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Photography by Jay Fram
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Photography by Jay Fram
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Photography by Jay Fram
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Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Charles Davis pulls up to the strip mall a few minutes before 9 a.m. He climbs out of his Jeep in baggy jeans and a black T-shirt that fits tightly over his robust biceps. Davis wears his glasses low on his nose, giving him a vaguely professorial look.
He unlocks the front door of his family’s new business, Ferguson Burger Bar & More, then moves quickly to disarm the security system before it blares. Painted images of cookies, ice cream, a milkshake, and a burger surround the words “Delicious Foods” on the two large windows to the left of the door. Davis opens the blinds before flipping on the red OPEN sign, just above the Grade A sticker.
Inside, the space is sparse, three booths on one side, two on the other, with a high bar up front, no stools. Two cold cases behind the counter hold cakes, condiments, and drinks, including various flavors of Vess soda and a vat of Muddy Water, a house twist on sweet tea that tastes a bit like Tang. Davis kicks open the door to the galley kitchen and pours a fresh box of oil into a deep fryer, then organizes the cash register.
A cook comes in, followed closely by the morning’s first customers. When a woman asks for coffee to go with her breakfast sandwich, Charles admits that his wife, Kizzie, is the one who knows how to work the machine. He’s been meaning to have her teach him, but there’s no time. To save money, the couple opted not to hire cashiers, instead working the counter themselves, seven days a week.
Kizzie comes in an hour later, after getting the kids to school. Charles likes to joke that she’s been breaking his heart for 16 years. She says that’s not true, then launches into the story. They met at a Fazoli’s, where Kizzie was eating with a couple of cousins. One said Charles must not like women, since he wasn’t hitting on them. He responded by giving Kizzie his card. “We hit it off immediately,” she says. But Charles is 12 years older, and at the time, she was 19, not ready for a serious relationship. They dated on and off for years.
Maybe Charles wasn’t completely joking. “I really didn’t look at it like me breaking his heart. I’m looking at it like maybe an I’m-not-ready type of situation,” Kizzie says.
In March 2013, Kizzie finally decided she was ready. He wasn’t convinced. To prove she was serious this time, Kizzie got a new tattoo. The depiction of Charles’ face on her left arm is spot-on, right down to the glasses.
Charles proposed that July. He had been married twice before, and both he and Kizzie already had children, so they didn’t want a big wedding. They married at the courthouse in Clayton this past January, then went to Kizzie’s favorite restaurant, Pasta Plus, for pasta con broccoli. “It was a nice little wedding,” she says, showing off her sparkly ring, which she says was a major splurge for her conservative husband.
Charles has always been self-employed, and this summer, he started looking for something new. Kizzie had quit her job in hospital administration and was planning to start a home-health firm, but he wanted a business they could run together. After praying for guidance, he spotted an ad for a restaurant for sale. On Friday, August 8, he bought the Ferguson Burger Bar & More and reopened it the same day.
The next day, at about noon, just around the corner from the business, Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed unarmed teenager Michael Brown.
Kizzie’s niece lives at the Canfield Green apartments. On August 9, Kizzie’s younger daughter, 9-year-old Geniah Watson, was staying there while her mother worked. Geniah heard a commotion and went outside. She saw Brown’s body lying in the street. Kizzie is friends with Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, and Geniah recognized “Mike Mike” on the ground and his family members on the sidewalk crying. Kizzie tried to take her home, but Geniah refused to leave. “I have to go to the vigil,” she said. “I have to get a candle.”
She had never seen a dead body before. It gave her nightmares. “For her to see that, I think, was traumatizing,” Kizzie says, tearing up. She pulls a wad of napkins from the dispenser on the table and dabs her eyes.
Her daughter had a lot of questions. “I thought the police were good people,” Geniah said. “Why did the cops do that to him?”
Kizzie searched for words. She explained that the police were supposed to protect people, though sometimes they didn’t. She said that there are good cops and bad cops. “As long as you don’t do anything wrong, hopefully you’ll be OK,” Kizzie told her daughter, wanting that to be true. “It’s tricky,” she says, “because even for me, I’m not sure anymore.”
