- [Announcer] "Living St. Louis" is funded in part by the Betsy & Thomas Patterson Foundation and the members of Nine PBS.

(traffic whooshing) (bright music) (people chattering) - Ferguson is my hometown.

Believe what you see, don't worry about any rumors and things like that.

- I love it, all the support here at Ferguson, they really support each other.

- I love Ferguson, like I said, this community has literally turned me into who I am.

- The community coming together to showcase all of our talent, all of what's here, and it's not just people tearing stuff down.

- It's a great town, and obviously, things changed after Michael Brown, you know, but we're still hanging in here, going strong.

(people vocalizing) - August 1st, 2014, after he graduated from high school, he said, "The world will know my name, I'm gonna shake the world.

I might have to go away for a while, but I'm gonna come back and heal my city."

- So he wanted to rap, and I'm telling him, "You're going to school."

So that's where that came from.

But we didn't think that days later, the world will actually know his name because of what had happened to him.

So, it's- - It's deep.

- Yeah, it's very deep.

- There is growing outrage tonight after an unarmed African American teenager was shot and killed by police in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri.

- People saw this street in Ferguson, the whole world was looking at this street.

- Ferguson, Missouri.

- In Ferguson, Missouri.

- Ferguson.

- Ferguson, Missouri.

- No, I wasn't surprised Ferguson happened, I was surprised maybe it happened in Ferguson 'cause it could have happened anywhere.

- Tell 'em, "Don't shoot, hands up."

- It certainly wasn't sadly not unique to have a casualty of a young black man at the hands of police.

But this, it was a tipping point, it sparked a community outrage.

- Don't shoot innocent people.

- You know, kind of reflecting back 10 years later, you know, I believe that changed the course of American law enforcement.

- I kind of felt betrayed by our community, and I get it, I'm sure the community in certain parts of the community felt betrayed by their law enforcement community.

- And let me say, we're talking about law enforcement, but, like, it's everything, right?

We actually believed that we could change this forever, like this was gonna be like the last one, the last person to be disrespected in healthcare, the last person, last child to be disrespected in education.

That's what we were, it's the whole thing, not just the one moment, it's all of that.

- [Jerome] Mike Brown changed the total course of this neighborhood, our lives.

- Yeah, police station, everything.

- Everything.

It helped us grow and it helped us learn and communicate.

It's an unfortunate event, but we did everything in our power to make the good out of it.

- Yes.

- I think I'm always still caught in, like, it took somebody's life to have that moment, you know?

I can't help but think about how old he would be now and what he would be doing now, and the grief that never goes away for his family, for sure.

(horn beeping) - Mike's grandmother called and she tells me that Mike is laying in the middle of the street, the police just killed him.

And I took a moment, I can kind of remember that part, and I turned to Cal, like, the police just killed my son.

And everything from there was like a blank.

(sad music) - [Cal] He was told that nobody wanted to see a angry black father, that they wanted to see the tears of a grieving mother.

So he was silenced in those first few weeks.

- I was already kind of quiet, so just to mute me was kind of easy, you know?

- Because people who don't understand what it is that you go through, say some of the meanest things.

- We have been getting death threats since the beginning.

- Well, the thing about it, we ain't scared of nothing.

- Right.

(chuckles) - I mean, we've dealt with the worst.

- That's right.

- It's like, what more can you do?

Good evening.

- (crowd) Good evening.

Welcome to our May Cookies N Convo.

I just wanted to say that I am so glad to see all of your beautiful faces, and of course, I look forward to spending this intentional time with each of you.

We created Chosen For Change in 2014.

A gentleman who I grew up with brought us a picture that was drawn by a 9-year-old at the time, and somehow he got hold to Mike's obituary and he duplicated the photos that was on there, and it was presented to us and it said, "Chosen For Change."

And we looked at each other and we like, "That's it."

(soft music) The Michael Brown Sr.

Chosen For Change organization provides care and support to fathers and families who are processing the unthinkable.

We provide grief support for the entire family, we have Chosen Fathers that create a space that is inclusive to a grieving father's healing, we have Mothers of an Angel that provides a space that is inclusive to a grieving mother's healing, we have COPES, Children Overcoming Painful Experiences with Support.

Often children are overlooked when there is a loss in the family.

