MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This week, I'm here at St. Louis Public Radio in St. Louis, Mo., with several of my colleagues, because Friday will mark 10 years since a white police officer shot and killed a Black 18-year-old young man named Michael Brown in Ferguson. That's a suburb about 20 minutes from St. Louis. That set off more than a year of protest in and around Ferguson, and I came here 10 years ago to be part of reporting and community conversation about what happened. Yesterday, I returned to the place where Michael Brown's life ended. Linda Lockhart took me there once again. Ten years ago, she was the first person I met when I landed, and the first person I sought out when I came back this week. She was born and raised in St. Louis and holds many of the city's stories, as a veteran journalist. She told me she comes here at least two or three times a year.
LINDA LOCKHART: Somebody comes out here frequently and adds tokens, memorials, flowers, teddy bears, stops and says a prayer, stops and says a curse, whatever. People come through here, but people are still living here. This is still a neighborhood, a community of residents, and in 10 years' time, there are probably people here that never knew Michael Brown, you know, and so it's very interesting that his family and people who did know him know this is important to maintain, so people will never forget.
MARTIN: Drawn in chalk on the ground reads, we will always remember. Lockhart remembers the protests, the anger and the fear that followed in the days after August 9, when Brown was killed.
LOCKHART: You know, there was a lot of distrust for police for a long time in this community, and we're living in a community that is racially integrated, but there's still Black Ferguson and white Ferguson. There's not integration within the community, so when the police department is predominantly white and they have a perception about young Black men and so young Black men are getting stopped, you know, frequently for traffic infractions that maybe young white men are not being stopped for, there is this distrust for police.
MARTIN: What do you think it's meant, both as a journalist and also as a person who's lived here most of your life? What difference did it make that Michael Brown died, that he died the way he did and that, like, over a year of demonstrations followed? Has it made a difference?
LOCKHART: Well, it has made a difference in small ways. People are talking about things in ways they didn't talk about before. It certainly gave an opportunity for Black people to talk to white people and white people to listen to Black people and learn things that they had no idea about. You know, one of the big things that came out shortly after Michael Brown's death was a conversation that was Black mothers talking to white mothers about having "the talk," quote-unquote, with their sons of how, you know, many families, most Black families, raise their children, and especially their sons, on how to behave if you have an encounter with police. But some of those young men still end up at the wrong end of a nightstick or a police stun gun or a gun that has live ammunition.
MARTIN: Perhaps that's why, at the memorial for Michael Brown, the names of victims of police violence in other American cities are written in chalk on rows of signs in the shape of small raised fists - among them, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Tyre Nichols, Sonya Massey. All this week, we're going to be asking questions about what happened and why and what would keep things like this from happening again - and, after all that this community went through, has anything changed? Stay with us all week to hear what we find. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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