 These have been a busy past couple of months. I've returned to teaching at Marian Middle School and I have the honor of being a teacher with the Community Arts Training program through RAC for their Cherokee Street Place based program. Additionally Cam and I are doing a residency at the Forsyth School in Clayton where we are working with 5th graders to discover their "inner heroes". Over the last month and a half I've been going to Ferguson once a weekend to do community art projects with kids and families at Canfield Green, the site of the Mike Brown Shooting. I've been holding meetings with a variety of allies in Kirkwood to try and set up some additional screenings of Elegy to Connie in Kirkwood and beyond next year. At home, I am working on the ongoing process of starting to submit to film festivals in hopes of having screenings outside of St. Louis. I've been thinking a lot about the film and Ferguson. I've been thinking a lot about Ferguson and Kirkwood. I've been thinking a lot about how to be an ally. I guess to begin I will backtrack.... The first few days after the shooting felt like the trauma of the Kirkwood Shooting. We (my community of family and friends) were glued to the television and to the internet and to Twitter feeds, watching the unfolding of the protests and the looting. Some of my friends were going down to Ferguson and to City Hall every day to protest. I was starting back my teaching that week so I could only watch the events from these media outlets. I was even afraid- How would I as a white lady be received in Ferguson or Canfield Green? News spread via Facebook and word of mouth, protestors being gassed and brutalized by an overly armed police force, friends arrested, friends of friends being shot. The images looked like something out of the Civil Rights Movement. I followed posts of friends on the frontline. One woman friend stood with young African American men that were angry and protesting. Her and group of friends embraced a young man that was enraged about the loss of his friend and as they hugged him and tried to offer him support, they all began to cry. The Thursday after the shooting I attended a group discussion at R.A.C. and listened as people voiced their frustration, anger, and sadness, about what was going on. Lack of programs in North County for kids, lack of elder leaders, issues with unchecked police brutality, problems of segregation and poverty, the shadow of power structures, like the Kirkwood/ Meacham Park relationship, the Ferguson and Canfield Green relationship seemed to be a boil waiting to explode. All along I think I was searching to figure out, what could I do, how could i be an ally? Online I watched my Facebook feed as conversations occurred about issues I'd been discussing with Elegy to Connie, the impacts of white privilege and segregation, the lack of diverse leadership in the Ferguson City Council and police force and other councils and police forces across St. Louis. The tenuous relationship between some African American communities in Ferguson and the police force. The way in which the city profits from ticketing with disproportionate rates between white and minorities indicating racial profiling. At the heart of this I think is the deep systemic and institutional racism that remains rampant in the U.S. This story happened in Ferguson and like the Kirkwood Shooting, it could have happened anywhere. This is why I think the county carried on "Hand Up! Don't Shoot". The next night I went to peace protest in downtown St. Louis near the arch. Following the protest I walked with an old activist friend that gave me advice. Then I headed home to light a candle for Mark Brown. At that moment I felt very disconnected, I wanted to participate but could not locate my place. The next day I headed down to Ferguson and St. Mark's Church to attend an Amnesty International Meeting and to be a part of a discussion about how to use arts as a tool for healing in Ferguson. Elizabeth Vega and Aziza Binti presented their projects poems, prayers, and affirmations. After the meeting, I drove by the QT site and thought I saw some students of mine protesting. I parked the car and walked down to the QT with a friend, the site was peaceful and energetic. A multi-generational group of people, primarily African American, protested on both sides of the street. Drummers hung out under the the gas station awning. People were making signs. At one point Reverend Jesse Jackson showed up for a photo op. On the street it was like a continuous parade of cars, honking, people putting their hand ups in a gesture of solidarity. A women hugged me and thanked me for coming. I spoke with Elizabeth about doing some prayer drawings with people after the March. After seeing a call from Earth Dance Farm director Molly Rockamon, I volunteered to also create a prayer drawing as part of the Ferguson Market. That morning I met a friend at the market, it was raining heavily, but will attended. I sat down under a tent with a therapist and started to draw. The drawing became a mandala. I noticed that the market was a primarily white space it had such a different feel then the QT site, it was a somber space and I think people were really questioning what was going on. At Earthdance's booth, she offered free hugs. A group of residents sold "I love Ferguson" signs. After I finished the drawing I headed over to St. Mark's Church to meet up with Elizabeth Vega, we set up an art space in the gym and then headed down to the protest. The protest was a joyous diverse space. They marched from Canfield Green to St. Mark's, ending in the back of the church at a parking lot where there was a rally. I went inside to the gym and worked with a few kids and families to create the prayer drawings. The following week I attended another meeting at RAC. This one was aimed at coming up with solutions. The only problem I felt was, I wasn't sure what the needs were. I sat with a group of people, many with ties to Ferguson and we identified a few: increased relationships between white and African-American residents via events like concerts and potlucks, revisit police presence by encouraging police officers to walk door to door and form relationships with residents, advocate diverse citizen participation in local politics. That next Sunday I returned to Canfield Green with Elizabeth Vega to help her with the story wall, an ongoing community mourning wall she had facilitated where people could stop and add a writing or collage expressing their feelings or hopes in response to the Mike