A lot of people are asking who this is, this is my newest endeavor.

This is Grief the Bear.

I'm actually working with Build-A-Bear to make this a reality, and more than 1,500 children in St. Louis who have been stricken with grief will be gifted this bear by our daughter, Mi-Kelle Brown.

- It gets hard, you know, that trauma, that's a different type of beast right there, you know?

And I tell people, "I don't have the blueprint to it, you know, but I can definitely tell you how I'm going through it, you know, and maybe it can help."

When you accept that this is a life sentence, you know, because you can't run from it, these things will pop up at any time.

You know, you can have a good week and that weekend, your weekend can be trash.

All them good memories, the laughter, the smell, all that is in your head, man.

And that will never leave you, you know, and memories are a lifetime, they're part of your healing.

Tears are part of your healing, memories are part of your healing.

- Right.

- You know?

The minute that you say there's nothing wrong with you, it's a problem.

It's a problem, bro, you know.

So it's gonna take some time.

There's always some baby steps ahead, but just know you'll learn how to walk again.

That helps, you know, it's part of the healing for us.

You know, that's where we get our justice from, you know, helping other families.

(cool music) - Well, we were here one year before the death of Michael Brown.

So for us, the beginning for us was zero sales, the way you look at it.

- It was.

- It just went from barely 'cause, you know, you have to let people know you're here and you're struggling on that when you first open.

And before we could catch our breath, Mike Brown happened.

So it started where nobody was in Cathy's Kitchen.

- The people who were coming in here to eat, they were the protestors.

At first, anything you saw on the news about the protestors, it was totally negative, the word protest was negative.

But I got to know those protestors by them coming in and out, and literally they were just standing up for their rights, you know?

- Yeah.

Cathy made an important decision because nobody was coming into the restaurant and we had all this food, Cathy decided to cook all the food we had, and she went out there and fed everybody that was just standing in the street.

So the payback, they paid it back forward to us was just priceless by protecting it.

- [Reporter] A number of stories like this, Cathy's Kitchen, a diner located on Florissant Road, very close to other businesses that were either burned to the ground or looted.

- Leave this alone.

- [Reporter] But last night, a group of protestors.

- Leave this alone.

- Linked arms to stop others from hurting the restaurant, you hear them saying, "Leave this alone," it escaped.

- [Cathy] Anderson Cooper invited us on his show.

It was the first positive video ever filmed of the protesters.

- One window was broken.

- Yeah.

- And who was it, Aeneas?

- Aeneas Williams, Football Hall of Famer walked up.

- He was out here fixing the window.

- He was outside cutting plywood, that's how I met a Hall of Famer.

(laughs) - [Jerome] Right, because he was out here fixing that one window.

- Yeah, you know, I always say, I thank God for the invention of the cell phone camera because it has changed more laws than anything we've ever tried to accomplish.

- And you got the chance to tell your story.

- The thing that Ferguson brought, not just to St Louis, but to the nation, was the power of community speaking out in their own voices.

- So we had people with their cell phones telling a story.

You could see in real time what was happening.

You didn't have to rely on like Channel 4, Channel 5, right?

It took, I think it was a year before I even saw what was on the news, I was like, oh boy, that looks scary from the television.

(laughs) And they captured the other moments, like, people defending property, you know, property wasn't a big deal for me personally, because we had lost a life.

And for me, it was the life that we, you know, should have been protecting, we can build another building, we can have a building fund.

I want us to get out of the pattern of having funeral funds.

- If you didn't live over here, you thought it was burned down 'cause what they showed you on television, it was a nightmare to the eyes of people.

So now the timeline takes us to trying to show you what's really here.

Well, it's only about three of us that survived from the original.

- Yes.

- Not that many.

- Not that many, but it's about 13 to 14 restaurants on the street now, so at least 10 of 'em are new.

- It's almost like a renaissance over here.

- Within the last three years, you know, and to us, Cathy and I, we like to call it the New Black Wall Street.

- Yes.

- Because, you know, all these new black restaurants, most people don't know about.

- And businesses, not all restaurants, all type business.

- Yeah, any business.

Real estate, clothing stores, ice cream shops, I mean, it's just a plethora of things to choose from now on this street because of Mike Brown.

- [Jerome] That's right.

- We used to go on vacation.

- Oh yeah.