Kizzie and McSpadden have been friends since Brown was 2 years old. Kizzie says school was a struggle for him, and he was disobedient from time to time, but it was just “typical things, nothing drastic.” Kizzie knows young men who sell drugs, fight, steal. “Mike wasn’t like that,” she says. “I knew a gentle bear.”
The night of August 10, when looting began, Charles and Kizzie stood at their home, just a few miles up West Florissant Avenue from the burger bar, and watched people run across their lawn with stolen goods. Kizzie wept—she refers to the period after the shooting as her “crybaby nights”—but Charles just laughed.
“Have you ever had something that was real, but just seemed so unreal, you can’t do nothing but laugh?” he says.
The burger bar, at 9120 W. Florissant, is in the middle of the commercial strip that became the epicenter of daily protests. The restaurant sits just a short walk from the QuikTrip that was burned that first night of looting. On all sides are businesses that were broken into: Sam’s Meat Market, Ferguson Market & Liquor, STL Cordless…
Why were the burger bar’s shiny windows spared when so many others were smashed? Charles shrugs. “I have a friend,” he says. “His name is God.”
Three days after Brown was killed, McSpadden came into the burger bar. She hadn’t eaten in days, so Kizzie brought her a tripe sandwich. The tripe is deep-fried, coated in hot sauce and yellow mustard, with pickles, onion, and tomato. McSpadden took a few bites, then packed up the rest to take with her.
She and Kizzie hugged. Few words were spoken. Kizzie’s heart ached. She asked whether McSpadden was OK. The grieving mother shook her head no.
Ten days after the shooting, Angela Noble comes in alone for lunch. Charles greets her the way he greets every customer: “Welcome to Ferguson Burger Bar & More, where the food will tap-dance on your tongue.” The house specialty is the double garbage burger, two thick patties topped with lettuce, onion, bacon, egg, cheese, and mayo.
A Florissant resident, Noble saw something on the news about Ferguson businesses hurting. Some had been looted, but others had simply been cut off from customers by protest marches and police barricades. “That’s why I came here to eat,” she says. “I was like, ‘Let me go support some black people.’”
Her son, 11-year-old Aahmod, refused to come along. “Are you sure you want to go over there?” he had asked. “Be careful. Don’t go to jail.” He’s overdue for a haircut, which he usually gets at the adjacent Prime Time Beauty & Barber Shop, but he won’t leave the house, scared of both the police and the protesters.
Noble wishes her son didn’t have reason to be afraid. She’s taught him how to act if approached by police. “Do not give them a reason to mess with you,” she tells Aahmod. “If you encounter the police, obey their rules and do what they say. Be nice and welcoming to them, so that you won’t be a victim of police brutality.”
She hopes something good will come from Brown’s death, but she thinks the opposite is more likely. She predicts criminals will continue to use the shooting as an excuse to act out, while the police will become more afraid, be quicker to the trigger. She proposes this solution: Wilson “should be charged now, and everybody needs to go home. I think it’s an open-and-shut case. There’s no reason why he had to shoot him in the manner that he did, how many times he did. They said his hands were up.”
A few days later, Cecilia Nadal pushes a plastic knife down through a piece of lemon cake. She offers a hunk to each person at the table. Nadal, who is known for working behind the scenes to connect people, sits with a pair of women whom she introduced to each other at a protest in the first week after Brown’s death.
Ferguson resident Cynthia Broadway had come that night feeling angry that yet another black teen had died at the hands of white authorities. To be honest, Broadway despised white people, had been told as a child growing up in the Arthur A. Blumeyer public housing project to stay away from them. “White people are so mean,” she thought. “White people are horrible.”
Nadal wanted to challenge that, so she pulled Tracy Fortenberry into the conversation. The white woman explained her experience growing up in Mississippi, surrounded by racism, but always knowing it was wrong. They talked. They asked each other difficult questions. They marched together, cried out for justice. They listened to Mary J. Blige in the car. They became friends.
Now, over fried shrimp and lemon cake, they discuss double standards. Nadal mentions the surveillance video that shows Brown taking cigarillos from a convenience store before he was killed. “Go to Ladue,” she says. “If a young teenager who was white stole cigars, likely the Ladue police would take him home and say, ‘Your son has been bad.’ But because he’s black, the perception and the approach is totally different.”
