Social Education 248 Ferguson Is About Us Too: A Call to Explore Our Communities Alexander Cuenca and Joseph R. Nichols, Jr. On August 9, Michael Brown, a college-bound black male, was fatally shot by a white police officer in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri. The news of Brown’s death spread quickly throughout this small suburban municipality. Later that evening, citizens organized protests and vigils at the Ferguson police department seeking information and answers. With few details released to the public, frustration mounted, eventu- ally leading to consecutive nights of confrontations between citizens and police. For several days, jarring images of tear gas, militarized police, and unrest in Ferguson flickered on screens across the world. Ostensibly, these images made it easy to fixate on Ferguson as a community in turmoil. However, beyond the spectacle of confrontation, this civic uprising had many more dimensions that were often unseen. For example, citizens gathered daily on sidewalks along the epicenters of the events—West Florissant Avenue and Canfield Drive—exercising their civic responsibility to demand justice when injustice was apparent. The sounds of car horns blaring in support, or of feet marching together down a closed thor- oughfare and shouts of “no justice, no peace,” reaffirmed the righteousness of the cause. Local artists used their influ- ence and mediums to communicate the exasperation of a community. 1 Religious leaders in Ferguson led prayer vigils, provided forums for citizens to express anger and frustration, and served as peacemakers in tense moments, stand- ing between crowds and police in riot gear. 2 And when police closed neigh- borhoods in Ferguson as a containment effort to fend off protests (effectively quarantining citizens from basic health- care services or being able to shop for groceries), neighbors looked after neigh- bors. 3 Today, citizens continue to attempt to redress the wounds exposed by the uprising in Ferguson. Antonio French, the St. Louis city alderman who gained national recognition for broadcasting the events in Ferguson in real time through Twitter and Vine, set up HealSTL, 4 an organization with the purpose of turn- ing this moment into a more sustainable movement of empathy, understanding, and action. While we can see Ferguson in terms of its experience of tense nights between citizens and police, the expressions of the citizen, artist, community leader, and neighbor speak to the reality that this “event” was about more than riots and tear gas. Undoubtedly, what brought Ferguson to the national consciousness— the death of a young black male and the uprising that followed—provides an opportunity to explore important issues such as stereotyping in our society, the role of protests and demonstrations in civic life, and the ways in which tradi- tional and social media help construct the narratives of critical events. However, at the root of these inquiries lies a tacit assumption that Ferguson was somehow extraordinary—that the flashpoint itself is what deserves to be interrogated. Yet, if we consider Ferguson in its totality through the eyes of its citizens, we can see that there was nothing extraordinary about what shaped the circumstances of these civic expressions. As with all upris- ings, the discrete acts of citizenship in Ferguson were mediated by the intersec- tion of social forces. These are the forces that influenced the character of Ferguson, and the study of these forces can poten- tially provide the most poignant lessons. The citizens voicing their discontent with the local government’s response to Michael Brown’s death were not just ask- ing for justice for Michael’s family, but for redress for an unjust series of decisions that have segregated this community by race and class. It is the accumulation of these decisions that have made it easy for one part of St. Louis to look one way while many St. Louisians suffer from a lack of affordable housing of quality, an absence of living wages, and decades of disinvestment in their neighborhoods. 5 The events in Ferguson serve as a reminder that calls for justice are often calls to redress the subtlety of other forms of social injury. On April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, presidential candi- date Robert F. Kennedy gave his famous speech on “The Mindless Menace of Violence in America” to the Cleveland, Ohio City Club: For there is another kind of vio- lence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is Social Education 78(5), pp 248–253 ©2014 National Council for the Social Studies