National Commentary

One Year After Ferguson: Change Still Must Come

By Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.

NNPA Columnist

After three days of peaceful demonstrations marking the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s fatal shooting in Ferguson, Mo., yet another African-American man was shot by police there. While the facts are still unclear, the tragedy will surely add to the national protests challenging our racially biased structures of criminal injustice

A week earlier, a young, unarmed man was shot to death by a police officer in Seneca, S.C. Only this young man was not Black, but White.

According to CNN, Zachary Hammond was fatally shot while in a Hardee’s parking lot. He was 19-years-old and on a date. The police officer was conducting a drug investigation and claims that he shot Hammond in self-defense when the unarmed teenager drove his car at him. A small amount of marijuana was found in the front passenger compartment.

Police said the target of the investigation was not Hammond but his date. An independent autopsy showed, however, that Hammond was shot in the back, contradicting the official story. “He was a 19-yea- old, 121 pound kid killed basically for a joint,” family attorney Eric Bland said.

CNN reported that if this had been an African-American victim, it would have received national attention. That is true now, but only because an active movement of demonstrators have made it so. In fact, virtually the only protests to Hammond’s death were issued by #BlackLivesMatter activists on social media.

One year after Michael Brown’s fatal shooting in Ferguson, unarmed Black men are still seven times more likely than Whites to die by police gunfire, according to a new study by the Washington Post. So far this year, the Post reports, 24 unarmed Black men have been shot and killed by police – one every nine days. The Post reports that 585 people in total have been shot and killed by police through August 7. [The Guardian database reports 700 have been killed by police].

There is no question that African-American men are at greatest risk. After the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, national protests have forced reform of the police and of mass incarceration policies onto the national agenda. The names of those who died from police violence – Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Samuel DuBose, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Freddy Gray, Sandra Bland and more – are etched in public memory because demonstrators have demanded justice for them.