Fortenberry tells a story about a recent protest, when she suddenly found herself staring at the business end of police officers’ assault rifles. Five black men came to her aid. “They literally engulfed me, like a protective wall,” she says. “I was very well taken care of, but not by the police.”
Broadway points out that while Fortenberry dealt with that once, it is a regular occurrence for African-Americans. “See, I’m not afraid of my children being killed by a thug or gang member,” she says. “I’m more afraid of them being killed by police. There’s something wrong with that.”
But Nadal offers hope. Change, she says, will come from connection, from forming relationships, like the one between these two women. Broadway agrees that their friendship shows racial walls can be knocked down. She’s come to understand Fortenberry, to call her “sister.”
“But how do I feel about the police now?” Broadway asks. “I feel the same way about them.”
“It hasn’t changed?” Nadal asks.
“No.”
Of all the people who come to Ferguson after the shooting—politicians, rabble-rousers, civil-rights leaders, celebrities—none of them are received on the block like Common. The rapper and actor visits the burger bar accompanied by a dozen or so young black men from Canfield Green. The group asks everyone in the restaurant to leave so they can have a meeting.
Even after his eviction, Kapeli Wiggins, a 30-year-old Ferguson resident, rapper, T-shirt designer, total cutup, and burger-bar regular, is beaming. On the way out, he got a picture with Common holding up one of his Red Hot Clothing shirts, which are a parody of Old Vienna’s Red Hot Riplets chip bags.
“Common’s big—straight up—in the community,” Wiggins says. “I never thought I’d see Common in Ferguson.”
It’s a scorching August day, and Wiggins joins a group standing against the building to get out of the sun. “This is Fergustan,” he says. “I’m sick of this shit.” Because of police barricades, he has to show ID just to get to his house.
A cook comes out of the restaurant on a break. She looks spent. “They got Common in there ordering up the whole damn store,” she says.
Wiggins says getting stopped by the police is just a fact of life here. “Man, that happens to everybody,” he says. “You don’t know nobody who got harassed by the police? It’s normal.”
He marvels at the attention that’s been paid to Ferguson. Parking lots up and down the street are full of cable-news satellite trucks. President Barack Obama gave speeches about the crisis. Does that give the city a bad name? “Yeah, but it makes the system look bad as a whole,” he says. “The system is corrupt… Everybody is trying to make it a white-and-black thing. It’s not that. It’s the people against the system. They are killing people everywhere.”
He rattles off the names of black men killed by authorities: Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Mike Brown.
“I just hope justice comes, man,” he says. “You know they’re going to let the cop go…”
Wiggins doesn’t understand why Wilson had to shoot Brown, when heinous criminals are often taken into custody. He mentions James Eagan Holmes, who walked into a midnight showing of The Dark Night Rises in Aurora, Colorado, and opened fire, killing 12 and wounding dozens of others. He was white. The police didn’t shoot him. “That’s weird, boy.”
Then Wiggins smiles. What about Christopher Columbus? “He stole the whole country and did not get gunned down,” he says. “Whatever they say about a pack of cigarillos, Mike Mike still didn’t deserve to get gunned down, man.”
At the other end of the strip, barbers Lil Tony Henley and Thomas Bradley stand in front of the shop. Henley is comparing various rappers on the basis of their responses to Ferguson. Top marks go to Common, who came without media and with limited security.
“F—k Nelly,” he says of the hometown star, who made one awkward appearance at a protest, accompanied by an army of bodyguards. “Where was you? This your city!”
With protesters and police clashing nightly in the street in front of the shop, cops carrying assault weapons and firing tear gas from armored vehicles, not too many people have been coming for haircuts. “Don’t nobody want to come around here,” Bradley says. “Our business is plummeting to the max.” A bearded 25-year-old who’s currently attending business school at night, Bradley used to be a paramedic. He’s treated protesters who were injured by police.
