United States

The Ferguson police shooting, the death of Freddie Gray, and the Charleston church shooting

In the summer of 2014, accounts of unarmed African Americans who had died in the process of arrest by police began to fill the media. In July 2014 a man in New York City died as a result of a choke hold applied an by arresting officer. In August protest demonstrations escalated into civil violence in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, after a policeman shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, during Brown’s arrest. Protests against those actions and against court decisions not to indict the involved officers continued into 2015, and in April of that year rioting erupted in Baltimore, Maryland, on the day of the funeral of Freddie Gray, a black man who died a week after incurring a severe spinal-cord injury while in police custody. Then, in June, the country was shocked when nine African Americans were shot and killed, allegedly by a young white man in a hate crime, in a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. The apparently white supremacist motivations of the accused killer sparked a discussion of the display of the Confederate flag on the grounds of the capitol of South Carolina and its perception by many as a symbol of oppression and racial subjugation. In July the South Carolina government legislated the flag’s removal.

Baltimore riotsA man throwing a brick at police in Baltimore on April 27, 2015, following the funeral of Freddie Gray. Patrick Semansky/AP Images