Witness To History: Rapper Tef Poe’s 1st Of 300 Nights On Ferguson’s Streets
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That first night in Ferguson, Aug. 9, 2014, before the protests turned all the way up the next night, so many cops from so many different towns had arrived in town, the lights from their sirens changed the color of the sky above the St. Louis suburb’s streets. A specific street in Ferguson, Canfield Drive, had changed color hours before all the cops arrived. It was a static, mean, crimson red and had been since a minute past noon on Aug. 9, the moment 18-year-old Michael Brown, Jr. was shot to death by a white cop, Darren Wilson.
It was in this way that Tef Poe, poet, activist, co-founder of HandsUp United, began his conversation with our colleague, Tory Russell, the father, mentor and coach, who led the 2014 uprising. He is serving as co-producer of Ferguson 10, the focus of this year’s Urban One’s annual, iOne Digital limited-series podcast, Witness to History.
But on Aug. 9, 2014, roughly 25 or 30 seconds before the clock hit noon, Michael, unarmed, young and Black–and set to begin college just two days later–was walking down the middle of the Canfield Drive with a friend, when his killer, on the job and driving a black Chevy Tahoe, pulled up. Within seconds there were shots fired. Six hit the teenager, two in the head. It was less than 90 seconds between the moment the killer saw Michael and the moment the teenager was dead by his hand.
At nearly the same time, Tef Poe was home in St. Louis, relaxed and on Instagram promoting a party he’d been asked to host in a couple of days. That’s when he first saw the posts about a dead Black teenager. It didn’t alarm him at first. Young, Black people being killed by white cops across the Greater Metropolitan St. Louis County, of which Ferguson was a suburb, was too frequent to be shocking.
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Every Black Family’s Story
In a conversation hosted by the Boston Review in 2019, Tef said bluntly, “I come from North St. Louis, the damn slums of the slums [that looked like] bombs dropped on them…” Here, with Tory, he shares that he had two little cousins, both shot by white cops. Wasn’t that every Black family’s story?
It’s not as though Tef hadn’t been hurt by the news being reported in real-time on his scroll. It was that at first he didn’t know how to understand Michael Brown’s killing as more than a regular day in the notoriously corrupt, white supremacist-led town, home to a notoriously corrupt, deadly white supremacist police force. Staying alive seemed to require staying low; neither Ferguson nor the other cities and suburbs that comprise St. Louis County were known for a history of protest.
“I pray for survival
Religion can’t free me ~ I don’t need the bible
The evil surround me, don’t let it drown me
My city is burning, my destiny’s family.”Tef Poe
For Tef, understanding that Aug. 9 was the inflection point, the moment when the past would not serve as prologue. And it wasn’t because of what he was seeing on social media. His understanding began the way real movement work always does–with one trusted voice speaking directly to another, saying that this was it. This was the now time.
Maurice, Tef’s little brother, was that trusted voice. He spoke with an urgency that could not be questioned or ignored. Michael Brown had not only been killed, had not only been unarmed and not only headed to college on Aug. 11, but his body was left for a stunningly disrespectful–hateful–four hours in the middle of Canfield Drive under a blood-soaked sheet.
It was just blocks from West Florissant, a main thoroughfare in Ferguson, and what became the corner where protestors gathered nightly–despite the militarized police, the dogs, the grenade launchers, the live and rubber bullets. It was the corner where Tef Poe, poet and MC, would make his home for the next 300 nights.
SEE ALSO:
Ferguson X: A Conversation With Mike Brown Sr.
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