On several occasions, Henley and Bradley protected the shop with bats and guns. On the night the cellphone store was robbed, a guy came over, turned back to the crowd, and called out, “Hey, the barbershop got flat-screens.” Intent on protecting his clippers, Bradley jabbed him in the chest and said, “Get the f—k back.” Of the looters, Bradley says, “80 percent of the people ain’t from this neighborhood. I pretty much know everybody around here, at least black and young.” In fact, he was Mike Brown’s barber.
One week before the shooting, Bradley had his own run-in with Ferguson police. He lives in Park Ridge Apartments, another nearby complex. He and his wife had an argument, and the neighbors called the cops. They came to his door, shined a light in his face.
“I don’t have any warrants,” Bradley told them. “There’s nothing you can do.”
From behind him, his wife yelled, “He never touched me ever in my life!”
The police slammed the door in her face and put him in cuffs.
“What are you charging me for?” Bradley asked.
At that point, he alleges, the police grabbed his head and slammed it into the wall. He pulls up pictures on his phone that show serious swelling. After the cops let him go, he went to the hospital. He called personal-injury lawyers, but was told his bruises didn’t merit a lawsuit.
Bradley believes if he had been able to make a case against the department, officers might have become more cautious, and Brown might not have been killed.
DeVone Cruesoe plows through a burger combo and a slice of caramel cake. A waiter and the pastor of a small storefront church, Temple of Destiny Church of the Apostolic Faith, he moved to Ferguson earlier this year, though he’s lived in St. Louis his whole life. Over the years, he’s butted heads repeatedly with various municipal police forces and court systems. “I have been in jail for traffic tickets,” he says.
It started when he was pulled over in Ferguson for making an illegal turn. The fine was more than $100. He went to his court date and was given a payment plan. Then Cruesoe missed an installment, and an arrest warrant was issued. An additional fine was added to his tab for failing to appear in court. The next time an officer stopped him, he was taken to jail. Behind bars, he says, the staff treated him like a hardened criminal, rudely refusing to answer his questions. In the morning, he posted bond. With the additional charges, he now owed more than $400.
“It ain’t even about how many tickets I’ve had,” he says. “It’s really about how many failures to appear and how much the fines are.”
Cruesoe doesn’t want anybody to get the wrong idea. He doesn’t think all cops are bad. But he says the way local governments drum up cash by ticketing everybody who drives past is wrong. “I’m going to be honest, I got caught in the system, ticketwise,” he says. “It’s just a vicious cycle.”
For five years, attorneys at ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit that provides free legal assistance to homeless and other low-income people, watched this same pattern play out. There are 90 municipalities crammed into St. Louis County. Many of the smaller ones, with limited revenue from property and sales taxes, rely on their police departments and courts to raise funds. Clients would come in with a stack of tickets, often for what managing attorney Michael-John Voss refers to as “poverty crimes,” infractions resulting from not paying for something, like car registration or insurance.
Compared to some, Cruesoe got off easy. If someone is held in contempt of circuit court, the equivalent of a failure-to-appear charge, they are immediately taken before a judge. But municipal courts meet far less frequently. If Cruesoe hadn’t been able to post bond, he could have sat in jail for three weeks, waiting for the next court session. In that time, people can lose their homes, their kids, and their jobs (making it even more difficult to pay the mounting fines).
“Because they can’t afford to make the payments, they are being incarcerated for a period of time, even though they haven’t been sentenced to any jail time,” Voss says. “So what you’re having is a debtors’ prison.”
To document these problems, ArchCity Defenders started a court-monitoring project, tracking legal practices in 60 courts over the course of a year. They identified three municipalities as the worst offenders: Bel-Ridge, Florissant, and Ferguson. The firm was just about to publish its findings when Brown was killed.
As the report notes, the municipal courts represent the only interaction most people ever have with the criminal-justice system: “The current policies adopted by the municipal court system lead to the impression of the courts and municipalities as racist institutions that care much more about collecting money—generally from poor, black residents—than about dispensing justice.”
In Ferguson, African-Americans account for 86 percent of traffic stops. Once they’re pulled over, black people are twice as likely to be searched, despite the fact that searches of white motorists more often produce contraband. But as statistics demonstrate, this is a class issue as much as a racial one. Ferguson’s unemployment rate is nearly double that of the county as a whole. Court fines and fees represent the second-largest source of revenue for the city, totaling more than $2.6 million in 2013. That same year, the Ferguson Municipal Court issued 24,532 arrest warrants, more than one per resident.
