Ten years ago on an August evening in Atlanta, thousands of people made their way downtown to the CNN Center.
Rain began pouring down as the sea of people began marching around Centennial Olympic Park. But they kept going, chanting, “Hands up, don’t shoot!” and “I am Mike Brown!”
Over 5,000 people attended the peaceful protest, mostly young Black people. They were encouraged to come dressed in graduation gowns and formal attire — a nod to a widely circulated photo of Michael Brown wearing graduation regalia. Just over a week prior to the protest, Brown was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri.
“August 18, 2014, is the day that changed my life,” says Scotty Smart, who was attending his first protest ever that day.
After the crowd circled the park and returned to the CNN Center, the rain stopped. Smart stood against the CNN sign and watched as passionate speakers galvanized the crowd.
“There was nothing that I ever felt like that before, that energy, that power, that strength, that camaraderie, that synergy between all Black people at that time,” he says.
Atlanta activists, like those in cities nationwide, stood in solidarity with activists in Ferguson who were steadfast in their calls for police accountability and justice for Mike Brown.
The protests sparked a new civil rights movement that later became known as the Black Lives Matter movement. It inspired a new generation of activists in Atlanta to push for local changes and cultivate a new approach to community organizing.
Changing the course of history
Eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed on Aug. 9, 2014, by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson after the two engaged in a physical struggle. Brown’s body was left in the street for four hours and word quickly spread on social media.
“I think that my generation got comfortable and [thought] things like this didn’t happen anymore,” Smart says.
The incident only added to racial tensions in the U.S. In 2013, Florida man George Zimmerman was acquitted of criminal charges after killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012. Another high-profile case of police brutality occurred weeks before Brown was killed, when Eric Garner was choked to death by police in New York City.
Activists compared the nationwide unrest in 2014 to 1992, when officers that brutalized motorist Rodney King were acquitted. The magnitude of protests in 2014 wouldn’t be seen for another six years — in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
Gerald Griggs, an attorney and president of the Atlanta and Georgia chapters of the NAACP, attended the first protest in Atlanta 10 years ago. He remembers the spirit of outrage, especially among young people.
“I definitely recognized that something was happening that was changing the course of history,” Griggs says.
“What I didn’t understand was this was the beginning of what we would be experiencing for a decade.”
He says that Michael Brown was a catalyst for a renewed focus on police brutality. After Brown’s death, Griggs added civil rights cases to his legal practice. Since then, he’s handled over 50 police brutality cases in Atlanta and Georgia.
Griggs also noticed a shift in how protests played out.
Intense protests in Ferguson were met with a forceful police presence.
According to reporting from St. Louis Public Radio, law enforcement made unlawful arrests, targeted journalists and fired tear gas, rubber bullets and smoke bombs into crowds. Criminal acts were committed by a small fraction of people who attended the largely peaceful protests.
Law enforcement — bolstered by the presence of the National Guard — were widely criticized for their use of military equipment such as armored vehicles, sniper rifles and combat-grade body armor against peaceful, unarmed protestors.
Real-time coverage of the protests was spread by citizen journalists on social media, outpacing traditional news coverage and having a farther reach.
“That was the first time we’ve really seen militarized response, you know, the tear gassing and all of the tanks and stuff … it looked like it was a military occupation to respond to a protest where law enforcement had killed somebody,” Griggs says.
Sustaining a movement
Activist Kamau Franklin credits local organizing in Ferguson for why the national movement began.
“For this level of reaction from the community, it became sort of a lightning rod across the world or across the country, particularly in Black and brown communities,” Franklin says.
Franklin remembers this as one of the few times he witnessed people in Atlanta mobilize beyond marching.
In 2014, protesters blocked traffic on multiple occasions. On other occasions they staged “die ins” and occupied public spaces.
“But these movements are hard to sustain in that way,” he says. “It’s hard to sustain a movement off of something that’s a reaction to someone’s death.”
His organization, Community Movement Builders, Inc., focuses on several issues. While they do organize demonstrations, more work happens in-between those big moments.
