On Aug. 9, 2014, a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed a Black teenager named Michael Brown in the middle of the street. His body lay where it fell for four hours in the hot sun. Residents posted details about the gruesome killing to social media and called local news outlets, and soon protests began, which ballooned into what became known as the Ferguson uprising.
Brown’s killing alerted the nation to the fact that Ferguson’s Black residents had been subjected to decades of systemic harassment, targeting, and discrimination by police. The slogan Black Lives Matter, which had been coined a year earlier when Trayvon Martin’s killer was acquitted, became an international rallying cry for racial justice.
Missouri State Senator Brian Williams grew up in Ferguson, and in the wake of the uprising he led the passage of several state-level police reforms. He recently also became the executive director of the Construction Career Development Initiative, which was created in 2015 as a direct response to the Ferguson uprising. Williams reflected on the 10th anniversary of Brown’s killing with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali.