{"id":111099,"date":"2024-07-12T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-12T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2024\/07\/12\/10-years-on-michael-browns-and-eric-garners-mothers-are-still-fighting-for-justice\/"},"modified":"2024-07-12T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2024-07-12T10:00:00","slug":"10-years-on-michael-browns-and-eric-garners-mothers-are-still-fighting-for-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2024\/07\/12\/10-years-on-michael-browns-and-eric-garners-mothers-are-still-fighting-for-justice\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Years On, Michael Brown\u2019s and Eric Garner\u2019s Mothers Are Still Fighting for Justice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"has-dropcap\">A decade. A whisper in the grand narrative of time, yet a chasm in the lives cleaved by the summer of 2014. It was a season punctuated by two names, two lives prematurely extinguished: Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Their deaths, separated by three weeks, became enmeshed in the grim chronicle of racialized police violence, a fabric knitted with threads of intolerance that stretches to today.<\/p>\n<p>It was on July 17, 2014, that Garner gasped for breath on a Staten Island sidewalk, his agony for air choked by the weight of a white policeman\u2019s arm, swallowed by the pavement, all for selling loose cigarettes. His final plea, \u201cI can\u2019t breathe,\u201d rumbled through the canyons of history. Not long after, on August 9, Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, lay sprawled on a Ferguson street, shot and killed by a white police officer in broad daylight after a convenience store\u2019s call about stolen cigarillos. Witnesses said the teen had his hands up before he was gunned down. His lifeless body lay prone on the asphalt, under scorching heat for hours, alone, disregarded\u2014a testament to the fragility of Black life in America.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Two names, two lives forever bound by the shared brutality that ignited a nation\u2019s conscience, exposing the raw, searing reality of unrestrained profiling and targeting. Their final moments\u2014detonations of anger and grief\u2014molded into what has become the clarion call of a people.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\"><em>I can\u2019t breathe.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Hands up, don\u2019t shoot.<\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Garner was <strong>Gwen Carr<\/strong>\u2019s son. Brown was <strong>Lezley McSpadden-Head<\/strong>\u2019s. Each with a dream to become more than their stereotyped labels. Garner dreamed of one day running a mechanic shop. The 43-year-old was into cars. He adored them. Especially old foreign types. Brown loved music. He\u2019d even dropped some tracks on SoundCloud. McSpadden-Head and <strong>Duane Foster,<\/strong> Brown\u2019s former high school theater director and teacher, said that\u2019s where the teen flourished the most. Brown was killed eight days after graduating from Normandy High School. The silenced melodies and the engines that never purred forever leave a void in the hearts of those who loved the two men.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"AssetEmbedWrapper-eVDQiB byBkf asset-embed\">\n<div class=\"AssetEmbedAssetContainer-eJxoAx dBHGoQ asset-embed__asset-container\"><span class=\"SpanWrapper-umhxW kGxnNB responsive-asset AssetEmbedResponsiveAsset-cXBNxi eCxVQK asset-embed__responsive-asset\"><picture class=\"ResponsiveImagePicture-cWuUZO dUOtEa AssetEmbedResponsiveAsset-cXBNxi eCxVQK asset-embed__responsive-asset responsive-image\"><noscript><\/noscript><\/picture><\/span><\/div>\n<p><span class=\"BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ CaptionText-bHjzlu iUEiRd jSwmTa iXWezO caption__text\">People participate in a protest to mark the five year anniversary of the death of Eric Garner in New York City.<\/span><span class=\"BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ CaptionCredit-ejegDm iUEiRd cvffOM fNaHcW caption__credit\">Spencer Platt\/Getty Images.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Burdened by this loss, those left behind, who cherished them, are forced to carry on, wondering, wishing, yearning for what could have been, churning through all the what-ifs. It hasn\u2019t been easy for them. What McSpadden-Head and Carr have done every day since is keep their sons\u2019 names alive, reminding us all that they were loved. That they were somebody\u2019s children, who dreamed big dreams and whose absence leaves a tangible emptiness in ways we may never fully comprehend in a world that so senselessly took them.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">\u201cWhen people ask me [if] I feel anything has changed, my reply is nothing,\u201d McSpadden-Head told me. \u201cI\u2019ve not seen the change that needs to happen for me as a Black woman with Black children and a Black family. We\u2019re still all talking about 400 years ago, 200 years ago, 100 years ago, 10 years ago\u2014still, nothing has gotten better.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">\u201cWe still have no justice,\u201d she went on. \u201cWe still have police brutality happening all over this country. We still have that line drawn in the sand between Black and white. We still have controversial politicians. When will accountability actually take place? And after 10 years, I\u2019m exhausted.\u201d It\u2019s a poignant sentiment that Carr echoed, telling me that when the system meant to grant access to recourse fails, all that mothers\u2014like herself and McSpadden-Head\u2014can do is press on, \u201cuplift each and every individual, [and] never let them forget.\u201d And that\u2019s what they continue to do: remind us all that their sons left an imprint even in their shortened lives.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/news\/story\/michael-brown-eric-garner-mothers-still-fighting-for-justice\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A decade. A whisper in the grand narrative of time, yet a chasm in the lives cleaved by the summer of 2014. It was a season punctuated by two names, two lives prematurely extinguished: Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Their deaths, separated by three weeks, became enmeshed in the grim chronicle of racialized police violence, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":111100,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[664,8701,8702,8703,7724,943],"class_list":{"0":"post-111099","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrity","8":"tag-black-lives-matter","10":"tag-michael-brown","11":"tag-police-reform","12":"tag-protests","13":"tag-racism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111099\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}