- They would ask you where you were from, we would say Ferguson and, "Oh my God.?

- They'd be like, "How is it?

How is it?

Is it okay?"

- I feel like we've done something no other city has done after a riot, you know, never, we've rebirthed the whole community here, so, yeah.

- Yeah, you know, we're proud to talk about it, you know, once again, none of this happens without Mike Brown, none of this.

(traffic whooshing) - The city of Ferguson, as we know, was 67% black and had zero African-American leaders in its city government.

(intriguing music) My role as a civil rights attorney at the national level, I was working then for a civil rights organization in Washington, D.C., I had had quite a bit of opportunity to interact with members of the Department of Justice, the Civil Rights Division, and was able to help bridge communications between the Department of Justice and community members.

The Department of Justice report, unsurprisingly, found deep evidence of racial bias in policing in not only Ferguson, but in St. Louis County as well.

We pushed the Department of Justice hard to impose a consent decree that would mandate particular reforms for the city of Ferguson.

And ultimately, the judge approved the consent decree.

And what we saw, of course, is that change was slow to come.

There were changes that were made.

African Americans elected to the Ferguson City Council, the first African American mayor in the city of Ferguson, on the Board of Alderman, on school boards, or as leaders of community organizations who are fighting for systemic change.

These were really important pieces of the puzzle and continue to be today.

- What happened in 2014 in the city of Ferguson was really just kind of an eye-opening moment to address a lot of the societal issues that we've been neglecting to address.

And while a lot of it was thrust upon law enforcement, kind of, "Hey, this is a law enforcement problem," the reality is is it exposed a lot of the warts that we have in American society.

- I think from a law enforcement perspective, we were up against it from the very beginning between social media, the media, disinformation, I mean, just all that stuff is just kind of a perfect storm, if you will.

- Babies, babies tear gassed, I'm tear gassed, animals tear gassed, and you wanna sit here?

- That's the perspective that I don't think the community saw, is that, yes, you have a story to tell, the activist side will say, and the first responders side has a story to tell as well.

It affected us in a mental health capacity more than people might imagine.

And I'm not saying that my experience is worse than yours, or yours is worse than hers, I'm just saying that we all dealt with what we had to deal with at the time and I think that was lost, there was no understanding, there was no, "We need to knock this off and we need to start taking care of each other," it was more us against them, them against us, you know, from both sides.

- We tell everybody and we tell officers, you know, understand the ripple effect that you have, every interaction has a ripple effect.

So when you meet one person, you have the ability to change that one person's life.

And there's truth to that, but understand that you have the ability to change a community too.

And you do that maybe by one interaction at a time, but all of those interactions cumulatively have the ability to change a society in a community.

- My job description is I help ensure the emotional, mental, and physical wellbeing of all of our employees.

There's a stigma to being a police officer, and that stigma is, "I don't need help, I don't wanna seek help.

I'm not gonna go find help because I'm good, I signed up for this, I'm tough."

- [Protestor] Y'all ought to hide your badges, like that's supposed to mean something, when that badge come off, you still the same as us.

- So we teach them, here's how you take care of yourself, here's how you bounce back from a critical incident, here's how you improve and enhance your resiliency, because there's no shortage of critical incidents in police work, there's always one right around the corner, there's always one tomorrow, whatever it might be.

There was a significant impact from Ferguson.

I don't wanna say we're past it, because there's things out there that you can't just unsee, and there's experiences that each one of them may have had that has left a lasting impression on them.

I know if I drive down West Florissant right now or drive down Canfield, I'm gonna remember those days, I'm gonna remember specific incidents.

But as long as we have a good level of resiliency, as long as we provide services and navigate them to the help they need, those issues are not right here, right?

Because if they're right here, we have a problem.

But I wish people would understand that what we were going through and I understood more of what they were going through.

And I think if that would've happened, if there had been some sort of understanding, this whole thing would've been a lot shorter than it was.

So that's just kind of my opinion on that.

- Yeah?

- Yeah.

- Yeah, I remember I was about the age of eight when I heard about the Ferguson situation that was going on.

And I remember I was in my room with my grandmother and I asked her, I was like, "You're watching all the local stations," and we saw that looters, they were like taking out shoes, taking out clothes."

And I asked my grandma, I was like, "Is these free clothes?"

(laughs) I didn't know what was going on.

So I want to ask you all the question, how do you think Ferguson has impacted the younger generation?

- I was 10 when the Michael Brown situation happened, and I lived in Ferguson my entire life.

And I remember just the city being in a uproar, and I didn't understand what was going on because I'm 10, like, I'm just learning multiplication, five times five and chilling, you know, watching Disney Channel.

- I was nine actually when Ferguson was going on, so I didn't have really too much of a knowledge of what was going on.

But I felt the commotion around, you could see it on the news and everything.

- I do remember there was a newspaper in our living room and I remember just reading it and being horrified.

- What do you all wish that people understood more about the Michael Brown situation that happened in Ferguson?

- I really wish that people would understand that it kind of caused the unhinged behavior within St. Louis.

- That's generations worth of anger.

Like, giving people grace to feel the way that they feel, and then also coming behind that and being like, "Okay, we felt that, how do we move forward and how do we clean up our community?

That's the important part.

- That's why we're generation of peace, that's why we're the generation that's gonna heal every amount of trauma that's enrooted in our DNA, that's why we're gonna change the genetic structures of who we are to move forward with action and with logical plans.

Like, my mom always says common sense is not that common, so we're the generation that has to install common sense back into ourselves.

Every time that I'm stepping on the forefront, I tell myself that the system isn't broken, it's designed this way for a reason.

- Straight facts.

- Definitely.

Definitely.

- So for me- (all laughing) - Why then breakthrough?

- I know like it's not designed for us.

- No.

- Right.

- So we're gonna have to move differently from how other people are moving.

- Exactly.

- I'm going to have to work 10 times harder versus than my white counterpart in the working field, you know, that's just the mindset that I have to have when I'm stepping out in front of whatever that I am doing.

So how can we specifically move forward in Ferguson as we know that this is the 10th anniversary of the Michael Brown tragedy that happened in Ferguson.

How can we move forward this year or in any other years to come?

- Really, I feel like we have to overcome fear because in the sense, we are scared of, what?

- Yes, yes.

- We have the talent.

- Yeah.

- Yes.

- But we sit back on it because we are afraid to fail, you feel me?

But failure is a part of life.

I wouldn't say that it's necessarily failure, it's just a learning experience.

- Yeah.

- It's only failure if you choose not to get back up and keep moving forward.

- Yeah, yeah, you know.

Can I tell, you touched on?

- Wait, hold on.

- Go ahead, go ahead.

- I'm so sorry.

- I was just gonna say like touching on that situation, it's just like, in this society, I feel like that we have so much fear, you know, to even stand up against the system because of all of the previous generations that's come before us.

- Yes.

- We are so scared, from their ego, this system or whatever, it just like makes us believe that there's just this mighty nation, and if something happened, we try to rise up, then they'll just be burnt down, just like Tulsa.

These businesses, we don't look at it, it's like black people right now are our own enemy.

Why?

Because we don't believe in ourselves.

- Yeah.

- Why?

But we built this whole nation, we thrive, we pushed forward the culture.

- I think something else that's really important within this conversation, we've talked a lot about how Ferguson had kind of built up with the looting and a lot of rioters during Ferguson.

And we have been in spaces where we constantly do not understand, like, we can feel this anger, but because we don't really understand where these thoughts come from, where this anti-blackness comes from, where this colorism thoughts come from.

Because we don't really understand that, and we are like sort of in the same place that we sort of were a while ago.

- Same place that we started.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, we're in the same place that we started.

- In the same way, like, after each death, the black community kind of goes through this phase where it's like, it puts us in a state of conscious of like, what if that's me?

- Gotcha.

- Man.

- So that's what, like, I mean, we need to really understand that righteous anger that we have 'cause that is valid, it is so valid.

We can talk about all this stuff, but we need to understand it.

And in order to kind of move forward, we need to really have that understanding and then channel it in the right ways, in the correct ways.

- Exactly.

(intriguing music) - After Michael Brown's death in August, it just brought to light all the racial inequity we had in our community.

The night of the grand jury announcement, when the decision was made not to indict, there was fires, there were riots, a lot of buildings, small businesses were damaged in Ferguson and the surrounding communities, actually, a lot of them were in Delwood.

I grew up in Ferguson, I just came down there saying, "Well, I can do something.

