Ten years ago on August 9, Mike Brown was murdered by police officer Darren Wilson. His death sparked a rebellion in the Black working-class suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, which developed into a decade-long movement that we now refer to as “Black Lives Matter.” 

I was on the ground in Ferguson with Socialist Alternative. I’m also a lifelong resident of Minneapolis, where neighbors and tourists alike still deliver flowers every day to the site of George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

Despite this decade of struggle, there is a pervading feeling among many people that very little has changed as a result. Police murders have increased almost 30% since 2013, and it’s still working-class Black and Latino people who are disproportionately killed. Black unemployment is still consistently twice as high as that of white workers, and Black workers still make up 37% of the homeless population while being just 13% of the overall US population.

What went wrong? How did a movement that at one point had tens of millions of people across the country, including in “red states”, and a moment in which the act of burning down of the Minneapolis Third Precinct had more support from voters than either Presidential candidate, fail to dramatically alter the situation for Black workers in America?

An Organic Uprising

During the Great Recession, tens of millions of working class families lost their homes, retirements and savings. Black people were hit hardest. Obama’s promise of “Hope and Change” raised the expectations of millions of people, especially young Black people. But as Occupy Wall Street proliferated the slogan of “the 1% vs. the 99%”, Obama became the chief spokesperson of the 1%. An opening emerged between expectation and reality – a space for mass protests.

In 2014, 18-year-old Mike Brown was shot on a small street in the center of an apartment complex in Ferguson, a working class, Black community outside of St. Louis. The whole neighborhood heard Mike Brown scream his last words: “Don’t shoot”.

Brown’s lifeless body laid out in the hot August sun for four hours as the community gathered, first to mourn, and then, to rebel.

Ferguson’s working class and youth defined the new Black freedom movement that followed. The protests were incredibly organic – people would get off work, congregate along the main street in the evening with homemade signs, and eventually young people would start marching and chanting. Then everyone else would join in.

The political establishment tried everything to put the protests down. First the local police, and later the state patrol, tried to enforce a curfew by showing up with a tank and assault rifles, indiscriminately spraying people with mace and tear gas. 

The nonviolent rebellion continued undeterred. The traditional “leadership” of the fight against racism, people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, were swept aside by a new, younger, and sharper force, armed with a much wider goal of eliminating racist police brutality once and for all and prepared to confront anything that stood in their way. This allowed what became Black Lives Matter to develop into a national phenomenon.

An Entrenched Enemy

Following the Ferguson Rebellion, high profile police murders started sparking waves of mass protests. People with lives and families, loved by their communities and coworkers, became names in an ever-expanding procession of obituaries. Tamir Rice. Freddie Gray. Sandra Bland. Philando Castille.

The movement had to grapple with what could be done. A loose program emerged around de-escalation training and body cameras, but these demands proved to be ineffective against the many-headed hydra of police violence. De-escalation training went out the window, dominated by the overwhelming attitude towards self-preservation within police departments. Body cameras were widely adopted, but had little impact on police brutality – police departments simply selectively release footage to paint themselves in the best light, or turn cameras off at critical times. Even when the footage of horrific violence was made public, often officers still weren’t prosecuted.

When the movement re-emerged explosively onto the scene after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, protesters demanded more. “Defund the Police” became the common refrain, reflecting the deep hypocrisy of feeding more and more tax dollars into violent policing while inflicting austerity and desperation onto the Black working-class population. 

While this could have been truly transformative, to retool city budgets to prioritize housing and social services over policing, it was not done by the Democratic establishment almost anywhere. The few cities that did cut police budgets in 2020 generally only did so by a few percentage points, and redoubled their investments the following year.

Leadership & Strategy

Why wasn’t this movement able to defeat, or significantly deter, racist police violence in the US?

At the height of the movement, nearly every politician and even corporation gave lip service to the fight against racism – but in practice, they systematically demonized, violently repressed, and worked behind the scenes to undermine the mass movement. On either side of the political aisle, Democrats and Republicans defend capitalism, and in a country where capitalism developed on a foundation of chattel slavery, and where today a few billionaires own as much wealth as half of the working class, the ruling class needs a tool of violent repression – the police – to maintain order. 

While the organic nature of the early movement lended it power, the ongoing lack of democratic structures in the movement handed authority to unaccountable, self-appointed leaders, some with careerist ambitions. This unaccountable leadership was then susceptible to getting sucked into processes of closed-door meetings with Democratic Party politicians promising change that never came. 

This led to the rise in prominence of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, a section of the BLM leadership that was essentially bought off – millions of dollars that poured into that organization from working-class people desiring a fighting lead actually went to buy houses and luxurious lifestyles for the members of its executive board.

This layer of self-appointed leaders maintained their positions by weaponizing identity politics, echoing the “divide and rule” tactics that the bosses and billionaires use to keep workers divided. They did not emphasize that the whole working class needed to fight all forms of oppression to eradicate the roots of racism: capitalism. 

Fighting For Black Lives Today

Learning the lessons of the last ten years of struggle since Mike Brown’s murder is essential to rebuilding a fighting movement against racism today. Police budgets need to be cut, and police departments need to be put under the control of democratically elected civilian-review boards. However, truly reducing crime and gun violence requires a program to tax billionaires and corporations to fund schools, jobs, housing, healthcare and social services.

Such a social transformation would benefit the whole working class, but especially Black workers. What the decade of struggle following Mike Brown’s murder showed was that large sections of the working class are willing to fight police brutality and racism. However, racism won’t go away as long as the racist foundations of US capitalism remain intact. We need a revolutionary, socialist program to eliminate racism along with all forms of exploitation and oppression.