Brown was killed at noon on Aug. 9, 2014.

And it’s where Momma Julia, from the beginning, was in the mix.

Listen to the first episode of Witness to History: Ferguson 10 with Dr. Cornel West here.

The militarized olice of Ferguson starting to gather, August 13, 2014 Source: Scott Olson / Getty

Say Her Name!

Tory’s intimate discussions bring us close to people well-known and not; people like Momma Julia who are rarely written about or otherwise documented fairly or accurately—when they’re written about or documented at all. But we need to know her name; her wisdom in the now time, not as a “discovery” a century, maybe two, in the future.

There’s a place in our collective minds that stores the unrelenting force-feeding of the most trivial of details of the most trivial of lives—the ones of people who are proudly narcissistic and talentless influencers who stalk our timelines and destroy our brain’s grey matter. Some of us may like that trivia and gossip, but none of us is helped by it and none of us need it. We need Momma Julia.

“For years,” Tory said, “she worked as a parent-student advocate helping our people of all ages who were disrespected by public school teachers and administration across the Greater St. Louis Metropolitan area. The mother of now two grown men, Jacques and Jerrion, was tragically widowed by the time Ferguson rose up in 2014, when she stood, the lone elder, with the young protesters almost from hour one and through nights that ran from August’s heat to November’s frost.

“She was just 44, but to us, given that we were mostly in our early 20s–or younger–we saw her and respected her as our elder,” Tory shared. “But not just because she was older than us. It was because she came with a loving mother’s calm aura and wise advice in the center of the storms. She was our safe harbor,” Tory said. “We all had Mommas but we didn’t have Mommas who went to the protests with us.”

Momma Julia, whose home was just down the block from the Ferguson police station on South Florissant, a two-minute drive and nearly all-white universe away from where Brown was killed on West Florissant, was never much good at staying still or silent when it came to matters of justice and Black people. Certainly, a sister who, as a small girl, saw nothing done when her own brother was reportedly shot and killed by police in 1981.

No way could she do as Michael Brown’s bullet-ridden body lay for hours on the street where he was shot. Or when she saw young people hogtied and dragged away, their hands zip-tied behind their backs, their feet bound with rope before their legs were bent backward and tied to their hands by Ferguson police who apparently favored the method of sadist bondage torture.

A young Ferguson man who protested the shooting of Michael Brown in the moment before he was hogtied Source: Scott Olson / Getty

A Call to Presence and Protection

“Momma Julia centered us and opened her home to us and fed us—and unlike other elders, actually stood with us on those streets and through the nights. No one else did that. Most of the elders in the community didn’t come until she called on them to—and also to help protect us.”

And they did come. And led by Momma Julia, they did protect the young people of the community over and over. Momma Julia did it despite police intimidation, including flooding her home with their high beams all night, and disgustingly, according to widely held belief, slaughtering her cherished pet dog.

Tory remembered one heated night early on when it looked like the police were seconds away from firing on protesters who’d gathered at the police station.

“She just said ‘Stop!’” Tory said. “Her voice rose up and over all the yelling that was going on,” he said, “…that stop was directed at us and the police and all of us–including the police–stopped,” he finished, having described just one moment on one night in the life of a woman who was and remains, in his words, “a portal to a peaceful African past.”

Her home was where Tory and other protesters could go and rest and feel safe and cry and laugh and strategize and reaffirm their work and their mission. And when Tory is asked about how he made it through that period of military siege—tactics, weaponry and all—that undertaken against Black Americans, again, he begins by talking about a woman named Momma Julia.

Please listen to her during this week’s moving and powerful episode of Witness to History.

Note from the editors: This episode of Witness to History was recorded and locked in just before House Representative Cori Bush lost her reelection bid against the pro-Israel AIPAC candidate, Wesley Bell.