Ferguson X: Lead Uprising Organizer Tory Russell On Life In The City, Then And Now [Video]

August 14, 2024

After the Grand Jury’s Return of No True Bill Against Cop Who Killed Michael Brown Source: Scott Olson / Getty

In the final installment of NewsOne’s Ferguson X series, we are invited to listen to Tory Russell and Dr. Travis Harris in an intimate discussion between two Black men. It’s one so rarely listened closely to or well-considered on the national dais. But it’s the sort of full-breadth conversation between two Black men who make clear the precise pain and generational impact–of police violence.

Tory Russell Today Source: Tory Russell / Tory Russell

Tory, the lead organizer of the Ferguson Uprising, and Dr. T, who traveled from out of state to support Black people in the Greater St. Louis area, take us directly to where the beating of the heart resides, the place where it rushes forward from, calling a nation of the terrorized, to action.

The two men disrupt the vulgar, one-dimensional racist and repeated mischaracterizations of Black people–how they’re rageful, uncontrollable, violent, dangerous, impervious to pain and unstoppable even by bullets.

Prompted by Dr. Travis, Tory—son, father, brother, mentor, cousin, coach and colleague–lays bare how unforgivingly sharp the edge of the razor that is life lived at the direct line of sight of the state-sanctioned, deadly sharpshooters that are American police officers.

His honesty calls us to consider how one loves, how one nurtures their own lives and the lives of their children, how one fights back and keeps coming back in the face of ongoing legislated hate and disinformation?

Constrained by these, how do dreams nevertheless take hold? Choked by these, how is dignity maintained?

While the statistic quoted in the discussion, one that went viral a decade ago—that every 28 hours a Black person is killed by police–has actually been found to be inconsistent with the data, it did help instigate broader investigations into fatal shootings by law enforcement.

Not ready to die but twice as likely to be killed

Not only was it found by researchers and reporters that FBI data was wildly off because police departments are not required to share accurate or even any data of fatal shootings by law enforcement with the the federal government, but when those reporters and researchers undertook to determine the accurate numbers themselves, they found that Black people are killed by cops at double the rate of white people.

Researchers further found that every time a Black person is killed by a cop, there is a terrible health impact on the members of that person’s community, especially younger members. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health first provided that data in 2018, and in 2022, the international journal, Social Science & Medicine, found that the rate of deaths by suicide rose in the wake of a police killing in a Black community.

And as NewsOne reported earlier this year, none are more at risk than Black children, the only group of young people whose rate of death by suicide has increased—and exponentially so over the last 20 years.

Speak, So You May Speak Again~ Zora Neal Hurston

Unlike Michael Brown, on this day we are all alive to tell what’s happened these last 10 years. We are alive to speak for the teenager whose life was taken from him far out of season. Whose body was left for hours to decompose in the street where he was killed by former Ferguson police officer, Darren Wilson. It seems especially urgent while there is a national platform on which to tell it during this election year.

Because well before and well after August of 2014, organizers, most with few or no resources, have fought to change the way Black lives have been brutally breached and eviscerated by police in America. Reformers ensured bodycams, research, trainings and more. There were even some public apologies. Still, the work done by dedicated organizers has never been met in equal measure by the work of federal, state and local government officials, often rendering life-saving reforms void.

Since the 18-year-old kid who was headed to college in two short days, drew his final breath on Aug. 9, 2014, some 10,000 people have been killed by police.

Since 2014, the discrimination that drives the racial disparity in those killings, has remained constant.

At the time of Tory Russell’s and Travis Harris’ discussion late last week, and as of this writing today, fatal police shootings have risen every year since 2015.

The prediction by analysts is that 2024 will be the year with the highest number of people killed by police ever recorded in America.