Some of their work in addressing policing includes “cop watches” where they monitor police, doing safety patrolling as an alternative to relying on police, and educating people on knowing their rights during police encounters. These efforts are focused in the Pittsburgh neighborhood and southwest Atlanta.
He’s also involved in organizing against Atlanta’s public safety training center known as “Cop City.” Franklin draws a direct line between the uprisings after Michael Brown’s death — and George Floyd’s in 2020 — to the construction of “Cop City” and how law enforcement is trained to respond to protests.
“Part of the ‘Cop City’ idea is that they had mock urban warfare preparation,” he says.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens says the center is needed because Atlanta “has the most extensive training requirements in the Southeast.” He says the facility will be used to train officers in de-escalation, mental health crises, community-oriented policing and crisis intervention.
Opponents have argued that the training center would bolster the militarization of Atlanta police.
“Mike Brown is a seminal moment, but it is not a moment of itself,” Franklin says. “This is a moment steeped in the relationship between the Black community and state forces, and with the role of the police in our community,” Franklin says.
Pushing for local changes
Like many young adults in Atlanta, Michael Brown’s death would be then-19-year-old Aurielle Marie’s introduction to organizing.
Just days into her time as an activist, Marie helped organize the Aug. 18, 2014, protest and demonstrations that followed. She co-founded the Atlanta-based organization It’s Bigger Than You. She later made trips to Ferguson and met with activists from around the U.S.
Those connections eventually formed the national network that started what would later be known as the Black Lives Matter movement (not to be confused with the Black Lives Matter organization).
“I was in rooms with people who were three times my senior and who had been organizing longer than I’ve been alive. And they trusted me there, listened to me, wanted to know my ideas,” Marie says.
Now 29, Marie is a writer and community-engaged poet.
“I didn’t realize how young I was. I look back and I’m like, ‘You were 19. There’s so much you didn’t know.’”
Through It’s Bigger Than You, Marie says she organized hundreds of actions in a two-year span following Brown’s death in coalition with other organizations such as Southerners on New Ground, Malcolm X Grasroots Movement as well as student activists. Some demonstrations put her in harm’s way, including facing armed men during a Confederate rally at Stone Mountain Park, and on another instance, police detaining her and keeping her in the back of a police truck for 13 hours, she says.
“Protesting was a way for us to interrupt business as usual [and] the comfort and peace of a system that was incredibly violent to us. And sometimes that violence was kind of enacted on the bodies of protesters themselves, which is something that we all knew going in but understood in a more material way the longer that we were organizers.”
In 2016, she even had a sit-down interview with then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
On a local level, Marie and other organizers were fighting for many changes, namely: body cameras on police officers, empowering Atlanta’s Citizen Review Board, closing the Atlanta City Detention Center and fighting against gentrification ahead of the construction of the Beltline.
They also demanded Atlanta pull out of the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange Program (GILEE), which sends officers to train in Israel.
They fell short of many of their goals, she says, but not for a lack of trying.
She remembers pushback from law enforcement, government officials and politicians, which she characterized as an “ideological disregard for Black life.”
It’s an issue that Marie says is pervasive in Atlanta despite its Black leadership. Former Mayor Kasim Reed was in office during this period.
Following a string of protests in July 2016, Reed expressed support for people exercising their First Amendment rights but dismissed concerns of activists, repeatedly denounced protestors blocking the freeway and refuted the comparisons of Black Lives Matter to the Civil Rights Movement.
“At the time we had a mayor who liked to keep up appearances but was very against working with local organizers or working with folks who he perceived as just loud and detrimental, like protesters,” she says.
But Marie has seen other measures of progress. She says people can now better express what anti-Black violence looks like beyond police brutality, that there are more conversations about addressing mental health crises, and more people are willing to do activism on the issue.
Atlanta police did eventually mandate body cameras, and they were deployed to all officers in 2017.
“I think all of that is because of the movement for Black lives and because of the Ferguson uprising.”
Correction: A previous version of this story addressed how Aurielle Marie organized hundreds of actions in a two-year span. In fact, Marie organized in coalition with other organizations.
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