Bridging black and white: How St. Louis residents are trying to surmount racial inequities post-Ferguson
Elyssa Sullivan never expected to get thrown in jail. The white suburban mother lives in a tony enclave on the outskirts of St. Louis with street names like Joy and Glen, a world apart from the turmoil that erupted 16 miles away in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.
She had no inclination to join the protests sparked by a white policeman’s fatal shooting of Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old, that overnight triggered a fraught – and painfully familiar – national debate on race relations in the United States.
“I was really scared,” says Ms. Sullivan. “I kind of bought that narrative, ‘Oh, that city is on fire; look at those protesters. I care about what they’re saying, but that’s not my place.’ ”
She never thought that three years later she would count a former battle rapper among her personal role models, or that she would scrawl “White Moms for Black Lives” on poster board and march down a highway. She couldn’t imagine that a police officer would yell obscenities at her – and another would zip-tie her wrists together.
But there came a point when Sullivan concluded that it was more dangerous for her to sit at home, ignoring what she now sees as an unequal justice system for black and white people, than to drive her minivan downtown and stand face to face with police in riot gear. Even if it meant spending a night in jail, as she ended up doing, unable to get an answer about the charge against her and denied a phone call to her husband and two kids.
“It just made me hyperaware of how no one is listening when people of color in our community have shared their stories of how they’ve been brutalized by police and damaged by police,” she says.
Sullivan is part of a broad movement that has sprung out of Ferguson,
