Witness To History: Ferguson 10 And The Attorney Who Was Forged In Fire

The fifth episode of Urban One’s original iOne Digital limited-series podcast, Witness to History–which this season looks back at the uprising in Ferguson in 2014–our co-producer and host, Tory Russell, speaks with Alex Templeton.

Templeton was 20 when they joined their neighbors and friends over the days, nights and months spent protesting the brutal killing of a Black, unarmed teenager Michael Brown, Jr., on Aug. 9, 2014. Had he not been gunned down in the middle of a city street at noon by a white man, Darren Wilson, who at the time was a Ferguson police officer, Michael would have started college on the Aug. 11, just two days later.

A Small City Calls a Whole Country and Whole World to Action

In the face of that public execution, Tory Russell, then a local football coach, but also the organizer and mentor he still is today, led a protest to the police station. That protest was met with a response vicious enough that it compelled first a community, and then a nation and then the nations across the globe to stand and to protest in solidarity with Ferguson against the police violence visited against Black people everywhere, it seemed.

Tory, still the heartbeat of so much of the work to see justice in Ferguson, a suburb of the Greater St. Louis County, the county founded by slaveholders and the one where many of their descendants, generations on, continue to rule.

But they no longer do so only in the dark. The uprising’s fire brought heat. But it also brought light.

What A Healthy Movement For Justice Sounds Like

Black people are far too described by non-Black people as human beings who can be both on the same side of a battle while still holding differing viewpoints about public events and opinions on strategies. We’re most typically filtered through an adversarial lens not of our own making: either you’re a Malcolm person or you’re a Martin person. Either you’re a clear revolutionary or you’re a clear sellout.

But as Minister Malcolm taught us, people of reason can reasonably discuss and differ on matters reasonably. This is what we see in action and in real time with Alex and Tory. Their conversation is seamless, moving from Alex’s mentor-supported journey to and through law school at Missouri State University, to the recent election in St. Louis in which Corey Bush, an uprising supporter, was defeated by Wesley Bell whose campaign was heavily funded by AIPAC.

For most organizers for justice, Bush’s loss was recorded as a loss for the community. That opinion is challenged in this conversation–neither unwisely nor disrespectfully. Other matters of justice are similarly discussed from differing perspectives, including on mass incarceration and prison abolition, to what it means to authentically and helpfully serve the public good. And aligned sentiments expose other matters that deserve courageous conversations, from the “nonprofit industrial complex” to Black Lives Matter.

Let their conversation be a template for all of us who want a world that doesn’t hate and kill our children, even as we see that dream in different living colors.

SEE MORE:

Cornel West Opens 2024’s ‘Witness to History’ Podcast

VIDEO: Ferguson X: Lead Uprising Organizer Tory Russell On Life In the City, Then And Now