A decade of racial justice activism transformed politics, but landmark reforms remain elusive

WASHINGTON — Cori Bush went from helping to lead an informal movement for racial justice to winning two terms as a congresswoman from Missouri, with an office decorated with photographs of families who lost loved ones to police violence. One is of Michael Brown.

Brown’s death 10 years ago in Ferguson, Missouri, was a defining moment for America’s racial justice movement. It cast a global spotlight on longtime demands for reforms to systems subjecting millions of people to everything from economic discrimination to murder.

Activists like Bush went from proclaiming “Black Lives Matter” to running for seats in statehouses, city halls, prosecutors’ offices and Congress — and winning. Local legislation has been passed to do everything from dismantling prisons and jails and reforming schools to eliminating hair discrimination.

At least 30 states and Washington, D.C., have enacted laws meant to curb abusive conduct since 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. While the last decade of racial justice activism transformed politics, landmark reforms remain elusive, more than three dozen activists, elected officials and political operatives told The Associated Press.

“As we look at the strides we’ve made, it ebbs and flows,” said Bush, a longtime community organizer and pastor before becoming a Democratic representative. “We’re still dealing with militarized policing in communities. We’re still dealing with the police shootings.”

A decade of achievements

As the new generation of Black activists wielding cellphones rewrote the national conversation on policing, questions of public safety and racial justice pushed into the center of American politics. Police body cameras are widespread. Tactics including chokeholds have been outlawed.

Ferguson prompted a change in how communities tackle police reform and misconduct, said Svante Myrick, who was the youngest-ever mayor of Ithaca, New York, from 2011 to 2021 before becoming president for People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group.

At least 150 reforms passed in localities and states.

“I know that someone’s life was saved, that there was an officer, that there was an encounter where a police officer could have made a different decision had there not been 400 days of protest during the Ferguson uprising,” Bush said. “Maybe the world was waking up to the fact that it can’t just be an outside strategy, there has to be an inside strategy as well.”

An example is Tishaura Jones, the first Black woman to lead St. Louis, who’s worked to end the city’s “arrest and incarcerate” model of policing and emphasize social service programs to help neighborhoods with high crime rates.

A new generation of leaders is putting that pattern into play nationwide.

“I’m someone that entered politics through the Black Lives Matter movement after years of witnessing unfair killings against Black and brown people,” said Chi Ossé, a 26-year-old member of the New York City Council.

He used social media to organize protests after white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, who was Black, in 2020, sparking a new and massive wave of protests. “It’s resulted in me having a different type of leadership style within my own community than prior City Council members who have represented this district.”

There’s work to be done

Lawmakers in Washington were wary of the Black Lives Matter movement at first.

In 2015, then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told three Black Lives Matter activists they should focus on changing laws instead of hearts. A 2016 memo from the Democratic Party’s House campaign arm told politicians to limit the number of Black Lives Matter activists at public events, or meet privately.

Ferguson marked a new phase. For perhaps the first time, a visible mass protest movement for justice for a single victim was born organically — not convened by clergy members or centered in the church — and often linked by mobile phones and sustained by hip-hop.

Brown’s death and the treatment of Black Lives Matter protesters also led many Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders to an internal reckoning. Organizations and individuals of all ages were galvanized to get off the sidelines.

“We’ve had gains,” Bush said. “I wanted to bring the movement into the House of Representatives, and I feel that I’ve been able to do that.”

A movement meets a national political shift

By 2015, Ferguson activists were welcomed into the White House to work on the Obama administration’s Task Force for 21st Century Policing.

While Donald Trump embraced some criminal justice reforms like the First Step Act, he remained opposed to racial justice activists throughout his administration. The movement was met with scorn on the right. In 2016, the then-Republican presidential nominee called Black Lives Matter “divisive” and blamed President Barack Obama for worsening race relations nationwide.

Trump was president during the racial justice protests that emerged in the summer of 2020 following Floyd’s killing. During protests, he posted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” He signed an executive order encouraging better police practices but that was criticized for failing to acknowledge what some consider systemic racial bias in policing.

During a 2017 speech in New York, Trump appeared to advocate rougher treatment of people in custody, speaking dismissively of the police practice of shielding handcuffed suspects’ heads as they’re placed in patrol cars.

Trump’s election caused many racial justice activists to shift focus from individual police departments to how federal policies fund and protect police misconduct.

George Floyd’s murder

The movement was again thrust into politics when Chauvin murdered Floyd in May 2020.

The protests upended American politics and shocked even many who′d spent years advocating for policies that were suddenly in the mainstream — community response teams, restrictions on police tactics, redirecting police funding.

Floyd’s relatives appeared at the 2020 Democratic National Convention; the following year, Democrats introduced a bill that would’ve enacted sweeping reforms.

The George Floyd Justice In Policing Act would have banned chokeholds and no-knock warrants, like the one that led to Louisville police killing Breonna Taylor in her home. It also would have created a database listing officers disciplined for gross misconduct.

The House passed it in 2021. The Senate failed to reach a consensus.

Stand outside or be at the table

Ella Jones didn′t see herself running for office before the Ferguson protests. A minister and entrepreneur, Jones felt called to protest Brown’s killing but said local Democratic leaders told her to run for Ferguson mayor. She won a City Council seat, and was eventually elected mayor.

“You can stand outside and scream at the system. However, you must be at the table where policy is made,” Jones said. “Some people may go into politics. Some people may go into establishing nonprofits, but it’s going to take all of us working together to make the change.

″You have to be at the table, where policy is made.”

Ferguson’s prosecuting attorney, Wesley Bell, was on a promise to tackle police misconduct.

Bell said in 2020 that legislators need to look hard at laws that offer police officers protection against prosecution that regular citizens aren’t afforded.

“It is something that handcuffs prosecutors in numerous ways when you are going about prosecuting officers who have committed unlawful use of force or police shootings,” Bell said.

In August he defeated Bush in a bitter Democratic U.S. House primary.

Bush said she doesn’t know what she′ll do after leaving Congress.

“But the fight is still here, and my boots aren’t far from me,” she said. “So people probably should have wondered, is she more dangerous in Congress or outside of it?”