Brown Shooting. I also brought a "milagro" project, which was essentially making protective miracle necklaces or junk "juju" necklaces from plastic charms. My project fast became a hit among the kids and I was happy to sit with an attentive group of mothers and kids making jewelry. We were all sad when I had to go. The following week we met up at lot and I continued to help facilitate the story wall, this time I began to add a protective layer to the wall so that it could be preserved. I had many conversations with people about the wall. One young boy said to me that he was moved by the fact that it could have been him. Mike Brown was at the wrong place at the wrong time. During my most recent trip to Canfield Green, I was able to participate in a button making workshop with kids. The milagro making continued and the story wall also was still expanding. I met two wonderful teenage girls that became some engaged with the button making that they covered their jean jackets and jeans with buttons, like some new young trendsetters. At one point I had to go the bathroom and the girls kindly offered to let me use theirs. They walked me to their house a few blocks and I strangely felt like they were also watching out for me. After I used the bathroom I walked back to art making and I thought about how there might be people, white people, that were afraid to walk in Canfield Green, this same sort of person that might have once told me that I should be afraid to walk in Meacham Park. This sort of though is the systemic racism we live in. A wise African American friend said to me, a white person walking in a black community gets helped- why are you here? are you lost? do you need something? She talked about how a person of color sometimes feels the need to "care" for a white person and how a person of color would probably never harm a white person walking in their community because it is tied with the historic conscience of the death a person of color might experience as a result of the injury of a white person- lynching, hanging, and beatings (I'd even extrapolate this to injuring a police officer). Meanwhile, if a person of color is walking in a white neighborhood, they would likely be accused of doing something wrong, possibly arrested or at the very least followed. Such terrible contradictions we live in. This is some of the whiteness I carry. 
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Arriving to now, tomorrow I'll go out to Canfield Green and sing with Celia and the Footbeat.
This all still feels like one huge work in progress, this is a movement. I feel torn by my time about being present in Ferguson and then actually doing this same work in all the communities I participate in, I want to be confident about having difficult conversations and confronting systemic racism. While working preserving one of the story wall pieces at my studio I came across a business card for Non Violent Protest principals and this one stuck with me and this is what I'm going forward with today: don't attack racist people, attack racist systems. Kirkwood/Meacham Park and Ferguson/Canfield Green, it overlaps some of same issues at the heart of Elegy to Connie are unmasking themselves in Ferguson.
I leave you with this article from Time.
In February 2008, Charles Lee “Cookie” Thornton, a lifelong African American resident of the suburb of Kirkwood, murdered Kirkwood’s mayor (who died several months later), a police sergeant, a mayoral candidate and two other citizens at a city council meeting, an act that must rate among the most horrendous political assassinations in American history. Thornton was killed by police. He was clearly deranged, but what drove him crazy was his sense of betrayal at the hands of white Kirkwood. Thornton had grown up in the all-African American Meachum Park area of Kirkwood, was a rabid supporter of Kirkwood’s 1991 annexation of Meachum Park, and was, if anything, for a time, an emblem of crossing St. Louis’s racial divide.
Many of Thornton’s demons were imaginary. Yet his unhappiness, his disappointment that the racial divide within the suburbs was impossible to transcend is felt by many African American. So, Thornton, in his brother’s words, “went to war.” And so has, it now seems, a portion of African American St. Louis, triggered by a particular outrage, but largely an expression of rage against a particular set of enduring arrangements. Perhaps the problem with race relations is that the more things change, the more they remain the same
This all still feels like one huge work in progress, this is a movement. I feel torn by my time about being present in Ferguson and then actually doing this same work in all the communities I participate in, I want to be confident about having difficult conversations and confronting systemic racism. While working preserving one of the story wall pieces at my studio I came across a business card for Non Violent Protest principals and this one stuck with me and this is what I'm going forward with today: don't attack racist people, attack racist systems. Kirkwood/Meacham Park and Ferguson/Canfield Green, it overlaps some of same issues at the heart of Elegy to Connie are unmasking themselves in Ferguson.
I leave you with this article from Time.
In February 2008, Charles Lee “Cookie” Thornton, a lifelong African American resident of the suburb of Kirkwood, murdered Kirkwood’s mayor (who died several months later), a police sergeant, a mayoral candidate and two other citizens at a city council meeting, an act that must rate among the most horrendous political assassinations in American history. Thornton was killed by police. He was clearly deranged, but what drove him crazy was his sense of betrayal at the hands of white Kirkwood. Thornton had grown up in the all-African American Meachum Park area of Kirkwood, was a rabid supporter of Kirkwood’s 1991 annexation of Meachum Park, and was, if anything, for a time, an emblem of crossing St. Louis’s racial divide.
Many of Thornton’s demons were imaginary. Yet his unhappiness, his disappointment that the racial divide within the suburbs was impossible to transcend is felt by many African American. So, Thornton, in his brother’s words, “went to war.” And so has, it now seems, a portion of African American St. Louis, triggered by a particular outrage, but largely an expression of rage against a particular set of enduring arrangements. Perhaps the problem with race relations is that the more things change, the more they remain the same
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