The Only ‘Outside Agitators’ Left in Ferguson

Thousands of people from around the nation have traveled here under the banner #FergusonOctober to protest the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. And while local citizens and politicians, visiting demonstrators and even media personnel have been subject to police confrontation since the earliest days of action, the latest round of demonstrations around the city have resulted in dozens of arrests – including those of Union Seminary professor Cornel West and African Methodist Episcopal pastor Renita Lamkin, who was also recently shot with a rubber bullet.

Although local organizations called for protestors to gather in St Louis last weekend, many in the press and general public are still questioning the presence and politics of what some – including Ferguson police chief Thomas Jackson – have called “outside agitators”.

Some of us, however, are asking a radically different question: what and who, exactly, is an “outside agitator”? Because, depending on the definition, I might be considered one.

I first went to Ferguson in August with #BlackLivesMatter, a national movement that serves as a “response to the tragic history of racial supremacy – one that renders black life valueless”. We witnessed the tanks and teargas. We saw local police officers uniformed in military gear. The American midwest looked more like the Middle East, and 2014 felt more like 1964.

Just when it seemed like the mainstream media was done reporting on Ferguson, another black teenager from the St Louis area, Vonderrit Myers, was gunned down by an off-duty white police officer, enraging an already infuriated community and putting the area back in the spotlight. The entire nation – and much of the world – has its eyes on Ferguson, once again. And as police repression continues to increase, so do questions of who should be involved in the resistance to it.

“Outside agitator” rhetoric is far from new. In 1964, in the midst of Freedom Summer, Mississippi governor Ross Barnett called workers organizing voter registration drives “outside agitators”.

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