Read Online We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation by Jeff Chang - Free Book Online

again cops gave a dispersal order, and from their armored vehicles dropped more tear gas canisters. St. Louis University professor and civil rights lawyer Brendan Roediger negotiated with the police for a way for the patrons to leave. Finally, they filed out of the café one by one with their hands up, and walked slowly away from the police line down the block to St. John’s Episcopal Church. The next evening, police would return to form riot lines in front of the café.
    Reverend Osagyefo Sekou had been at MoKaBe’s on the morning of November 24 to attend an urgent meeting about preparations for the grand jury announcement. The young organizers had received him with a warmth and deference that they showed only a handful of other members of the clergy.
    Back in the earliest days of the protests, mainstream clergy positioned themselves as brokers to the white elite. But when it became clear to the protesters that some of those same clergy were negotiating away their rights, they had chanted, “Fuck the clergy!” When the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson came to town, they received the cold shoulder from the street activists. In time, a popular T-shirt worn on West and South Florissant read, “Not Your Respectable Negro.”
    In October, at a massive interfaith gathering at St. Louis University’s Chaifetz Arena, those same activists grew tired of the empty talk from church and civil rights leaders. They began chanting to let young people speak. When Tef Poe took the stage, they cheered. “For us this is not an academic issue,” he told the leaders. “Y’all did not show up.” He told them that he trusted the shirtless, bandanna’d boys and the young girls who had gone truant to be at the protests more than the elders. “This ain’t your grandparents’ civil rights movement,” he cried. “Get off your ass and join us!” 36
    The small group of church leaders who had gained the respect of the protesters included the Reverend Tommie Pierson, who flung open the doors to his Greater St. Mark Family Church, less than a mile from Canfield Green, for demonstrators and community members, despite constant police raids; Renita Lamkin, the white pastor of St. John African Methodist Episcopal Church, who had been shot with a wooden baton round as she stood between advancing police and retreating protesters; Pastor Traci Blackmon of Christ the King United Church of Christ, who in rolling, sonorous, profound tones always seemed to capture exactly the words any crowd in a church or in the street needed to hear; and Reverend Starsky Wilson, who would move from marching in a hoodie to becoming the cochair of the governor’s Ferguson Commission.
    The young activists accepted Reverend Sekou as one of their own. He looked and talked like them. He was wiry and short, wore long dreadlocks and kept a rough beard, and he cursed like a hardcore rapper. He had been born in St. Louis, returned for high school north of the Delmar Divide, and had family in Ferguson and Berkeley.
    Sekou was a third-generation Pentecostal preacher with an unusual pedigree. He had studied under Kwame Touré, who had given him his African name, and trained him to be ready for revolution. In his twenties he had been hired to teach teenagers at the Cochran Gardens housing projects and Stevens Middle School in St. Louis City, but he would say that he had studied under them too. From the teens, he learned that the hip-hop he had loved as a youth could catalyze consciousness in a new generation. In 2004, he became a key organizer for the National Hip-Hop Political Convention.
    Ten years later, he was the formation and justice pastor of First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, where he led a spoken-word and hip-hop ministry for queer youths of color. He was not easy on his peers and elders. It wasn’t about age, he insisted, it was about attitude. “What do you fundamentally believe about young people?” he asked them. “Do you believe that