Ferguson, Missouri, a majority Black suburb of St. Louis, has again become the flashpoint of a new movement against the oppression of Blacks, as well as a racist reaction to it.

US attorney general Eric Holder recently released a Department of Justice (DoJ) report detailing the systematic oppression of the Black community by the city authorities, police department and courts.

Holder also released a DoJ finding that there was insufficient evidence to indict the cop, Darren Wilson, who murdered unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown last August. The finding is a blatant contradiction to the department’s own report.

It highlights the administration’s two-faced stance concerning Black oppression: on one side condemning it – but only when forced to do so – and on the other signalling it will do nothing to bring racist perpetrators to justice.

The Justice Department’s report, based on Ferguson city records from 2012 to 2014, found that African Americans, who are 67 percent of the population, made up 93 percent of arrests. In instances where police used force, 88 percent were Black victims, and in all cases where police used attack dogs, it was Blacks who were bitten.

Many of these arrests were actually motivated to raise city revenue, the report found, amounting to a special tax on Black people. Fines for concocted charges were levied. Blacks too poor to pay the fines were then arrested for that “crime”, imprisoned and then had new fines added. Many ended up owing many hundreds of dollars more than the original fines, and thus were subjected to arrest again.

Not only was this a new version of debtors’ prison, supposedly outlawed in the US, but many found themselves caught up in this spiral of arrests, fines, new fines, arrests again, more fines, from which they cannot escape. This is reflected in the fact that 96 percent of arrests in traffic stops were for an outstanding warrant.

It was for the “crime” of jaywalking that officer Darren Wilson originally accosted Michael Brown, to give him a ticket and fine. The DoJ report found such actions to be a violation of Black people’s civil rights. But the same DoJ found that there was no evidence that Wilson violated Brown’s civil rights, not only for the jaywalking stop, but for murdering him in a hail of bullets!

In the wake of the report, the Ferguson city manager resigned, as did the police chief and a municipal judge. But the mayor refused to say that Ferguson would abide by the Justice Department’s recommendations, only that they would be “studied”.

Racist backlash

The lieutenant governor of Missouri, Peter Kinder, has blasted the Justice Department report and blamed Holder (who is Black) and Obama for fomenting the protests that have erupted in Ferguson and St. Louis, and which swept the nation from last August.

“There is more racism in the Justice Department than there is in anywhere I see in the St. Louis area”, Kinder said. “It is the Eric Holder and Obama left and their minions who are obsessed with race, while the rest of us are moving on beyond it.

“What we got too often from them was incitement of the mob, and, uh, encouraging disorder in Ferguson and disrupting the peaceable going-about our daily lives in the greater St. Louis region.”

Kinder added, “Many of them [in the Department of Justice] spent most of their careers defending Black Panthers and other violent radicals.”

Nowadays, stone cold racists in and out of government call those who protest racial oppression “racists in reverse”. Their hatred of all Blacks includes officials like Holder and Obama.

Kinder’s remarks were picked up, broadcast, rebroadcast and amplified by Fox News and other rightist media.

The protests continue

People in the Ferguson Black community have continued to demonstrate, calling for a complete overhaul of the police department, viewing the resignation of the police chief as positive but not sufficient.

Speaking to Democracy Now!, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, said: “It is clear to me that first and foremost, change comes when people stand up, speak unpopular truths and are willing to take risks in the name of justice. There is no way that the Justice Department would have investigated what was going on in Ferguson if the young people there hadn’t stood up and taken to the streets.”

When asked if the Justice Department report gave her hope that change was happening, Alexander replied, “No, the report doesn’t give me hope. A single report, even a single indictment, isn’t going to make a difference unless people become organised and commit themselves to hard work of movement building on behalf of poor people of all colours. And I see that beginning, and that’s what gives me hope.”