This, maybe more than anything else, explains what all of those protesters are so angry about.
Change seems to be on the horizon. Yielding to controversy, some municipalities, including Ferguson, have begun to reform their courts. Some fines for failing to appear have been repealed, and some jurisdictions have even granted amnesty for previous violations. Some restrictive courtroom rules, like preventing defendants from bringing their children, are being rolled back.
“They need revenue to support the services they provide their citizens, but what is the least harmful way of doing that?” Voss asks. “That’s never been looked at, and hopefully, this white paper is part of the process of us, as a larger region, talking about larger issues.”
Longtime Ferguson resident Reola Davis is a frequent visitor to the burger bar. She lives a couple miles up the road. Plus, her son, who moved into the house next to hers about three years ago, owns the place. She’s a warm, perpetually smiling woman, who insists on ending interviews with a hug. She recommends the tripe and suggests ordering it “dipped one time, crispy. I guarantee you will like it.”
During the worst of the protests, she avoided this strip. “It was like we were in a world war,” she says. “I had never seen anything like that in my lifetime. I think Ferguson is a peaceful place.”
She says the media has the city all wrong. White and black people get along fine here. When she moved in, her white neighbors brought over a welcome basket. “We don’t have no problem,” she says. “It’s the police.”
Charles agrees with Mom on that one. “The political structure and law enforcement in Ferguson sucks,” he says.
His own saga with Ferguson government is long and complicated. The short version is that a city inspector started hassling him, first over a home renovation, then over cars that he had for sale in his driveway. Charles did his homework, making adjustments in some areas and proving the inspector wrong in others. Charles believes the inspector, unwilling to accept defeat, then sent the police after him. Shortly thereafter, Kizzie was backing out of their driveway one day when a police car pulled up behind her, blocking her path.
“They stopped her in our driveway, gave her a ticket, and said she was impeding the sidewalk,” Charles says. He begged her to fight it, but she didn’t want to go to court. They paid the fine.
Given his own experience, Charles says he supports the protests, just not the looting. But even if he won’t say it, the entire situation has been stressful. It’s hard enough to open a new business without police and protesters battling in the streets.
One night, a guy came in, and when Charles looked the other way, he emptied the tip jar into his bag and sprinted out. Another time, the place was full, and things outside were looking hairy. Charles wanted to close, so he asked somebody by the door to stop holding it open for people. The guy wouldn’t listen, then started cursing, so Charles shoved him out the door. “That was a no-no,” Kizzie says. “I keep telling him, you do not touch.” She went outside and talked to the man, told him her husband doesn’t normally act like that. Perhaps because she was crying so hard, the guy said it was no big deal.
“Right now is a stressful time for everyone,” Kizzie says. “He’s working really, really hard.”
Kizzie refers to everything that’s happened as “bittersweet.” She’s spent night after night in tears. She wakes up each morning and checks the news to see whether the burger bar has been destroyed. Her heart breaks for her friend who’s lost a son. But she’s thankful the protests have brought the restaurant so much attention, so many customers.
“Our business was spared in a lot of different ways,” she says. “I’m extremely grateful.”
One day around lunchtime, a middle-aged white guy in a Cardinals jersey pulls up in a red convertible. When Charles goes back into the kitchen, the guy rushes over to the tip jar—and drops in a check to make up for what had been stolen.
Emily Davis and her husband, Dwayne Isgrig, are crammed into a booth with their three young children, waiting for burgers. “He’s 43!” says 7-year-old Isaiah, pointing at his father. “Today’s his birthday.” Then he introduces his adopted sister, 8-year-old Naomi, and his younger brother, 3-year-old Zeke. To kill time, Emily draws superheroes on scraps of paper. The kids play with them like action figures, doing battle with evil ketchup bottles.
Although Emily’s family lives just two miles from the burger bar, it seems like a different world. Trees shade the winding street. The house feels like it’s in the country, and sure enough, there’s a barn out back. Emily’s grandmother bought the place in the ’50s.
