Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
“Crisis is the leading edge where change is possible,” Lisa Fithian, an itinerant protest organizer, once told me. Nowhere does that seem more true right now than in Ferguson, Missouri, where ongoing protests have drawn attention to a deep national vein of racial animus. It’s not surprising, then, that national figures have begun parachuting into town: The Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, actress Keke Palmer, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey—and the list goes on. The threat of “outside agitators” is a meme that has accompanied protests dating back to the civil rights era and beyond. But in Ferguson, there are indeed complaints from local organizers that some outsiders are making the situation worse.
On Monday, when Missouri Governor Jay Nixon signed an order to bring in the National Guard, he cited “violent and criminal acts of an organized and growing number of individuals, many from outside the community and state.” On Tuesday, U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill said on MSNBC that the protesters “have now been invaded…by a group of instigators, some coming from other states, that want a confrontation with police.” An officer told the Washington Post that visitors to Ferguson are engaging in “looting tourism.”
Arrest statistics appear to bear them out, up to a point. Of the 78 people arrested Monday night, police told reporters, 68 percent were from the St. Louis metro area, but 18—or 23 percent—had come from out of state, some from as far away as New York and California.
So who are these outsiders, and what do they want? I went looking for every non-local organization claiming to have members protesting in Ferguson, from fringe to mainstream. Here are some I found:
Continue Reading »
Continue reading:
From Anarchists To Tibetan Monks, Here Are Some of the Outsiders Joining Protests in Ferguson
