Despite calls by President Barack Obama and other senior officials the protests are getting worse and Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has ordered the deployment of the state’s National Guards to the St. Louis suburb of the city that has been the scene of unrest over the past week. The city is already occupied by armed policemen and a curfew is in place.
Police clashed with protesters and fired tear-gas at protesters who are angry with police actions against black people in the city.
The escalation in the crisis came after the eighth night of unrest since Brown was killed by a white police officer Darren Wilson in disputed circumstances on August 9. Wilson shot the teenager after reportedly stopping him for walking in the street, disrupting traffic.
Preliminary private autopsy has found that Brown was shot at least six times, including twice in the head. Brown’s attorney Benjamin Crump said the victim’s family is seeking justice for their child.
The continuation of the protests in Ferguson and other cities are because of the fact that the African-Americans and other communities are still facing racial discriminations in the country and the election of Obama did not help end racism.
The protesters want an end to a culture which it says that the poor are subhuman due to the fact that many of the needy people in the country are blacks.
Now Ferguson, where only three of its 53-member police department are black, and other American cities have been dominated by liberal outrage over what some see as racial injustice.
Civil rights group also connect the perceived overreaction by a militarized local law enforcement to their critique of the heavy-handed power of government.
One of the leading figures in today’s libertarian movement in the US, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, said in an opinion piece on Time magazine that “Americans must never sacrifice their liberty for an illusive and dangerous, or false, security. This has been a cause I have championed for years, and one that is at a near-crisis point in our country.”
“What’s happening in Ferguson certainly looks like a counter-insurgency,” he writes. “If cops keep it up long enough, some residents might respond with an insurgency. Around the world, insurgencies are fueled by unemployed young men with few prospects. It’s the way things like this tend to work, actions and reactions, supply meeting demand, in this case residents filling roles cops seem to be waiting to have filled.”
As Senator Paul said, the current unrest in Ferguson is primarily the result of nationwide economic neglect, unemployment and disinterest toward overwhelmingly African-American areas of the country. A research by the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Economic Development showed that certain social structures and employment trends affecting black citizens are the primary reason for inner city joblessness. And a report, produced by the University of California Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, shows unemployment among the blacks stands at 16 percent, exactly twice the rate of unemployment for white Americans.
Now, the protesters want poor black children to have a better shot in life and no discrimination and nothing more.
By Davood Baqeri, Chief Editor