Early on the morning of August 11, two days after Brown was shot and a couple of hours after the worst of the looting, Dwayne and Naomi were the first ones up. Naomi’s on the autism spectrum and is prone to wandering.
“Please don’t go outside this morning,” he told her while rushing off to work. “The police are out.”
When Emily awoke, Naomi came to her. “Something Daddy said scared me,” she said.
Emily sat the children down for a talk, but she didn’t know where to begin. How do you explain 400 years of racial strife to a 3-year-old? She told them that Mike Brown had been shot by the police, and nobody knew exactly why.
“Wait a minute,” Isaiah said. “I thought the police were the good guys.”
Emily tried to explain that for people who look like them, that’s true, but people who look different are sometimes treated differently, too. It was a foreign concept.
“We still love Ferguson,” Emily says, “but we really want things to change.”
“We want them to be more inclusive and more just, for everyone,” Dwayne adds.
Emily points out that many Ferguson residents, black and white, have worked for years to build a vibrant community, citing the Ferguson Farmers Market, the annual Ferguson Twilight 5K/10K & Fun Run, the Ferguson Youth Initiative, and its Earn-a-Bike and Earn-a-Computer programs. But the city remains divided.
Part of the problem is geography. The section of Ferguson that contains Canfield Green and other low-income apartment complexes is far from downtown, removed from many community activities. Another issue is the schools. Because of their perception that white kids mostly go to private schools, while black kids go to public ones, the family decided to home-school.
The couple wants police culture to change. Emily rattles off the names of officers who lost their jobs while patrolling the protests, cops who threatened unarmed residents or who took to social media with racist tirades. Fellow officers had to know that these cops were bad apples, but they hadn’t spoken out. “That’s scary,” Emily says.
She can’t believe that Ferguson’s elected leaders, especially Mayor James Knowles III, stood by idly while outside police forces turned the streets into a war zone. “I was just overwhelmingly shocked, not only at the police response, but that the city officials of Ferguson let them do that to the people of Ferguson,” she says. “To see that the police were OK with what they did to the protesters—pointing guns at people, telling them they are going to kill them—it was crazy.”
Emily and Dwayne are pacifist Mennonites, but she doesn’t blame the looters. “How can you be upset when people don’t react perfectly to years of systematic oppression?” she says. The couple wishes the white people who are hung up on the vandalism would move on, so the focus could shift to Ferguson’s real problems.
With the mayor on the sidelines, Emily says it’s up to residents to build bridges. “But there is not enough of the white community being supportive allies,” she says. “That is the biggest challenge.”
Those wanting to get involved can follow Isaiah’s example. After that initial conversation, he came back to Mom with a question: “What can I do?”
“You have to treat everybody the same, everybody special,” she told him.
The family volunteered at the Food Pantry at St. Stephen’s Episcopal church, which was running low. Isaiah loaded trucks and sorted goods. Food was taken to people who were cut off from the grocery store by police barricades and to children who missed their first week of school during the unrest. The kids marched and made signs. Isaiah’s said, “Please stop the violence. Don’t shoot.” Naomi’s said, “It’s not OK to shoot people. Please stop.” And Zeke, the youngest, asked Mom to write, “Me love humans.”
It’s August 25, the day of Brown’s funeral. Before the lunch crowd hits, Charles watches the ceremony on TV, though he’s not impressed with the big-name speakers, who spend a lot of time on rhetoric but not much on the life of the young man in the coffin. “It was a mockery,” he says.
A little later, he and Kizzie disagree about something, turning up the TV so people in the dining room won’t hear them argue. For newlyweds trying to start a business in the middle of a world news event, they seem to be coping remarkably well. It’s hard to tell when they’re fighting and when they’re flirting, because both conversations start with playful barbs and end with laughs.
Tim Ishmon, who is just finishing a burger, sits in the booth by the door. A Ferguson resident, he works as a corrections officer at the St. Louis County jail, and his brother Wendell is a decorated St. Louis police officer. As a black man with connections to law enforcement, Ishmon sees valid points on both sides of the Ferguson discussion.