I'll go and, you know, support small businesses on Small Business Saturday."

I literally saw hundreds of artists come out and they were taking just blocks and blocks and blocks of boarded up buildings and transforming them into these incredible works of art, and I was just overwhelmed.

And I decided there and then that I was gonna write a book.

And I well, that's how I can contribute, I can do this book, all the profits can go back to the community and that's how it got started.

So after I wrote the book, I started talking to some of the store owners because they didn't have any place to store their art.

And I said, you know, "If I take good care of it, would you let me use it?"

And I hoped that it would be displayed someday.

- That let's go in the front of the healer.

One of my very favorites, especially with all the band-aids, well, I knew this would be a good home for them because the inspiration, the original inspiration for Delmar DivINe came from my experience right after Michael Brown had been killed in Ferguson.

I was sitting with children talking to them and listening to what they wanted and needed, and all of those things existed in St. Louis, they just didn't know where they were, how to access them.

And I started thinking then that, you know, what can I do?

Now that I know there's this issue, what can I do to correct it?

- To me, it speaks for itself.

- The Delmar DivINe is a place and a space that we've created to bring nonprofits together in a way that they can collaborate.

We have 26,000 nonprofits in St. Louis, way too many, and we couldn't hold 26,000, but we could hold some of the major ones here.

And we worked together to solve and work on the problems that we have here in St. Louis, the social problems.

The interesting thing about the art when I saw it was it represented so many of the tenants that we had here that were working on solving, healers and educators and people that work in collaboration and in facilitation to bring people together, this is what is going on at Delmar DivINe, even though the artists may not have known they were building something or painting something for a long time, they were just trying to protect those buildings and heal themselves that they would be healing 10 years later, 20 years later, hopefully, and 30 and 40, maybe a hundred, that people will still be looking at this art with a feeling of history and a connection to St. Louis that they might not have had in any other way.

- There were more than 450 artists, that's what's so monumental about this effort.

I mean, the paintings themselves are big and they're inspiring, but the fact that people dropped everything they were doing and came out in the cold and said, "I wanna make a difference."

To me, that's the message of the paintings, is that people are saying, "We can't stay where we are, we have got to work and we've gotta work together to make a difference."

(bright music) - Thank goodness for the artists.

They came up with all the things that you would've just never imagined, like, you know, all the ways in which it showed visibly the heart and harm and pain that was happening at the time.

And so, when we think about like systemic change and how can we change a region, it takes all of us, but all of our work may look a little different.

(people chattering) - This exhibition asks, what have been the artistic responses to a decade of social upheaval that began in 2014 and continues today in the US?

Focusing on policing and racial injustices from artists of color, from Ferguson and beyond.

Their art asks us to reflect and then act.

It is my profound honor and Webster's profound honor to welcome the Brown family.

(audience applauding) - You know, I struggle every day, you know, missing Mike, it's 10 years now, it still feels like the same year everything happened.

Me, personally, I don't think too much has changed, but we got a whole lot of work to do.

And I'm standing here telling you, I'm gonna stand with the people that wanna do the work, thank you.

- [Audience] Amen.

(applauds) - The world is back looking at Ferguson with St. Louis, Ferguson, you know, it's all the same.

We always want things to happen overnight, and it doesn't, you know?

- I'm not gonna tell you things haven't changed and things aren't better, things are better.

Things are not where they should be.

- We're not perfect, but we are able to have those conversations, we are able to better relate to one another, and I think that's what brings us together and makes our community whole again.

- There's so much despair and there's a lot of reason to despair in St. Louis, but there is a lot of reason for hope.

- I'm proud, I'm proud to say, when anybody asks me, "I'm from Ferguson."

- We had the loss of a life that has transformed, not just a community, but a nation, I mean, I've traveled internationally, they too have talked about Mike Brown and Ferguson.

- I would want the world to know that he was loved, his family loved him, he was a human because he was dehumanized, right?

We definitely want the people to know that he was my son, my son, and I loved him.

- [Interviewer] What do you want people to know 10 years later?

- It ain't over, it's just the beginning.

(chuckles) (inspiring music) (inspiring music continues) (inspiring music continues) - [Announcer] "Living St. Louis" is funded in part by the Betsy & Thomas Patterson Foundation and the members of Nine PBS.