For starters, he thinks the entire situation could have been avoided if Wilson had followed procedure. At the prison, guards are trained never to put themselves in a dangerous situation, like breaking up a fight between inmates, without first calling for help. As Ishmon sees it, if he was truly stopping Brown for walking in the street, Wilson shouldn’t have let the situation escalate so quickly. And if he in fact knew about the robbery—a point of contention—he should have called for backup.
“It went from him doing his professional job, then he took it personal,” Ishmon says. “I think that’s why the number of shots occurred.”
As for the protesters, while most of them were peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights, the looting, he says, was inexcusable. At that, a man waiting for his order nearby turns around and joins in. “As a hardworking black man, it was really horrible to watch these people go around here busting all these folks’ stuff,” he says. “I thought that was the most disrespectful thing.” Ishmon doesn’t fault the police for responding with force. Protesters shot at police vehicles, threw bricks and rocks and Molotov cocktails, carried guns. “They met them at their level,” he says.
And he says that before the black community points a finger, it needs to look in the mirror. “Why is it that it takes somebody outside our community to commit an act upon us to get us out, but we don’t have the same march when we’re killing each other?” he asks. “We selling drugs to each other every day. I don’t get that.”
Ishmon finds the stigma around snitching equally perplexing; why wouldn’t people want to clean up their own neighborhoods? If you call the cops when somebody breaks into your neighbor’s house, you’re a snitch, he says, but when it’s your house getting broken into, you want everybody to call. “You can’t have it both ways,” he says.
He’s heard people complaining about Knowles, who did little to meaningfully address the community’s anger in the wake of the shooting. But Knowles was just reelected this spring, running unopposed. Only 12 percent of Ferguson’s registered voters cast ballots. “That makes no sense,” he says. “If you’re so concerned about the mayor, you should be concerned about voting.” (On the counter, next to the to-go menus and hand sanitizer, Charles has added a stack of voter-registration forms.)
Ishmon believes racial profiling is prevalent, and he’s dealt with it himself, but he says you can only gripe about being stopped if you’re not doing anything wrong. “I have insurance, my plates are right, I don’t have any warrants… So when they pull me over, they are pulling me over because I’m black,” he says. “Now the flip side of that is, if I got drugs, a gun, warrants, or my plates are messed up, I can’t go complain, because I’m driving wrong.”
But the more he talks, the more instances he remembers of being harassed by police. Once, a city officer pulled him over near Calvary Cemetery. Ishmon protested that he had been going 32 mph in a 30-mph zone. Well, the officer said, that’s speeding, adding, “You were probably on your way to commit a robbery anyway.” Ishmon’s 6-year-old daughter was sitting right next to him in the car.
After she was arrested at a march downtown, Hedy Epstein’s phone rang off the hook. It made for a surreal headline: “90-year-old Holocaust survivor arrested at Ferguson protest.” So when a reporter offers to drive her to lunch, she’s eager to get out of the house. She asks for a veggie burger and a coffee, and since Kizzie is here today, she gets a cup.
Epstein grew up in Kippenheim, Germany. She was not yet 10 when Adolf Hitler came to power. In the small village, everyone knew which families were Jewish. Hedy’s math teacher was an SS man, and he would wear his uniform to school. Tucked into his right knee-high boot was a revolver. When it was Hedy’s turn to speak in class, he would put his hand on the gun. A couple of times, he pointed it at her. She would go home in tears. “I was so full of fear,” she says. “‘Am I going to die?’ I couldn’t learn.”
Her parents tried desperately to leave Germany, but the best they could do was secure Hedy a spot on a Kindertransport. In the nine months preceding World War II, the British government took in nearly 10,000 children, mostly Jews from across Europe. Hedy was child No. 5,580.
When her parents saw her off, they told her to be good, to be honest, “and we will see each other again soon.”
“I believed that,” Epstein says. “Whether my parents did, I don’t really know.”
Epstein left in May 1939, and aside from an uncle who had previously made it to the U.S., she never saw any of her family members alive again. Her parents were deported to a concentration camp in 1940, and two years later, first her father and then her mother were sent to Auschwitz.
Epstein moved to the U.S. in 1948 and a got a job at an agency that helped place Holocaust survivors in communities across the country. An African-American woman showed her around on her first day. At lunchtime, Epstein asked if perhaps they could go together. The woman said no. What about tomorrow? No. A few days later, she asked the woman again. She still said no. Epstein asked if something was wrong.
“No,” she replied, “but you know why I can’t go.”
“No, I don’t know why.”
“Negro people can’t go to eat where white people go, and white people don’t want to go where I can go to eat.”
Epstein was confused. Hadn’t President Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves? Her co-worker explained that yes, he had, but problems persisted. Eventually, they went to eat together. The experience launched Epstein into a life of working for civil rights. For years, she ran the Greater St. Louis Committee for Freedom of Residence. She participated in the Jefferson Bank protests, was arrested while demonstrating at Scott Air Force Base against the Iraq War, and has traveled to the Middle East to protest Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
On August 18, three days after her 90th birthday, a friend invited her to a protest downtown. A group was planning to march to the Wainwright Building, where Gov. Jay Nixon has an office, to ask him to de-escalate the situation in Ferguson.
“I was just horrified by the violence, not of the people in Ferguson, but by the violence of the police,” she says. “This was a war zone. The police are supposed to be peacekeepers, but they were militarized.”
When the protesters arrived at the building, police and security guards blocked the front door. They announced that everyone should leave. “You could tell almost instantly, the electricity in the air,” Epstein says. The protesters linked arms. The police handcuffed them and loaded them into a paddy wagon. Epstein was released and given a court date in October. The charge was “failure to disperse.”
Lunch finished, she asks to stop by the place where Brown was shot. She wants to see the memorial. She approaches first the mountain of teddy bears, posters, and cigarillos stacked around a lamppost. Then she makes her way out into the street, where a line of candles, flowers, and more stuffed toys straddles the center line, bookended by traffic cones. Silently, she spends several minutes taking in the scene. A tear appears behind her glasses.
“Maybe this is a wake-up call,” she says. “We need to talk—and not just beautiful words and no action.”
When the car pulls up at her apartment, she asks a favor. “I forgot to tell the people at that store that this was the best veggie burger I ever had,” she laments. “Maybe they will give me the recipe.”
It’s another hot Friday night in August, well past dinnertime, and while packs of people march in the street, the burger bar is jammed with late-night diners, protesters, and reporters. People cram into booths, making new friends. When the sun goes down and the protests gain a more volatile edge, most of the businesses on this strip shutter, but not the Ferguson Burger Bar & More.
Somebody asks Charles about the painting on the front window. The ice cream has been replaced by chicken wings and fries. “We don’t sell ice cream,” Charles says. “The old paint was wearing off anyway, because of the tear gas.”
A group of young men discusses preferred terminology. One objects to being labeled African-American, because his family came from Jamaica. “I see black as black,” he says. In another booth, a heavyset man and his three children silently sip milkshakes. Nearby, Ponchita Argieard tells a friend about a study she read recently. “Black women tend to have lower birth weight in their babies,” she says. “They said that black women sustain continuous assaults, small, subtle assaults to their personhood daily.”
Several diners take note of the motivational posters on the restaurant’s walls. They were already here when Charles and Kizzie bought the place, but their messages seem specifically directed at the situation outside.
“Speak it into existence,” says one. “You say I dream too big. I say you think too small,” proclaims another. “If Plan A didn’t work, the alphabet has 25 more letters! Stay cool,” advises a third.
Police have put up a fence around the burned-out shell of the QuikTrip down the street, which has pushed the bulk of the protest even closer to the burger bar. In a nearby parking lot, officials have positioned an electronic road sign that says, “APPROVE ASSEMBLY AREA.” A snarky grammarian added the missing D with notebook paper.
Charles comes out from behind the counter and asks everyone whether the food is adequately tap-dancing on their tongues.
“I couldn’t tell,” says one wise guy. “Could I have another order?”
Charles gives his usual comeback: “I’m going to treat you like family…and ignore you.”
Before the laughs die down, a group of police vehicles, lights flashing, speeds up West Florissant Avenue. Reporters, protesters, and curious residents spill out of the burger bar, looking for a glimpse of the action. They leave behind a smattering of Styrofoam containers and half-eaten sandwiches.
On the far side of the room, one of the posters, previously obscured by diners, is now visible: “Old ways won’t open new doors.”
